Do you know the way to San Jose? Dionne Warwick famously asked in her 1968 hit song. Well, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon certainly does, and she recently made sure the city was served with a civil rights lawsuit over its $1,600 fee for a concealed carry permit (firearm and ammunition not included).
Keep in mind that even after that princely sum, the applicant is still on the hook for a locally mandated psychological exam and state required fees, training, and fingerprinting that could easily push the total cost for a measly two-year permit well over $2,000. The “stars that never were” pumping gas and parking cars in San Jose that Warwick sung about almost certainly would be priced out of their Second Amendment rights at this rate, to say nothing of retirees or virtually anyone else who did not strike it rich in LA or Silicon Valley.
According to Dhillon, “You don’t need a law degree to recognize that charging a fee several times higher than the cost of the firearm itself is illogical, and an unconstitutional attempt to impede Americans’ Second Amendment rights.”
Amen to that.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in the NRA-supported case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” It also found that New York’s “may-issue” licensing scheme for concealed carry offended this right, as there was no comparable legal tradition in American law dating back to the founding era.
These holdings immediately set off a scramble among the seven or so may-issue states that remained in 2022, including California, to find ways to make concealed carry as cumbersome, expensive, and impractical as possible. The resulting litigation continues to this day and includes other cases launched by the Second Amendment Section within the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ).
San Jose, for its part, insists that the fee merely covers the city’s administrative expenses for administering the permit system. This is implausible, even in a place as infamously unaffordable and laden with gratuitous bureaucracy and public sector largesse as California. Similarly anti-gun and unaffordable jurisdictions like San Francisco and New York City, while hardly bargains for concealed carry, manage to make their permits less expensive.
Yet even if San Jose’s claim were true, it merely makes the point that California and its local jurisdictions have vastly exceeded any reasonable and constitutionally permissible level of vetting incident to a law-abiding person carrying a handgun for self-defense. Such a person in California has already gone through an extreme amount of vetting to get the gun in the first place. Repeating the process ad nauseum makes no one safer, but it will discourage many from even attempting to apply for a concealed carry permit. And that, of course, is entirely the point.
Meanwhile, most of the U.S. has long moved on from these transparent anti-gun machinations. Twenty-nine states require no permitting to carry a concealed handgun whatsoever. And most of those that do have settled on straightforward and objective criteria to screen out legally prohibited persons and perhaps to require some demonstration of proficiency.
They do not require neighbors to weigh in on an applicant’s character or fitness, clinicians to opine on future events they are incompetent to predict, employers to vouch for someone’s reliability or punctuality, exhaustive reviews of driving records and parking tickets, inquiries into unpaid debts, or notifications to various parties who may or may not object to an otherwise qualified individual carrying a gun. When states or localities require such things, they are not engaged in evidenced based crime prevention but obvious make-work to extend and complicate an already unnecessary permitting process.
To be sure, criminals who wish to carry a gun will not subject themselves to any of it and will find any number of ways, from straw-purchases to theft to black market activity, to carry exactly the gun they want wherever they want.
NRA-ILA welcomes the Department of Justice’s newfound commitment to Second Amendment rights. Make no mistake, this was not an organic movement by department careerists, who have long prioritized enforcement of statutorily created rights and “penumbras” of constitutional provisions over the actual text of the Bill of Rights itself.
It is only because of President Trump’s leadership, appointments, and force of will that competent people like Attorney General Todd Blanche, Assistant Attorney General Dhillon and Second Amendment Section Chief Barry Arrington can now use DOJ’s considerable resources, reach, and expertise to pursue these cases.
If a President Harris or Newsom were to take over, that would all disappear very quickly, and we’d likely be back to the dark days of “zero tolerance” ATF inspections of law-abiding federal firearm licensees and the politicization of ATF’s law enforcement mission.
In the meantime, progress continues. But as the midterm elections loom, no pro-gun American can afford to take it for granted. Do not Walk on By your polling place this November. Make your voice heard, and vote freedom first!
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