DOJ, Gun Rights Orgs Press Jurisdictions Over Slow-Walking Concealed Carry Permit Applications

It is almost exactly three years ago that the United States Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case of NYSRPA v. Bruen, invalidating the “may issue” carry licensing regime in New York State and in the five other jurisdictions that continued to use subjective or extraordinary standards (“proper cause”) to prevent law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to carry handguns publicly for self-defense.

Just days later, New York State’s Governor Kathy Hochul responded to the “reckless” decision by announcing emergency legislation that replaced the invalidated discretionary licensing standards with different, but still subjective, carry license requirements, including character references, an in-person interview of the applicant with the licensing officer/designee, and disclosure of the applicant’s “list of former and current social media accounts for the last three years.” In addition, licensing officers were authorized to “request any additional information they deem appropriate” during the licensing process, regardless of the specific legislated requirements.

In the same spirit of open defiance of the Constitution and the nation’s highest Court, government officials elsewhere have worked to stymie the implementation of the Bruen decision, treating the Second Amendment as an optional responsibility, as discretionary as the firearm permit schemes the Bruen Court put a stop to.

In California (another of the “may-issue” states), the Los Angeles Police Department has allegedly moved from “stubbornly refusing” to grant concealed carry permits to proceeding at tortoise-on-tranquilizers application processing speed.

According to the California Rifle and Pistol Association, prior to Bruen the department had issued only four active carry concealed weapons permits, despite the city’s population being close to four million people. After that rate became legally unsustainable due to the Supreme Court ruling, the “wait times for a CCW permit with LAPD have ballooned, and LAPD has gone back to not accepting applications when they are submitted so they can falsely claim faster processing times. Applicants [are] being told in emails that they can expect to wait 18-22 months” for a decision, despite California law requiring that such permits be processed within 120 days. Some applicants report that the “LAPD is ‘gaming’ this statutory deadline by putting applicants on a waiting list and not treating their application as ‘accepted’ until LAPD decides to receive it,” even though the 120-day time starts running from the date the applicant submits the application. CCW renewals, also, appear to be handled less than expeditiously.

Attorneys on behalf of the CRPA have since placed the City of Los Angeles and the LAPD on notice (here and here) that these excessive wait times are not only a violation of California law but an unequivocal violation of the Second Amendment, and that a federal civil rights lawsuit may follow “should the LAPD refuse to make firm commitments to expeditiously resolve its CCW permit application backlog.” Bruen, the lawyers observe, “was decided almost three years ago, meaning LAPD has had more than sufficient time to set up a process to handle CCW applications.” Wait times “have only gotten worse since Bruen,” implying that “the City is not devoting sufficient resources to CCW permit processing despite now having years to assess its budgetary and staffing needs to fulfill Bruen’s mandate.”

If the impediment is state law “making it impossible for LAPD to respect the Second Amendment by issuing CCW permits in a reasonable timeframe, then the cumbersome requirements of California law must make way for the Second Amendment, and not the other way around,” with the CRPA suggesting that the LAPD consider lobbying for legislative changes to make processing CCW permits less unnecessarily burdensome and time-consuming –by removing requirements like personal references and in-person interviews, for instance, or doubling the time for which a permit is valid to four years.

A CRPA blog post at the end of April suggests that patience is running thin, and “[i]f the LAPD doesn’t adopt changes quickly, a lawsuit is inevitable.”

The CRPA has already succeeded in litigation challenging the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s CCW permit delays. That outcome attracted the attention of U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who announced in a March 27 news release that the federal Department of Justice was launching an investigation of the sheriff’s department to determine whether it is resisting pro-Second Amendment caselaw by “engaging in a pattern or practice of depriving ordinary, law-abiding Californians of their Second Amendment rights” through excessively long processing times or otherwise.

In language that should concern the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD, the news release warns that the investigation “will be the first of many similar investigations, lawsuits, or other actions involving other localities in California, the State of California itself, and any other states or localities that insist on unduly burdening, or effectively denying, the Second Amendment rights of their ordinary, law-abiding citizens.”

In the most recent example of the new Trump administration’s commitment to actively protecting and enforcing the Second Amendment in the same way as other fundamental constitutional rights, Attorney General Bondi has fired off a letter to Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday and Sean P. Kilkenny, the Montgomery County Sheriff (who is also the president of the Pennsylvania Sheriffs Association), regarding reports that sheriffs are “not properly issuing carry licenses on a nondiscretionary, nondiscriminatory basis” to out-of-state residents.

In a “clear violation of Pennsylvania law, which expressly contemplates that both resident and nonresident firearm licenses will be processed on a ‘shall issue’ basis,” the letter alleges that many county sheriffs have categorically refused to issue nonresident carry licenses, a contravention with no legal justification and no statutory remedy.

As one example, the Philadelphia’s Police Department website features a pop-up notice that reads, in part, that the “Philadelphia Police Department is not issuing License to Carry to Out of State Applicants. If you submit an application, it will be withdrawn and application cost will be refunded minus Permitium Fees…” (as in the original); another webpage on carry permits, by the Philadelphia PD Gun Permit Unit, confirms “[w]e only process applications from Philadelphia residents.”

As Ms. Bondi’s letter points out, this not only disregards Pennsylvania law and the Second Amendment but, because “the categorical refusal to issue licenses specifically targets out-of-state residents, these policies are also suspect under the Privileges and Immunities Clause, which guarantees that ‘[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.’”

Although the letter requests the officials’ cooperation in resolving the situation promptly, without the need for litigation, it includes a warning that the Department of Justice “will be monitoring the situation closely.”

What happens next may depend on just how much taxpayer money intransigent government officials are willing to publicly squander to defend unconstitutional policies and practices, simply to justify their hostility to what the Second Amendment requires. It is, ultimately, a corner these bureaucrats have painted themselves into. To borrow the words of the CRPA attorneys, if the government insists on a person obtaining a permit before the constitutional right to carry may be exercised, the government cannot also complain that the unnecessarily convoluted permit process it set up is “too burdensome to process permit applications” in the statutorily-mandated timeframe or otherwise. Your NRA-ILA will keep you posted on further developments.