DOJ Accuses Los Angeles of Delaying Concealed Carry Weapon Permits
The lawsuit claims the county forces citizens to wait 281 days, over nine months, “to begin processing their applications, with some waiting as long as 1,030 days (nearly three years).”
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has accused Los Angeles County of denying people the right to concealed carry permits.
Yes we did https://t.co/tq71uqpGnL
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) October 5, 2025
“The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has systematically denied thousands of law-abiding Californians their fundamental Second Amendment right to bear arms outside the home—not through outright refusal, but through a deliberate pattern of unconscionable delay that renders this constitutional right meaningless in practice,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit claims the county forces citizens to wait 281 days, over nine months, “to begin processing their applications, with some waiting as long as 1,030 days (nearly three years).”
“These delays far exceed California’s own statutory requirement that licensing authorities provide initial determinations within 90 days, demonstrating Defendants’ flagrant disregard for both state law and constitutional obligations,” the lawsuit adds.
The division discovered “[A]s of May 2025, approximately 2,768 applications for new licenses remain pending, with interviews scheduled as late as November 2026—more than two years after some applications were first submitted. Numerous applicants simply gave up and withdrew their applications, often after waiting months in Defendants’ deliberately stalled process.”
During that time, the stats show the county issued two licenses and denied two.
Absolutely insane.
The division cites the Supreme Court 2022 division in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, where the justices state that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self defense outside the home.”
“It is important to clarify that the LASD’s CCW Unit has been issuing permits at a significantly increased rate, contrary to the statistics and information cited by the Department of Justice in its complaint,” claimed LA sheriff spokesperson Nicole Nishida.
The Second Amendment is not hard to interpret: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Get it, LA County? Shall NOT be infringed. There’s a period after the word infringed. There’s no “except” or “but.”
You shall not infringe our natural right to bear arms.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
CCW requirements are IMO an unnecessary bureaucratic impediment to the exercise of 2A rights.
The majority of state legislatures seem to agree with you.
It is and now the battle is for nationwide reciprocity.
Plus we need nationwide reciprocity for constitutional carry.
Is there some protocol/law where an outside agency is assigned to take over an action that has failed to be done by a local municipality? Could the DOJ push to get the concealed carry permits issued by a court assigned agency.?
Is that a Serpa holster in the picture and video? Those are garbage holsters because of the placement of the release button. Federal law enforcement is banned from using them because of the increased risk of a negligent discharged caused by the trigger finger slipping off the release button onto the trigger. Then again, I’m not surprised LASD isn’t smart enough to issue Safariland SLS holsters like every other department.
I live in a constitutionally carry state. But I carried long before Kansas said it was legal.
2A is the only permit I need.
https://youtu.be/o1a91ztj6OU?si=tdYy9JjoAufy2MVq
“ 2A is the only permit I need.”
In media locals, just tell that to the judge before they haul you off in cuffs and put you into jail cell.
Weak sauce.
DOJ concentrates on sticking it to Bass and Newsom, while continuing to ignore their own federal bureau consistently denying the rights of US citizens nationwide.
During COVID, blue cities and states forced gun stores to close as “nonessential.” Courts ruled that a constitutional violation.
As soon as the shutdown started, BATF shut down their section that issues NFA tax stamps as being “nonessential.”
There is no qualitative difference between these two rights denials. DOJ is directly in the food chain of the latter.
Yep. We can’t allow any gov’t entity to refuse to process applications, shut down application approval or slow walk application review. Every instance should be subject to criminal and civil penalties for denial of Constitutional rights. If it was a 1A requirement we wouldn’t even have to explain why this bureaucratic gamesmanship is bad. Maybe that’s the way forward… a Red State with a friendly Federal Circuit simply applies CA style 2A permitting to 1A then let that percolate up to SCOTUS….in pursuit of a commonsense ruling that Constitutional rights don’t require the prior consent/approval of govt prior to exercise with very narrow, limited, specific exceptions.
It’s already been done. And the First Amendment won. And despite the broad language of the rulings, courts refuse to extend them to the Second Amendment.
A state may not impose a charge for the enjoyment of a right granted by the federal constitution… The power to impose a license tax on the exercise of these freedoms is indeed as potent as the power of censorship which this Court has repeatedly struck down… a person cannot be compelled ‘to purchase, through a license fee or a license tax, the privilege freely granted by the constitution.’
–MURDOCK V. PENNSYLVANIA 319 US 105 (1942)
An ordinance which… makes the peaceful enjoyment of freedoms which the Constitution guarantees contingent upon the uncontrolled will of an official — as by requiring a permit or license which may be granted or withheld in the discretion of such official — is an unconstitutional censorship or prior restraint upon the enjoyment of those freedoms. And our decisions have made clear that a person faced with such an unconstitutional licensing law may ignore it and engage with impunity in the exercise of the right of free expression for which the law purports to require a license.
–SHUTTLESWORTH v. CITY OF BIRMINGHAM AL, 394 U.S. 147 (1969)
Thanks for the two citations. They are important because they explore the background of the NFA, which was a tax provision. The Congressional Record discussions of the NFA ’34 go over this in detail. (Most certainly related to the recent BATFE loss in Hobby Distillers. I checked with the litigants at the recent GRPC.) It is worth reading, and then re-reading “THE PECULIAR STORY OF UNITED STATES V. MILLER” a somewhat recent analysis. Although half-baked and widely ignored, Miller is still good law. It will come up again soon in the various gun cases before the court.
“The Second Amendment is not hard to interpret”
Well, actually, it is hard to interpret. Quite hard. https://constitutioncenter.org/images/uploads/news/CNN_Aug_11.pdf
That said, I support gun rights, generally speaking. But that’s only because I believe in the right to self-defense.
No, it isn’t hard at all. No harder than any individual clause of the first amendment. It’s not self-interpreting, any more than the first is. It absolutely protects the right to keep and bear arms, but it doesn’t say exactly what that right consists of, and thus what kind of laws would infringe it, just as the first doesn’t say exactly what kind of laws would abridge the freedom of speech or of the press. So courts are needed, but their job isn’t difficult if only they were honestly willing to do it.
Your linked article says: “For the most part, these applications have
remained consistent since Heller and McDonald. “It’s really striking that since these Supreme Court decisions… lower courts have upheld almost all of the gun regulations they have asked to review”. What it doesn’t say is that the reason for this is simply dishonest courts that are deliberately twisting their decisions in a desperate attempt to ignore the 2A as much as possible, and pretend it doesn’t say what it clearly does say. They are treating the RKBA as a second-class right at best, exactly what SCOTUS told them not to. And SCOTUS refuses to discipline them for it.
Aww, cmon man, keep and bear is pretty self-expanatory. Should they have said Own and Carry? It’s the same thing. Anything that impedes either of those things is clearly unconstitutional and anyone claiming otherwise is a liar.
There’s room for minor regulation of 2A similar to 1A ‘time, place, manner’ restrictions but IMO that’s about it. RKBA includes the right to buy firearms/ammo/accoutrements and the choice to ‘bear’ aka carry or not. No law abiding Citizen should face gov’t impediments to those basic general presumptions. There are a very few places/events that have a clear historical record where 2A is outweighed but those are very limited, unusual and not supposed to be the general presumption according to McDonald, Heller and Bruen. If I was running DoJ we’d be slamming State/local entities who stepped out of those very narrow circumstances with civil and criminal charges…. to include civil asset forfeiture of State/Municipal property used to do so…so seize vehicles, buildings, bank accounts, assets of those gov’t entities. I suspect that would get the issues the attention they deserve instead of being largely ignored b/c no meaningful immediate consequences have been levied yet.
No, for anyone with a 5th-grade reading level it is crystal clear. People that “misunderstand” it are doing so purposefully and in bad faith.
^^^ This.
Weasels gotta weasel.
There’s a popular meme category about “if women had a time machine vs. if men had a time machine.” In one, the man goes back to the drafting of the BOR with a copy of the Second Amendment in his hand, and tells the Founders, “Write it so a third grader could understand it.”
The irony is, back then, their third graders would have had no problem understanding it.
It’s today’s superannuated crybullies who seem to be “unable” to interpret it properly.
“generally speaking.” 😂
It seems a perversion of nature to wait nine months to just get a bulge in one’s pants.
Seriously, there is no ‘except’ or ‘but’? How do you weed out the mentally unstable or criminals outside of the permitting process. In a permit-free world, you think gun retailers will just sell to anybody who walks in the door?
If there is to be no exceptions, then retailers would have to be removed from federal regulations and permitting as well. And manufacturers would not need to send serial numbers to the federal government. Then anyone can go to Amazon and have an untraced gun delivered with no questions asked. Zero infringement.
And your point is…?
You don’t “weed out criminals” because there are no gun stores in prisons, where you KEEP your criminals. (Note they get them even there anyway, but at least that’s the professionals’ problem, not the average citizen’s.)
And if gun dealers don’t want to make a particular sale, they don’t need to. It’s still their privilege to weed out the hinky patron, like Senator Mark Kelly. Non-government entities don’t have to sell you a gun any more than they have to rent you their broadcasting studio.
Serial numbers? They are unconstitutional arms control, not crime control. The number of crimes solved by serial numbers is practically zero — it requires a criminal you haven’t already identified, leaving a gun behind, one that is registered to him (and not stolen, as almost all crime guns are).
(In Canada, in 1995, they created a national registry of guns. They said it would cost $2 million. It ended up costing $2 billion — a thousand times more. After running it for a decade, they discontinued it, after admitting that it had helped solve zero crimes, EXCEPT the crime of having an unregistered gun — a crime that wouldn’t even have been a crime except for the existence of the registry itself.)
“If there is to be no exceptions, then retailers would have to be removed from federal regulations and permitting as well.”
Yes. Just like office supply stores..
In Illinois, it is illegal to have a loaded firearm in your car without a concealed carry license.
Without a concealed carry license, your firearm must be unloaded and in its own container.
Your ammo must be in its own container.
California has started to issue non resident CHL’s. A buddy is completing the process with Shasta county. Cost is over $300. I’ve heard San Jose county wants around $1200. LA county’s fees and time delay is done to persuade folks to not even try to start the process. In my state of Idaho the permit process takes about a month (class and live fire required) and fees are about $180.