If the Department of Justice wants to silence the ongoing criticism from some Second Amendment advocates for not doing enough to defend the right to keep and bear arms, one way to prove them wrong would be to be more aggressive in pursuing civil litigation against ongoing abuses. The DOJ's Civil Rights Division has filed suit against the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department over its excessive delays in processing concealed carry applications, but to date that's the only litigation that the division has brought (though it's been active in other areas, including opposition to bans on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines).
There's no shortage of jurisdictions where gun owners could use the DOJ's help, but the Massachusetts groups Gun Owners Action League and Commonwealth 2A have fired off a letter asking the Justice Department to go after the lengthy delays Bostonians are facing when applying for a gun license.
State law says a gun license must be approved or denied within 40 days. In Boston, the advocates said, the process takes between eight to 10 months, part of the “unreasonable and unconscionable delays” plaguing the state’s gun licensing system for years.
“Please help us finally put an end to the treatment of the Second Amendment as a lower-class right and broadcast a warning to other cities and towns in Massachusetts that continue to slow-walk the firearms licensing process,” the letter states.
... In the letter, the gun-rights groups asked the DOJ to examine a case from Boston Municipal Court in which Maximilien Baas-Thomas, 31, sued Michael Cox, city of Boston police commissioner, after he faced delays in his gun permit application.
Weeks after Baas-Thomas paid his $100 application fee at the beginning of January, he called Boston police at the end of February, who told him that there were many applications still pending before his. His lawsuit asked the judge to order Boston police to start processing his application.
When the matter came before Judge Maureen Flaherty, Detective Lt. Gary Eblan testified that the number of gun carry permits increased after the state’s law changed last October. In response, the office processing the applications grew from three people to 10 to handle the load.
But it wasn’t enough. When Eblan testified in June, he said there were almost 600 applications filed ahead of Baas-Thomas from November and December that the department was still working through.
In her order issued July 1, Flaherty said she sympathized with his plight, but she ultimately denied Baas-Thomas’ petition, saying it appeared the Boston police are “acting in good faith and processing the applications as quickly as possible with the resources they have.”
Frankly, it doesn't matter if the BPD is acting in good faith or intentionally slow-walking these applications. They're failing to follow state law, and they shouldn't get a pass just because a judge thinks the department is doing its best. We're still talking about the deprivation of a fundamental civil right, and as the Supreme Court has said, even "shall issue" regimes can be deemed unconstitutional if they charge excessive fees or have lengthy waiting periods to be approved.
SCOTUS didn't say anything about having to prove some nefarious intent behind those delays in order for them to be unconstitutional. Besides, even if the Boston Police Department itself is honestly putting forth a good-faith effort to comply with the law, that doesn't mean that the politicians who set the police department's budget are doing the same.
Unsurprisingly, the gun control crowd doesn't think these untenable delays are an issue.
A permitting or licensing overhaul comes with “a couple of years of mess of trying to iron out your internal procedures and processes for dealing with the applications,” said Dru Stevenson, a law professor at South Texas College of Law who researches firearm policy and law.
And, while the right to bear arms is written in the Constitution, there are other licensing processes that take just as long.
“Guess how long it takes to get signed up for Social Security disability or to incorporate a nonprofit?” Stevenson said.
Stevenson said the DOJ’s lawsuit against Los Angeles is largely symbolic, where the most significant thing the government could obtain from a judge is injunctive relief.
“They can get a court to order Los Angeles County to hurry up,” Stevenson said.
Stevenson's not just a law professor, and he's hardly unbiased. He's described by the gun control group Giffords as a "contributor" to the organization and its efforts, and has authored numerous law review articles that are generally supportive of the gun control movement since 2019.
As for the substance of Stevenson's argument, it's irrelevant how long it takes to get signed up for Social Security disability or to incorporate a non-profit. It may very well take too much time to do those things as well, but the issue here is the government failing to follow it's own timeline to approve the permits they mandate before we can exercise a civil right.
Brady's Kris Brown was even more dismissive of the DOJ's lawsuit against LASD, telling MassLive.com the lawsuit "is yet another example of how the Department of Justice under Donald Trump is spending its limited resources to do the bidding of the gun industry.”
Brown would be raising holy hell herself if the LASD's inability or unwillingness to do it's job benefited gun owners in any way. She's only bothered by the fact that the Justice Department is taking aim at a process that's keeping people from exercising a right for a year or more.
The Boston PD's practices are definitely ripe for DOJ review, but so too are the needless delays in processing New York City carry permits; the exorbitant fees charged by some jurisdictions in California, where the cost to apply for a carry permit can run $2,000; and the numerous "gun-free zones" in states like New Jersey and Maryland that make it nearly impossible to lawfully carry in many publicly accessible places. Brown is right about the DOJ having limited resources, but again, if Justice Department officials really want to push back against criticism by some 2A groups, the best thing to do is to be even more active in defending our right to keep and bear arms than it already is.
