An investigation into the department’s concealed carry permitting process was part of Trump’s mandate to review gun policies.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for allegedly denying residents’ Second Amendment rights through an inordinately long concealed weapons permit application process.
The lawsuit, filed by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, comes on the heels of a DOJ investigation and a partially successful lawsuit filed by the California Rifle and Pistol Association.
In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, the DOJ accuses Sheriff Robert Luna of overseeing a system designed to deny citizens’ Second Amendment rights.
“Between January 2024 and March 2025, Defendants received 3,982 applications for new concealed carry licenses. Of these, they approved exactly two—a mere 0.05 percent approval rate that cannot be explained by legitimate disqualifying factors alone,” the lawsuit states.
“This is not bureaucratic inefficiency; it is systematic obstruction of constitutional rights.”
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement announcing the lawsuit that it “seeks to stop Los Angeles County’s egregious pattern and practice of delaying law-abiding citizens from exercising their right to bear arms.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s office did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.
The Sheriff’s Department emailed a statement to The Epoch Times expressing support for the Second Amendment and defending its handling of concealed carry weapons (CCW) permit requests. According to the statement, the DOJ fails to take into account staffing issues and the fact that the department is changing from paper to digital records in the permitting process.
“Despite significant staffing shortages, we have successfully approved more than 19,000 CCW applications since 2020. Year to date in 2025, we have issued more than 5,000 CCW permits, including 2,722 new applications,” the statement reads.
The department was dealing with a backlog of permit requests prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, according to the statement.
In that landmark decision, the high court ruled that carrying a firearm in public was a constitutional right. It also ruled that any gun laws that did not follow the plain text of the Second Amendment and did not have a historical analog from the time of the Amendment’s ratification were unconstitutional.
New CCW requests increased dramatically after Bruen, the statement reads.
