President Donald Trump’s DOJ filed suit against San Jose, California, Wednesday over the city’s “presumptively unconstitutional” Carry Concealed Weapons (CCW) license fee.
In the complaint, the DOJ pointed out that San Jose’s fee is almost $1,600 and noted the “exorbitant” fee cannot survive the Bruen (2022) test, as “there is no plausible claim that San Jose’s punitive $1,591 fee accords with the nation’s firearm regulatory tradition.”
The DOJ claims San Jose’s “purpose” with the fee is “making it impractical for middle class citizens and impossible for low-income citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights.”
Moreover, the DOJ intimates it has the connotative effect of treating Second Amendment rights as second-class inasmuch as “charging a prohibitive fee would be unthinkable in other constitutional contexts.” In other words, it would be unthinkable to have to pay nearly $1,600 for a permit to exercise freedom of speech, or religion, or the press.
KRON4 quoted Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon saying, “All law-abiding Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense. This right is not a luxury reserved for a privileged few, but a fundamental element of our republic.”
Dhillon added, “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.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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