President Donald Trump had all the pro-gun endorsements anyone could ask for in a candidate. However, he was also the guy who had the ATF issue the now-defunct bump stock ban, so a lot of gun folks are skeptical.
And there are a lot of things they wanted to see the Trump administration do, though I suspect this pro-gun move wasn't on most people's list.
It seems that the president thinks concealed carry needs to be a whole lot easier in our nation's capital.
On Friday, President Trump issued an executive order designed to make DC a whole lot safer. There are, of course, a lot of different aspects to it, including things like cleaning up graffiti, getting the police forensic crime lab up and accredited, pre-trial confinement, and many other things.
Of interest to gun people is in Section 3 of the order:
(v) collaborating with appropriate local government entities to provide assistance to increase the speed and lower the cost of processing concealed carry license requests in the District of Columbia;
The District has a longstanding hostility toward the right to keep and bear arms.
The Heller decision that set the stage for most pro-gun rulings since involved a District of Columbia law that basically made it impossible to have a firearm for self-defense. You could have one, but it had to be disassembled and unloaded, which means that if someone broke into your home to hurt you, you pretty much had no recourse but to just let it happen.
Sure, you could fight back, but not effectively.
Heller ended that.
But the animosity toward armed citizens has continued.
The only reason it was a "shall issue" jurisdiction before the Bruen decision was because of a lower court ruling they lost and opted not to take to the Supreme Court. If they had, the Bruen decision wouldn't have been called the Bruen decision. They'd have lost, and they knew it.
So the idea of federal authority stepping in to try and make this happen easier and cheaper is a good thing.
Over at our sister site, Bearing Arms, Cam Edwards talks about what the status quo currently is:
According to the Metropolitan Police Department, applicants must pay a $13 application fee, along with a $35 fee for fingerprinting and a background check, while the concealed carry license itself costs $75. That's about double what it cost me to get a carry license in Virginia, and of course it doesn't take into account the price tag of the training course mandated by the D.C. government.
The bigger issue, however, appears to be the slow pace of applying for a permit. The MDP has 90 days to approve or deny an application once its been submitted, but you can't just walk into the police headquarters and drop off your paperwork. Instead, you have to make an appointment to apply for a concealed carry permit, and when I went on to the MPD's website and tried to schedule a time for me to begin the process of obtaining a D.C. carry license the first available slot was Wednesday, July 30th at 11:20 a.m.
That means someone applying for a concealed carry license in our nation's capital can expect a seven month delay, and that's if the MPD processes the application in the 90 days allotted to it under local law. That's not as bad as jurisdictions like Los Angeles County or New York City, where the permitting process routinely stretches out beyond a year, but I'd say it's still one of those "lengthy wait times" the Supreme Court suggested would be unconstitutional in the Bruen decision.
Yeah, seven months is ridiculous.
I mean, Los Angeles is taking heat (pun fully intended) for dragging out the permitting process for people trying to rebuild after the Palisades fire, and that's at something like 75 days. Yet building permits shouldn't be all that different from concealed carry permits, really. People have property rights and gun rights, so the process should be just as quick.
If 75 days is a long time for a building permit, then seven months is a crime against humanity.
But the problem here is that I'm not sure there's all that much that Trump can do to force the issue. That long-held hostility toward gun rights isn't going away and I'm not sure that "collaboration" is really going to make that disappear.
Frankly, I suspect it's going to take legal action to make that happen. Luckily, the Department of Justice is stepping in and investigating Los Angeles County over its permitting practices, suggesting they might be willing to get a bit more proactive, should it be necessary.
Either way, I suspect folks in DC are going to have an easier time getting permits in the near future.
