Justice Department Sues Glendale Over $2,000 Concealed Carry Permits

The Justice Department has sued the city of Glendale, California, arguing that its concealed carry permit system charges residents about $2,000 for a licence to carry a firearm in public — and then subjects them to a vetting process with no published standards.

The complaint, filed on Monday in federal court in Los Angeles, says the Glendale Police Department’s permitting regime violates the Second Amendment. It is the latest test of how far cities can go in charging for, and screening, a right the Supreme Court recognised in 2022 as extending beyond the home.

Glendale has not yet filed a response in court, and the city had not publicly answered the department’s claims as of Tuesday morning.

What Glendale charges

According to the Justice Department, a first-time applicant in Glendale now pays between $1,971 and $2,106 in total for a concealed carry permit. A renewal, required every two years, costs between $1,271 and $1,406.

The department says those totals are a sharp break with the previous fiscal year, when the police department charged a $100 fee for first-time applicants and $25 for renewals. The complaint puts the licence fee itself at $1,078 for a first application and $826 for a renewal, with the rest of the total made up of related costs, including a psychological examination and a 16-hour training course.

The department described the fees as “an unreasonable barrier to exercising that right” and called Glendale’s scheme one of the most expensive in the country. MyNewsLA reported that the department had warned the city in a letter on 28 October that a lawsuit was coming if the fees were not changed.

The vetting process

The cost is only part of the department’s case. The complaint describes a 15-step process that includes three reference interviews, a psychological exam, an interview with the applicant, and a review of the applicant’s public statements, including social media posts.

The department says the police department publishes no objective standards for those checks, leaving officials to decide who qualifies on the basis of their own judgement. That, the complaint argues, is the kind of open-ended, “may-issue” system the Supreme Court rejected in its 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

In Bruen, the court said states could run “shall-issue” licensing systems, in which anyone who meets objective requirements receives a permit, so long as those systems are not “put toward abusive ends”. The court’s own example of such abuse was “exorbitant fees” that “deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry” — the passage the Justice Department’s case is built around.

The legal argument

The suit was brought by the Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section, which enforces the Second Amendment, the federal pattern-or-practice statute, and an executive order on gun rights. It names the city of Glendale as the defendant and was filed as United States v. City of Glendale, No. 2:26-cv-13098.

The department is relying in part on 34 U.S.C. Section 12601, the 1994 law that lets the attorney general sue over a pattern or practice of law enforcement misconduct. That choice of statute may itself be contested: on the same day the Glendale suit was filed, a federal judge in Maryland ruled that the same provision could not be used to challenge a county gun law, according to a review of that ruling.

The case was announced by Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Jesus Osete, with First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli of the Central District of California. The department has not said what specific relief it is seeking from the court.

What happens next

Glendale must now answer the complaint in federal court, where a judge will decide whether the fee system and the vetting process can stand. If the department wins, the city would be ordered to rework a system that, by the government’s account, prices ordinary residents out of a constitutional right.

The case also lands in a wider national argument about the cost of carrying a firearm. The department’s latest crime figures show violent crime falling sharply in 2025, but the politics of gun regulation remain unsettled, and other cities with costly or discretionary permit systems will be watching the Glendale case closely.

For now, the question before the court is a narrow one: how much can a city charge, and how much discretion can it keep, before a licence fee becomes a barrier to a right.