Feds settle lawsuit with L.A. County Sheriff's Department over concealed firearm permits

The U.S. Department of Justice and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have agreed to settle a lawsuit over what federal prosecutors alleged last year was a pattern of delaying applications for permits to carry concealed firearms for “unreasonable” lengths of time.

The Sheriff’s Department will “bring its procedures in line with the Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen decision,” the DOJ said in a statement Thursday, referring to a 2022 high court decision affirming a constitutional right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.

Excessively delaying applications for concealed carry permits, the DOJ had alleged, effectively violated the applicants’ constitutional rights.

In response to its lawsuit, the DOJ’s statement said, the Sheriff’s Department “drastically cut those waiting times and is now in compliance with statutory deadlines.” The development is “a huge win for the residents of Los Angeles County and for the Second Amendment,” the federal agency added.

“The Justice Department supports our law enforcement partners,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in the statement. “The sheriff acknowledged the problem and devoted substantial additional resources, including new processing software and additional personnel, to cutting waiting times dramatically.”

The Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that it “welcomes the resolution and settlement of this matter and appreciates the U.S. Department of Justice’s recognition of the meaningful steps the Department has taken to improve the processing of firearm carry permit applications.”

In its complaint filed in federal district court in L.A. in September, the DOJ claimed that the Sheriff’s Department had “systematically denied thousands of law-abiding Californians their fundamental Second Amendment right to bear arms outside the home — not through outright refusal, but through a deliberate pattern of unconscionable delay.”

The complaint stated that between Jan. 2, 2024, and March 31, 2025, the Sheriff’s Department received almost 4,000 applications for new concealed carry licenses but issued only two. Two others were denied and the rest were either withdrawn or were still pending, according to the DOJ.

The DOJ complaint also cited Sheriff’s Department data that showed that over those 15 months, it took an average of nearly 300 days for the department to advance the more than 8,000 new permit applications and renewals it received.

The Sheriff’s Department’s Thursday statement said it “officially established a Carry Conceal Unit, in the summer of 2025, that is staffed by 16 full-time personnel,” and that the department has eliminated its backlog of concealed carry permit applications.

The Sheriff’s Department said in September that Sheriff Robert Luna, who was also listed by name as a defendant in the original federal complaint, “inherited a dysfunctional system” when he took office in 2022, and that he had only 13 people to manage the avalanche of applications for concealed carry permits filed each year in L.A.