Two prominent gun-rights groups and a handful of Santa Clara County residents have sued the sheriff’s office in federal court over its methods for issuing concealed-carry weapons permits, saying high fees along with required psychological exams and political contribution disclosures are violations of the Second Amendment.
The lawsuit, filed with the Northern District of California on Monday, represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association, the Second Amendment Foundation based in Washington State, and five South Bay residents who claim the sheriff’s requirements pose an “onerous” financial hardship and unnecessary intrusions of other constitutional rights including the First Amendment.
In the lawsuit language, the plaintiffs refer to the groundbreaking scandal that effectively forced out the previous sheriff administration under six-term sheriff Laurie Smith, who was found by multiple investigations and a civil jury to have engaged in corruption and political favoritism in the way her office handed out CCW permits. One of her close advisers was convicted and her former undersheriff was criminally indicted, though Smith herself avoided criminal consequences.
By imposing nearly $2,000 in licensing, training and exam fees, the lawsuit alleges, the current sheriff’s office under Sheriff Robert Jonsen has “merely substituted an underground ‘pay-to-play’ grift for a broad daylight constitutionally corrupt grift, that is intended to dissuade most people from exercising a fundamental right.”
Jonsen’s office deferred to the County Counsel’s Office when asked for comment. The county did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent shortly after the lawsuit was publicly announced.
Four of the five county residents who serve as individual plaintiffs in the lawsuit claim financial hardships that put Santa Clara County’s permit expenses far out of reach, while one who did pay the fees objected on principle to having to bear the costs.
The lawsuit highlights a $976 total application fee, applicants’ expenses for required training estimated to be as high as $400, the $500 cost of a required psychological exam to assess an applicant’s mental fitness for having a concealed gun, fingerprinting and other fees, on top of an estimated $850 in renewal expenses every two years. Applicants in Santa Clara County are also required to submit disclosures of political contributions, which is almost certainly a response to the scandal that dogged Smith for more than a decade before she left office in 2022.
“Even hinting that a public disclosure of politically protected speech is required to exercise a fundamental right to the means of self-defense demonstrates the defendants’ habit, pattern, and practice of imposing unlawful requirements to a licensing process that regulates a fundamental right,” the lawsuit states.
Much of the basis of the corruption allegations against Smith lay in what until 2022 had been California law that gave sheriffs and police chiefs in the state wide latitude on how they determined fitness for a CCW permit. In particular, law-enforcement leaders’ discretion to require a show of “good cause” for a permit gave them undisputed veto power.
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That changed, ironically after Smith’s commanders had already been criminally indicted and her own civil corruption case was underway, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen ruling that outlawed “good cause” tests in issuing the gun permits. Still, state Attorney General Rob Bonta and other leaders pledged to maintain rigorous rules to ensure public safety and keep California from becoming an open-carry state.
The lawsuit claims that Santa Clara County took it too far, citing how peer counties in California — Alameda, San Mateo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego — require assorted initial permitting costs that amount to a quarter of that in Santa Clara. None of those jurisdictions require a psychological exam, which the plaintiffs argue unfairly presumes applicants are mentally unfit unless they prove otherwise.
The plaintiffs want a federal court to declare the fees and implied costs for CCW permits in Santa Clara County, as well as the financial disclosure and psych exam requirements, to be declared unconstitutional.
“It’s not a far stretch,” Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, said, “to see that this fee structure is simply another way to deliberately discourage people from exercising their constitutional right to bear arms.”