On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order aimed at “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” that contains a provision of great interest to gun owners and Second Amendment advocates.
As part of the effort to make D.C. safe by fighting crime, Trump has established a D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force that will, among other things, collaborate “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.”
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.
The task force established by President Trump has a number of other action items, including “directing maximum enforcement of Federal immigration law and redirecting available Federal, State, or local law enforcement resources to apprehend and deport illegal aliens in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area”, “monitoring the District of Columbia’s sanctuary-city status and compliance with the enforcement of Federal immigration law”, and “reviewing and, as appropriate, revising Federal prosecutorial policies on seeking pretrial detention of criminal defendants to ensure that individuals who pose a genuine threat to public safety are detained to the maximum extent permitted by law”.
The EO by Trump is also open-ended in nature. While his first executive action aimed at protecting the Second Amendment gave Attorney General Pam Bondi 30 days to come up a list of policies and practices throughout the federal government impacting our right to keep and bear arms, the order published on the White House website today doesn’t include a deadline for the task force to provide assistance that could speed up the concealed carry permitting process.
It’s also unclear what that assistance might look like. If it’s taking the MPD four months to book an appointment for folks to drop off their carry application, the logical conclusion would be increasing the number of staff available to handle the applications. The task force could redirect some federal employees to work with the D.C. police department’s Firearms Registration Section to improve wait times, but there’s no guarantee they’ll take that step.
It’s far too early to tell what will result from Trump’s latest executive order, but the fact that it was issued, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s announcement that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is being investigated by the DOJ Civil Rights Divison over its own lengthy wait times and fees is a good development… and hopefully just the start of the Trump administration holding state and local governments accountable for infringing on our fundamental right to keep and bear arms.
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