The bottom line
The DOJ’s Second Amendment Section is not a press release. It has filed an affirmative lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff, argued in federal court against Illinois’s assault weapons ban, filed amicus briefs in the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court, declined to defend an unconstitutional federal handgun ban for adults under 21, and launched a formal process to restore gun rights to nonviolent felons. The comments calling this performative are wrong.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
The announcement
On December 4, 2025, Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, announced that the Civil Rights Division had formally established a dedicated Second Amendment Section. This is the first office of its kind in the history of the federal government: a permanent unit inside the DOJ whose entire function is to investigate and litigate violations of Second Amendment rights by state and local governments.
I covered the announcement when it was coming. The skepticism in the comments was predictable. People have been burned before by politicians who talk a good game on guns and then do nothing. That skepticism is understandable. But when I look at the actual record of what the Second Amendment Section has done since Dhillon arrived at the Civil Rights Division, the skepticism is not supported by the facts.
Let me go through what has actually happened, because the list is longer than most people realize.
The LA lawsuit
In September 2025, the DOJ filed suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for its concealed carry permit delays. This is the first-ever affirmative lawsuit by the Department of Justice in support of gun owners. The numbers in that case are staggering. Between January 2024 and March 2025, LASD received 3,982 new CCW applications. It approved two. The median wait time before an application even moved to the next processing step was 372 days. Some applicants were on track to wait over 1,000 days. The department was scheduling interviews as late as November 2026.
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, decided in June 2022, established a clear shall-issue standard. Law-abiding citizens who meet objective criteria are entitled to a carry permit. There is no residual authority for a sheriff’s department to sit on applications for three years. What Los Angeles was doing was not slow bureaucracy. It was a deliberate tactic to convert a shall-issue mandate into a functional denial system, one application at a time.
The DOJ recognized it for what it was and filed. The case is pending.
The Illinois argument
In June 2025, the Civil Rights Division filed an amicus brief in Barnett v. Raoul before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The case challenges Illinois’s ban on a range of semi-automatic rifles including the AR-15 and standard-capacity magazines. On September 22, 2025, Dhillon personally appeared in federal court in Chicago to argue the United States’ position.
I want to be clear about what this means. The Assistant Attorney General of the United States walked into a federal courtroom and argued, on behalf of the federal government, that Illinois’s assault weapons ban is unconstitutional. The DOJ’s brief is grounded in the test that the Supreme Court laid out in Heller and Bruen: the Second Amendment protects arms in common use by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, and restrictions on those arms must be justified by a historical tradition of analogous regulation.
The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the United States. There are more than 20 million in civilian hands. It is used by hunters, competitive shooters, and homeowners who chose it for the same reason the military did: it is reliable, accurate, and effective. Under any honest application of the Heller common-use doctrine, a blanket ban on that firearm cannot stand. Justice Thomas wrote as much in his majority opinion in Bruen. The DOJ’s brief takes that language and applies it directly to Illinois’s statute. The Seventh Circuit should follow the Supreme Court’s logic to its conclusion.
Hawaii and the sensitive places trap
The DOJ also intervened in Wolford v. Lopez, the case challenging Hawaii’s so-called sensitive places law. After Bruen forced Hawaii to shift from its previous system of issuing virtually no concealed carry permits, the state enacted Act 52, which inverted the traditional default rule on private property. Instead of allowing carry unless a property owner posted a prohibition, Hawaii required gun owners to obtain express affirmative permission before carrying on any private property open to the public.
The practical effect is the near-total elimination of carry rights in populated areas. Restaurants, retail stores, parking lots, hotels, and most other locations you might actually visit become no-carry zones unless you find and obtain individual permission from each property owner. The DOJ filed an amicus brief supporting the cert petition, calling the rule a “severe burden” on Second Amendment rights with no foundation in historical American law. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in October 2025. The case is now before the Justices.
The under-21 handgun sale ban
The Fifth Circuit decided Reese v. ATF in January 2025, striking down the federal prohibition on FFLs selling handguns to adults aged 18 to 20. The majority held the ban unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. When the deadline arrived to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court, the DOJ allowed it to pass. The ruling stands as binding precedent in the Fifth Circuit.
This is significant because for decades the DOJ reflexively defended every federal gun restriction in court regardless of its constitutional merit. The decision not to appeal Reese represents a genuine shift in posture. Rather than burning resources defending an unconstitutional law and risking an adverse Supreme Court ruling that the other side could exploit, the DOJ accepted the Fifth Circuit’s judgment.
I will note that the subsequent injunction proceedings got messy, with disputes over how broadly the ruling applied to non-plaintiffs. But the core decision, the constitutional one, went our way, and the current DOJ chose not to fight it. That matters.
Gun rights restoration for nonviolent felons
Dhillon’s team has also been working on something that doesn’t get enough attention: restoring Second Amendment rights to people with nonviolent felony convictions. In July 2025, the DOJ published a proposed rule to establish a formal application process under 18 U.S.C. § 925(c), a statute that has existed for decades but was effectively dead because Congress banned the ATF from processing applications using appropriated funds in 1992.
The proposed rule would create a pathway for people with nonviolent felony records to petition for restoration of their gun rights after a waiting period. Violent felons, sex offenders, and people with domestic violence convictions would be presumptively ineligible. For most other qualifying convictions, a five-year waiting period after completing the sentence applies. Even before the final rule, the DOJ listed 22 individuals in the Federal Register whose rights had already been restored.
This is a genuinely liberty-oriented policy. The current federal prohibition on gun ownership for anyone with a felony conviction is a blunt instrument that sweeps in people who were never a threat to anyone, who completed their sentences, and who have lived law-abiding lives for years afterward. The Constitution says “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Permanently stripping a right from someone because they were convicted of a nonviolent offense twenty years ago is exactly the kind of policy that treats the Second Amendment as a second-class right. Dhillon is right to try to fix it.
Where I part ways with the skeptics
The criticism I hear most often is that the pace is too slow and that none of this touches the NFA. Both things are somewhat true. The pace is not as fast as I would like. The NFA is still on the books and still being used to criminalize ordinary gun owners for things like having a barrel that is a quarter-inch too short. I want all of that fixed.
But I also understand what happens when you overreach in constitutional litigation. If you bring the wrong case to the wrong court at the wrong time, you lose, and you create precedent that entrenches the very law you were trying to remove. Look at the SBR challenge, Rush v. United States. The NRA-ILA petitioned the Supreme Court to hear that case in June 2025. The Court denied cert in December 2025. The Justices are not ready to take on the NFA’s short-barreled rifle restrictions yet. If someone had gotten an adverse ruling from the Supreme Court on that question, it would have set the movement back years.
Dhillon is building cases that win. The CCW delay cases are straightforward because Bruen already established the standard and the jurisdictions being targeted are in obvious, documented violation of it. The assault weapons cases in Illinois are built on the strongest possible doctrinal foundation from Heller and Bruen. The Hawaii sensitive places case is now at the Supreme Court, which means the Justices apparently think the question is worth resolving. Each of these wins creates legal architecture that supports the harder fights coming later.
The Second Amendment did not get as restricted as it is today in one decision. It was done incrementally, over decades, with courts accepting increasingly aggressive regulations. Getting it back is going to work the same way, except faster because the Supreme Court has already ruled and those rulings are on our side.
The structural point
What Dhillon built is not temporary. A section inside the Civil Rights Division is a permanent institutional feature of the DOJ. It can be funded. It can be staffed by attorneys who develop specialized expertise in Second Amendment litigation. It can conduct pattern-or-practice investigations, meaning it can investigate systemic constitutional violations by a law enforcement agency rather than just responding to individual complaints. That is the same investigative authority used to address civil rights violations by police departments, and it is now available to gun owners dealing with permitting systems that are designed to deny them their rights.
The people who spent thirty years fighting to make the Second Amendment mean what it says, the attorneys who built the cases that became Heller and Bruen, understood that you need institutions on your side, not just favorable rulings. A favorable ruling with no one willing to enforce it is worth less than it looks. What is being built inside the DOJ right now is enforcement capacity, and that is what the movement has been missing.
I am not telling you to stop pushing. Keep pressuring the DOJ to move faster. Keep demanding action on the NFA and suppressors and magazine restrictions. Make the wish list loud and public. But do not make the mistake of dismissing what is already happening as theater. It is not theater. It is the federal government taking the field on our side for the first time in living memory, and that changes the math on every fight ahead.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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