The bottom line
Harmeet Dhillon gave a detailed public interview explaining exactly what the DOJ’s newly formed Second Amendment Section will do, who it will target, and why it prioritized CCW permit obstruction above everything else on the wish list. She is right about all of it. This is the correct strategy, pursued by the correct person, and anyone paying attention to the legal landscape should recognize that.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
Who Dhillon is and why it matters
Harmeet Dhillon is the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice. That title means she runs the Civil Rights Division, which is the federal office historically responsible for enforcing voting rights, desegregation orders, and employment discrimination law. Under her leadership, that office now also has a dedicated Second Amendment Section, and she is the one who built it.
I want to be clear about something upfront. Pam Bondi is Dhillon’s boss. She is the Attorney General of the United States and she sets the top-level direction of the department. I have been critical of Bondi, and I stand by that. As Attorney General of Florida, she supported red flag laws, which let the government seize your firearms without any due process on the front end. She supported an age-based handgun ban for 18-to-20-year-olds. She supported sensitive places restrictions that function as gun-free zones with a better press release. None of that has changed. Bondi is not a principled Second Amendment defender, and calling her one would be dishonest.
But Dhillon is not Bondi. The Second Amendment Section reports to Dhillon directly. Bondi has not moved to shut it down or redirect its work. For the purposes of what is actually happening with federal Second Amendment enforcement right now, Dhillon is the person who matters, and what she is saying and doing deserves serious attention.
What the section is targeting first
Dhillon was explicit in her interview: the number one enforcement priority is delays in the CCW permitting process. This is exactly right, and here is why.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1. The ruling was 6-3. It held that New York’s “proper cause” requirement for concealed carry permits violated the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. It established a shall-issue framework nationwide: if you are a law-abiding citizen applying for a carry permit and you meet the objective criteria, the government must issue it. They do not get to decide whether you have a good enough reason. Self-defense is the reason. The Supreme Court said so.
That was three years ago. And what have California, Hawaii, and other blue jurisdictions done about it? They replaced their may-issue denial schemes with delay schemes. Los Angeles County is the case everyone knows about. Between January 2024 and March 2025, LASD received 3,982 new CCW applications. It approved two of them. Two. The median processing time before a file even moved to the next step was 372 days. Some applicants were projected to wait 1,030 days. The DOJ filed suit against the LA County Sheriff’s Department in September 2025 in the first-ever affirmative DOJ lawsuit in support of gun owners. That case is moving.
San Francisco came up next. The sheriff’s office allowed permit renewal applications to simply expire rather than process them. Applicants who filed on time and did everything right found their permits lapsed because the sheriff’s office didn’t bother to act. The DOJ issued a formal warning to San Francisco in December 2025, threatening litigation if the violations continued. The sheriff apologized and blamed budget cuts. Budget cuts are not a constitutional defense. A law enforcement agency claiming it is too understaffed to process a constitutional right does not get to keep violating the Constitution while it waits for more funding.
Dhillon framed the point as well as anyone could: imagine a city that took three years to process a First Amendment parade permit. No court would tolerate it for ten seconds. The Second Amendment is not a lesser right. It says “shall not be infringed” in plain English. A permitting process designed to outlast an applicant’s patience is an infringement, and it is the most common infringement happening right now across the most populated jurisdictions in the country.
The assault weapons front
Beyond the CCW delays, Dhillon outlined what else is coming. State laws banning semi-automatic rifles are on the target list. She said directly that AR-15s are presumptively constitutional under the Supreme Court’s framework and that states banning them are wrong.
This is not a novel position. It is grounded in the Heller-Bruen common-use doctrine. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), established that the Second Amendment protects arms in common use by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the United States. There are over 20 million of them in civilian hands. Under any honest application of the Heller test, a blanket prohibition on that firearm fails.
The DOJ has been backing that position in federal courts. In June 2025, the Civil Rights Division filed an amicus brief in Barnett v. Raoul before the Seventh Circuit, challenging Illinois’s assault weapons ban. Dhillon personally appeared in Chicago to argue the case on September 22, 2025. The DOJ’s position is that the banned rifles meet the Heller-Bruen common-use test and that Illinois’s law cannot survive the text-and-history analysis that Bruen requires courts to apply.
Hawaii’s carry restrictions are also in the crosshairs. The state enacted so-called “sensitive places” laws after Bruen that effectively flipped the default: instead of requiring a reason to deny carry, Hawaii required gun owners to obtain affirmative permission from private property owners before carrying onto their property. The Supreme Court took up Wolford v. Lopez in October 2025, after the DOJ filed an amicus brief supporting the cert petition. The government’s brief called the law a “severe burden” on Second Amendment rights and noted that Hawaii’s rule had no roots in American historical tradition. The Supreme Court’s willingness to take the case signals the Justices are not done enforcing Bruen’s requirements on resistant jurisdictions.
The complaint about pace
I hear the criticism constantly in comments: why is it going so slowly? Why aren’t they doing more? Why aren’t they going after the NFA? Why not machine guns?
I get it. I genuinely do. I want all of that too. But the criticism misunderstands how constitutional litigation works and what the current Supreme Court is actually positioned to do.
You cannot just file a machine gun case in federal court today and expect to win. The current Supreme Court majority is sympathetic to the Second Amendment, but it is also cautious. If you bring a case the Court is not ready to take, you lose, and that loss creates binding precedent that the other side will cite for decades. The Heller decision was the product of decades of strategic groundwork by gun rights organizations that knew which cases to file, which courts to file them in, and which arguments to lead with. Bruen was built on Heller. The cases being built right now will eventually enable arguments that are not yet viable.
What Dhillon is doing is the correct version of this. File the cases with clear legal support. Win them. Build a record of favorable precedent. Use that record to make the next fight easier. Each CCW delay case the DOJ wins tightens the screws on the next jurisdiction that tries the same tactic. Each assault weapons challenge that produces favorable appellate language makes the eventual Supreme Court case stronger.
What actually changed
For the first time in living memory, the federal government has a permanent institutional structure inside the Department of Justice whose sole function is to investigate and litigate Second Amendment violations by state and local governments. That is not a task force. It is not a press release initiative. It is a section of the Civil Rights Division, operating under the same legal authority and using the same tools that have been deployed for decades to enforce other constitutional rights.
That structural change matters because it persists. The section can build institutional knowledge. It can track which jurisdictions have problematic practices. It can coordinate with private litigants like the Firearms Policy Coalition, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the NRA-ILA, lending the weight of the federal government to cases those organizations have already filed. Private groups have done extraordinary work with limited resources. The DOJ walking in alongside them is a force multiplier that changes the calculation for every government lawyer on the other side.
This is not the end of the fight. The NFA is still unconstitutional and still on the books. Red flag laws are still being passed and enforced. Illinois, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts are all still running restrictions that should not exist. There is years of hard litigation ahead. But the machinery that was missing, the institutional federal counterweight to decades of anti-gun enforcement, now exists. And the person running it knows the law, knows the strategy, and is doing the work.
That is worth taking seriously.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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