DOJ Lawsuits Against Gun Control Especially Protect The Weak

In a major shakeup at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Trump administration last week created the Second Amendment Rights Section within the Civil Rights Division. Under the leadership of Harmeet K. Dhillon, the division has already moved quickly to challenge gun-control laws, opening an investigation into allegations that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department slow-walked approvals for concealed-carry permits.

The move signals a dramatic shift welcomed by those who support gun ownership, but it has provoked strong opposition from critics, who claim the division is straying from its traditional civil-rights mission — typically focused on racism, excessive force, and discrimination. What those critics overlook is that gun control laws disproportionately harm minorities, women, and the poor — the very people who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves.

“The Civil Rights Division’s new focus on the Second Amendment, which is far outside its longstanding mission, is moving us even further away from our nation’s commitment to protecting all Americans’ civil rights,” said Stacey Young, a former division attorney who resigned shortly after the current administration took office.

The investigation into Los Angeles’ reluctance to grant concealed-carry permits has already drawn sharp criticism. “This is a gross misuse of the government’s civil rights enforcement authority,” said Christy Lopez, who served as deputy chief of the division under the Obama administration.

But poor black Americans — who face the highest risk of violent crime — gain the most from having the ability to protect themselves.

For women, the safest response when confronted by a criminal is to have a gun. Women who rely on passive behavior are 2.5 times more likely to suffer serious injury than women who use a firearm to defend themselves. Because criminals are overwhelmingly men, a woman attacked by a man faces a much larger strength imbalance than a man attacked by another man. A gun dramatically shifts that balance. It increases a woman’s ability to protect herself far more than it does for a man.

Background Check Errors Mostly Affect Blacks, Hispanics

Consider something as seemingly uncontroversial as background checks for gun purchases. Gun-control advocates often claim that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has stopped 5.1 million dangerous or prohibited people from buying guns since 1998. But more than 99 percent of these denials are false positives, and the errors fall disproportionately on law-abiding black and Hispanic men.

In 2022, NICS issued 131,865 denials, yet prosecutors indicted only 18 people — just 0.014 percent. These cases should be extremely easy to prosecute: the buyer signs a form swearing they are not prohibited from purchasing a gun, presents government-issued ID, and is almost always recorded on video while attempting the purchase. Forgetting a long prison sentence is not a credible defense.

Prosecutors don’t pursue these cases because they simply aren’t real cases. You can’t prosecute someone just because they share a phonetically similar name and birthdate with a felon.

Here’s the problem: people tend to share names with others in their racial or ethnic groups. Because 33 percent of black males and 17 percent of Hispanic males are felons — compared to about 6 percent of white, non-Hispanic males and 1.5 percent of Asian males — NICS errors overwhelmingly target black and Hispanic men.

When these mistakes occur, people often must hire lawyers to fix them. With legal fees starting around $3,000, few poor or middle-income individuals will find it worthwhile to correct the government’s mistake simply to legally obtain a gun.

If politicians truly want background checks to stop criminals rather than generate headline-grabbing, racially skewed false positives, the fix is simple: require the government to follow the same standards it imposes on private employers. Use all available identifying information — exact names, full birth dates, Social Security numbers, and more — so innocent people aren’t wrongly flagged.

Costs Create Barriers

Costs create another barrier. In Washington, D.C., background checks on private gun transfers costs $155, and registration adds another $13. For poor residents of high-crime urban neighborhoods, those fees are a real obstacle. Law-abiding potential victims bear these costs; gang members do not. Worse yet, states with universal background checks usually require a separate check for each gun. If someone in D.C. inherits or receives four guns, the total cost rises to $672.

Democrats who argue that voter-ID requirements impose unfair burdens on poor minorities should recognize the similar — and often greater — burdens created by background checks.

LA’s Elite Get Guns

Or consider what happened when gun-control politicians decided who had a “good reason” to obtain a permitted concealed handgun. In Los Angeles County, officials had issued only 226 permits for nearly 8 million adults as of January 2017. They gave those permits almost exclusively to the political elite — judges, reserve deputy sheriffs, and a small group of wealthy, well-connected men. Although Hispanics made up almost half the county’s population in 2012, they received only 6.5 percent of the permits. Women, who receive almost 30 percent of permits nationwide, got only 7 percent in Los Angeles, and black residents received just 5 percent, less than half the national rate.

Were women and minorities in Los Angeles somehow spared the threats of crime faced by them elsewhere in the country?

This discrimination has a long history. Indeed, the 14^th Amendment applied the Bill of Rights to the states in large part because Southern states were passing laws to disarm newly freed blacks.

If we accept that the Constitution treats the right to life as a civil right — as reflected in the Fifth Amendment’s command that “no person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process” — then civil rights apply to everyone, not just a few.

The Justice Department’s shift underscores a basic reality: self-defense is a civil right, and the people most at risk suffer when officials restrict it. Policies that raise the cost of obtaining guns or limit permits to the well-connected while burdening the poor, women, and minorities leave the most vulnerable less able to protect themselves. True civil rights must guarantee every law-abiding person — not just the privileged — the ability to defend their own life.

John R. Lott Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy in the U.S. Department of Justice during 2020-21.