Fierce Patriots

Conservative Political News

  • Subscribe

<![CDATA[Kostas Moros]]>

SoCal city warned by gun group over outrageous cost for carry permits

by Leave a Comment

The city of Santa Monica is the latest California locale to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen by jacking up the cost to apply for a concealed carry license, and now the California Rifle & Pistol Association is warning city council members that if they don’t take reverse course they could soon be facing a lawsuit.

Several Los Angeles County cities, including Santa Monica, have levied administrative fees and costs amounting to more than $600 for applicants. Unlike in the past, residents are no longer able to get their permits through the L.A. County Sheriff’s office, which has stopped processing applications from residents in independent localities in the county in order to cut down on the backlog of applications and improve processing times for concealed carry applicants in unincorporated areas of the county.

CRPA attorney Kostas Moros told the city council last week that Santa Monica is not only obligated to process these applications in a timely manner, but cannot impose excessive fees on applicants. Despite the words of warning, the council unanimously moved forward with a fee schedule that prices some residents out of their Second Amendment rights. Now Moros and the CRPA have sent a follow-up letter to the council hinting at the possibility of a lawsuit unless the fees are reduced to a reasonable level.

Under the fees approved by the City Council last Tuesday, Santa Monica residents will pay $617 — plus $150 for a psychological exam — for a license.

The total amount is $617 more than residents paid the LA County Sheriff’s Department (LASD), which charged a total of $150 and required no psychological testing, before they stopped processing fees for the city.

The Council also set the renewal fee at $150, five times more than the $30 charged by the Sheriff’s Department.

“Charging $767 (not including the training course) for the exercise of a constitutional right is not acceptable,” Konstadinos T. Moros, an attorney representing the California Rifle & Pistol Association, warned the Council shortly before the unanimous vote.

In his warning, Moros included a copy of a letter he sent to the City of La Verne threatening a lawsuit over the same fees Santa Monica would unanimously approve.

“By charging such outlandish fees, the City is punishing the very people who are law-abiding and respectful of the process,” Moros wrote.

“You are encouraging them to give up and, if they still must carry for their own safety, to do so illegally.”

That’s definitely one of the unintended consequences of Santa Monica’s fee schedule. It discourages responsible gun ownership by imposing so many financial burdens on applicants that some will undoubtably choose to risk carrying without a license because they can’t afford the hundreds of dollars in administrative costs imposed by council members.

In setting the fee, the Council used staff’s estimate that it would take the Police Department ten hours of work per application at an estimated cost of $1,093.83, a cost Moros said is overblown.

There is no reason it needs to take hours and hours to process permits in-house,” Moros wrote. “This can be done far more cheaply, as most other police and sheriff’s departments manage to do.

“This shouldn’t be more than a couple hours of work for each applicant.”

Moros also questioned the need for a $150 psychological exam he said “the vast majority of issuing authorities in California do not require,” including LASD.

“The idea that people who go out of their way get carry permits are a significant criminal threat is self-evidently wrong,” he wrote.

“There is no threat here for the City to fear. These are good people. The criminals are already carrying illegally, and won’t be applying for a permit any time soon.”

But neither will many law-abiding Santa Monica residents, which seems to be exactly what the city council wants.

The vast majority of states around the country charge anywhere between $50 and $150 for a concealed carry license, and even in southern California there are jurisdictions charging far less than Santa Monica’s $767 or La Verne’s $1,018 to apply. Whittier and Glendora both charge $243, according to Moros; still an eye-popping amount from my perspective (I paid $50 for my Virginia carry license, plus the cost of training), but a lot better than the ridiculous requirements imposed in some locales.

So far the city council is standing by its fee schedule, so the high cost of carrying may soon be the subject of a court challenge. California gun control laws have already taken one hit this week, and I’d love to see Santa Monica or La Verne try to defend their own locally imposed anti-gun regimes before a judge in the near future. It’d be much better if these cities simply respected the Second Amendment rights of residents, but I doubt that’s gonna happen without a court order.

Santa Monica council member lets the mask slip on carry costs

by Leave a Comment

On Wednesday we reported on the outlandish fees that may soon be imposed on gun owners in Santa Monica, California who are trying to obtain a concealed carry license.  The Santa Monica PD is recommending the city council adopt a fee schedule forcing applicants to shell out more than $600 simply to apply for a CHL. Add in the cost of training and the mandatory psychological evaluation the city’s imposing on all applicants, and it’s likely to cost residents $1,000 or more before they receive permission to exercise a constitutionally-protected right.

After our original story was posted, California Second Amendment attorney Kostas Moros highlighted one comment from a city council member that’s very revealing. While defenders of the costly fees proposed in Santa Monica (and already in place in other SoCal cities like La Verne) say they’re just passing on the cost of conducting background checks to the applicants themselves, one council member said the quiet part out loud and seemingly admitted that they’re trying to price people out of their Second Amendment rights.

I encourage you to check out the link that Moros shared, because it’s a great look at the anti-gun mindset that permeates California politics. The councilwoman in question is posing some questions about the fees that applicants have to pay, including who exactly pays for the psychological evaluation that applicants must undergo before they can be approved. She seems happy to learn that applicants themselves are forced to pay that fee, but that led into another series of questions about how much the city can charge an applicant. Council staff (it might have been the city attorney, but they weren’t identified) informed her that the fees must be “reasonable” in nature, which led to her comment about trying to disincentivize residents from applying.

To my surprise, the staffer responded that there would be “some risk to doing that,” which did shut down the council woman’s line of inquiry. Rather than drop the subject completely, however, she turned to other avenues to inhibit the right to bear arms. “I would also just say that I support future items similar to what they did in L.A. County to prohibit carrying guns on public property, etc. and to prohibit selling large scale, like, magazines in the city of Santa Monica if we haven’t done that yet.”

Despite the Supreme Court’s crystal-clear ruling that the Second Amendment protects the fundamental right to bear arms in public in self-defense, scenes like Tuesday’s city council meeting in Santa Monica are still all too common in many anti-gun strongholds, and the intent behind them is unmistakable. Anti-2A officials are trying to erect as many roadblocks as possible between responsible citizens and their 2A rights; not only preventing as many applicants as possible from obtaining a license, but working to make the application process so burdensome and unaffordable that many gun owners won’t even try to get a CHL. And for those that run the bureaucratic gauntlet, these same prohibitionists want to make it impossible to lawfully carry in as many places as possible, with the threat of fines and jail time for anyone who sets foot in a “gun-free zone”, even by accident.

Santa Monica council members still have time to do the right thing here, but if they continue to pursue these sky-high fees they’re likely to end up facing a lawsuit, and the council member’s comments will come in handy for the plaintiffs hoping to show that it’s anti-gun animosity that’s fueling the outrageous administrative fees imposed. City officials seem intent on charging as much as they think they can get away with knowing full well that the high cost to carry will exclude some responsible gun owners from exercising their constitutionally-protected right. The Supreme Court said in Bruen that excessive fees can call even “shall issue” regimes into question, and California may very well provide SCOTUS with multiple opportunities to prove it meant what it said in the not-too-distant future.

Former teacher’s op-ed on guns rather illuminating

by Leave a Comment

Most of us who are parents send our kids to school. I did for years until the pandemic showed me that I could actually homeschool my daughter, so that’s what I did.

Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of amazing teachers out there. However, there are those who think they know more than they really do, particularly on subjects like guns and gun rights.

We’ve seen this more than once, too. A kid brings home their classwork and there’s some blatantly wrong fact revolving around the Second Amendment.

Most such teachers at least try to keep their ignorance out of the public eye, but a former teacher and superintendent recently wrote an op-ed on the subject that put his own ignorance on full display.

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads as follows: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

When I taught government, my students would ask questions as to the purpose and meaning of amendments, particularly the Second Amendment. My response to this question was, “Our founders were painfully aware, because of their experiences with England, of a federal government’s potentially abusive power, and they were committed to the preservation of the power of the states. Our founders had, as a primary concern that specific protection. The Second Amendment was meant to be a collective-rights state’s protection, not an individual right to bear arms.”

There you go. Ignorance for all to see.

There’s absolutely no reason to teach such complete and utter nonsense, and yet, he did.

First, let’s remember that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights both specify “the states” in several places and “the people” in others. In every other instance when the text reads “the people” or “the people’s,” it’s a right that’s held to be an individual right. The Fourth Amendment, for example, is a prime example of it.

So why is it that the Second Amendment is somehow immune to that?

The author continues, though.

In 2009, to the shock of many Americans, the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller declared that the intent of the Second Amendment was not to protect the states, but rather to empower individuals to bear arms and if that were not enough, in 2022, the court in New York State Rifle and Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen fashioned the ultimate blow by declared that citizens could carry guns in public settings without registration. The court literally moved the playing field and tilted it irretrievably.

No, the court did no such thing.

This ties into Cam’s post earlier today addressing similar claims by David Hogg. In particular, this idea that the Second Amendment only became an individual right to own guns in recent years.

It’s–and I apologize in advance, but I can’t help myself–Hoggwash. (Sorry, I had to do it.)

Pro-gun attorney Kostas Moros has heard all of this before. Last year, he started compiling a rather epic Twitter thread of all the evidence showing that no, this isn’t some uniquely modern idea of it being an individual rather than a collective right.

Seriously, go and read the whole thing. Block out a good long while to read.

Of course, Moros is an attorney, someone whose job it is to look at the law and understand it. Further, he looks at legal experts from the past and finds where they have written on the topic well in the past. Despite that, the person whose word we should take isn’t his, but a former government teacher.

Folks, this is, in part, why our educational system is so screwed up.

Teachers are people. They are fallible and flawed, just like the rest of us. Their expertise is, at least in theory, communicating ideas to young people and helping them learn and retain that information. It’s not in constitutional law or any number of other subjects where they often take their classroom authority to mean they’re an actual authority on other matters.

This was someone who admits to teaching his own interpretation of what the Second Amendment means in class as if it were the absolute truth, then presents that teach as if it’s an authoritative statement on the nature of the right to keep and bear arms.

Don’t delude yourself into believing this doesn’t happen with other subjects. I recall teachers professing facts in class during my time in school that I knew to be untrue, then calling me down for daring to disagree. None of these had anything to do with guns.

But this case does, and I’m not a student in the classroom anymore. I’m damn sure going to call this teacher out over his “facts” that are anything but.