In one California city, you can walk into a shop, fill out the federal paperwork, pass the background check, and buy a perfectly legal handgun for around five hundred bucks. Then, if you’d like to actually carry that handgun the way the Constitution says you’re allowed to, the city wants $1,591 — and starting Wednesday, that’s the new, higher price.
That’s right. The gun is the cheap part. The permission slip costs three times more than the firearm.
The city is San Jose, and the San Jose Police Department has spent years building the most expensive carry-permit operation in the entire state. The fee sat at $1,491 — already the highest in California — and somebody in city hall looked at that number and decided it wasn’t quite punishing enough. So on July 1, it jumps another hundred dollars to $1,591. Happy Independence Week, patriots. The Bill of Rights is now available for the low, low price of a used transmission.
Now, the official story is always the same. It’s not a barrier, they’ll insist — it’s a “fee.” It merely “recovers the cost” of processing your application. Funny how the cost of pushing a form across a desk in San Jose runs $1,591 when the same right costs a fraction of that two counties over. Either San Jose’s paperwork is gold-leafed and hand-delivered by a butler, or the number was never about covering costs at all.
Here’s the part they’re counting on you not to notice. For decades, the people who run places like San Jose had a simpler tool: they just said no. California was a “may-issue” state, which is bureaucrat for “we may issue you a permit if we feel like it, and we never feel like it.” Then the Supreme Court came along in Bruen and took that toy away. The government can no longer tell an ordinary, law-abiding citizen that they don’t have a good enough reason to exercise a constitutional right.
So what’s a dedicated gun-grabber to do once the front door is bolted shut? Pick the lock on the wallet.
They can’t ban the permit anymore, so they price it. They can’t reject you for who you are, so they reject you for what you earn. A $1,591 toll doesn’t bother the tech executive in the hills above Silicon Valley — he’ll write the check and forget about it. It bothers the night-shift nurse, the guy who fixes air conditioners, the single mom closing up the restaurant at midnight in a rough part of town. You know — exactly the people who might actually need to defend themselves on the walk to the car.
And that’s the quiet little tell in this whole scheme. A right you can only afford if you’re rich isn’t a right. It’s a luxury good. It’s valet parking. It’s the velvet rope at a club that used to be the public square.
We’ve seen this movie before, and it didn’t end well for the people who tried it. There was a time in this country when certain Americans were told they were absolutely, constitutionally free to vote — they just had to pay a poll tax first. Pure coincidence, surely, that the tax always seemed to land hardest on the folks the people in charge least wanted showing up. We eventually passed a whole constitutional amendment to kill that trick, because the nation finally admitted you cannot put a cover charge on a right and still call it a right.
San Jose apparently skipped that chapter of the textbook. So did Sacramento County, where the number has been climbing toward the same neighborhood. So did every other blue jurisdiction quietly studying San Jose’s homework, watching to see if they can get away with charging working people fifteen hundred dollars and a stack of receipts for the privilege of carrying.
That’s the real danger here, and it’s bigger than one city’s fee schedule. Because if a $1,591 toll survives the courts, the number doesn’t stop at $1,591. Why would it? The whole appeal of pricing out a right instead of banning it is that there’s no obvious line in the sand. Eighteen hundred next budget cycle. Two grand the year after. Tack on a mandatory “psychological evaluation,” a “department-approved” training course you can only take from one vendor, a renewal toll every two years. Stack enough perfectly reasonable-sounding fees on top of each other and you’ve rebuilt the old “may-issue” wall brick by brick — except now it’s made of invoices, and the bureaucrat gets to keep his hands clean and his conscience clear because, hey, he never said no to anybody.
The courts have, to their credit, started to notice. Judges keep reminding these jurisdictions that you can’t set a fee so high it functions as a ban — that a right priced out of reach has been denied just as surely as one flatly refused. Whether San Jose’s accountants get that memo before or after the lawsuits is anybody’s guess.
But understand what’s actually happening while we wait. Every month that $1,591 stands, somebody in San Jose who wanted to protect their family decided they couldn’t swing it and went without. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the design working exactly as intended.
So the next time a politician tells you he respects the Second Amendment, that he’d never dream of banning a single gun, take him at his word. He’s not going to ban anything. He’s just going to send you the bill — and keep raising it until the right you were born with is something only the wealthy can afford to keep.
A right you have to be rich to use isn’t a right. It’s a receipt.
