A California City Turned a $100 Gun Permit Into a $2,106 One — And Volunteered for the Next Lawsuit.

A year ago, a concealed-carry permit in Glendale, California, cost $100. Today, per the city’s own police department website, a new application runs $1,078— a 978 percent increase — and a renewal costs $828. Layer on the mandatory training course, the Live Scan fingerprinting, and the psychological evaluation the city also requires, and the Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed the real out-of-pocket total comes to at least $2,106.

Glendale did not announce this with a press release or a headline vote. It surfaced when Kostas Moros, the Second Amendment Foundation’s director of legal research and education, flagged the new pricing on X on August 14, 2026 — noting the total now runs higher than Santa Clara County, which is already being sued in federal court over its own permit fees. Gun-rights lawyers have a name for what a city does when it prices a constitutional right this far out of reach: an invitation.

This is a governance story as much as a gun story. California shifted to a “shall issue” permitting system after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, which also warned that exorbitant fees could turn even a shall-issue law into a de facto ban. Glendale is only the latest California city or county to test that warning — and it is doing so with a fee schedule no one had to defend on the record.

• $100 → $1,078 — Glendale's concealed-carry application fee, then vs. now — a 978% jump in about a year · Source: Daily Caller; Bearing Arms
• $828 — Glendale's renewal fee, up from the same flat $100 rate · Source: Bearing Arms; Kostas Moros (X)
• $2,106+ — total confirmed out-of-pocket cost once training, Live Scan fingerprinting, and a psychological evaluation are added · Source: Daily Caller News Foundation
• $976 — Santa Clara County's own CCW application fee (up from $662 in January 2026) — now the subject of a federal lawsuit · Source: San José Spotlight; SAF
• $20–$90 — the same permit's application fee in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, under the same state law · Source: Bearing Arms
• Sept. 22, 2025 — SAF and CRPA sued Santa Clara County's sheriff over its fee structure in Blank v. Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department, still pending in federal court · Source: SAF; AmmoLand

Glendale is a city of roughly 197,000 people in the Los Angeles basin, home to one of the largest Armenian-American communities in the country and, until this year, an unremarkable place to apply for a concealed-carry permit. As of last year, the Glendale Police Department charged $100 for a concealed-carry license, new or renewal, in line with what most California jurisdictions outside the Bay Area still charge. Sometime over the past year, that changed: the department’s own CCW application page now lists $1,078 for a new permit and $828 to renew one.

Those figures are the application fee alone. California’s statewide post-Bruen permitting law, SB 2, already requires a 16-hour training course and Live Scan fingerprinting for every applicant. Glendale, like Santa Clara County, additionally requires a psychological evaluation the state does not mandate. Add the training course, the fingerprinting, and the psych exam to the new application fee, and the Daily Caller News Foundation — which confirmed the pricing directly against the city’s listed figures and standard local vendor rates — put the real total at $2,106 or more. Nothing about the increase appears to have run through a headline city council vote; it surfaced only because a gun-rights attorney happened to check the fee page.

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Glendale is not an outlier so much as the newest entry on a growing list. Santa Clara County raised its own application fee from $662 to $976 in a January 2026 Board of Supervisors vote, and when its mandatory psychological exam, training course, and fingerprinting are added, the Second Amendment Foundation puts the real cost at up to $2,000. San Jose charges $1,591 for a new permit as of July 1, 2026, though its $25 renewal fee is a fraction of the county’s $477. Drive two hours east or south, and the same state-mandated permit costs $90 in San Bernardino County and $20 in Riverside County.

That gap is the entire legal argument. The Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen struck down New York’s discretionary permitting regime and required states to issue carry permits to qualified applicants — but the Court also flagged that lengthy processing delays and exorbitant fees could still render a nominally “shall issue” system unconstitutional in practice. Gun-rights groups argue that is exactly what a small number of Democratic-run California counties and cities are now testing: instead of denying permits outright, price them out of reach for most working residents.

Glendale does not yet face a filed lawsuit over its new fee schedule — but the legal template for one already exists, and it is aimed at a lower price tag. On September 22, 2025, the Second Amendment Foundation and the California Rifle & Pistol Association sued the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department in Blank v. Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California before Judge Edward J. Davila. CRPA calls its broader campaign against high-fee jurisdictions the “CCW Reckoning Project” — an explicit effort to force California localities that resisted Bruen back into line, one lawsuit at a time.

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“By imposing such high licensing fees for a CCW permit application and mandating psychological testing without good cause, Santa Clara County is merely substituting an unconstitutional wealth qualification for a corrupt political patronage scheme that has the effect of suppressing its residents' Second Amendment rights.”

Alan M. Gottlieb, Second Amendment Foundation founder — statement on the Santa Clara County lawsuit

The Santa Clara case is not the only federal action California’s permit practices have drawn. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and SAF separately sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Sheriff Robert Luna over processing delays that plaintiffs said amounted to a “pattern or practice” of violating Second Amendment rights, a case gun-rights advocates declared a win on in August 2026. Bearing Arms’ Cam Edwards, reviewing Glendale’s new numbers, called the fee “a 21st century poll tax on the right to keep and bear arms” and predicted “there will be a legal challenge to this fee fiasco.” Given that a lower fee just two counties over already drew federal litigation, that is not a difficult prediction to credit.

Glendale’s city charter makes its five-member council officially nonpartisan, and Civic Intelligence found no public roll-call vote specifically on the CCW fee line item — the increase appears in the police department’s routine cost-recovery fee listing rather than in a standalone ordinance the council debated on camera. That absence of a visible vote is itself part of the story: a fee increase of nearly 1,000 percent on a constitutional right took effect without the kind of public accounting a tax increase of similar size would draw. Glendale sits in Los Angeles County, which Kamala Harris carried 63 percent to 34 percent over Donald Trump in 2024 — the same county whose sheriff’s department just settled a federal lawsuit over how it handles the identical permit.

A California city took a $100 permit fee to $1,078 — and to more than $2,100 once the state and local add-ons are counted — without a headline vote, a press release, or, so far, a courtroom to defend it in. Two counties away, a lower fee is already the subject of a federal lawsuit arguing that price tags this size function as a wealth test on a constitutional right. Whatever a reader thinks of gun policy generally, the accountability gap here is plain: a fee increase of nearly 1,000 percent moved through city government with less public scrutiny than a routine parking-fine adjustment would draw. We will update this page if Glendale is sued, if the fee is revised, or if the Santa Clara case sets a precedent that reaches it.

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Last updated August 17, 2026