Attorney General Bondi is facing criticism from the left for deploying the Department of Justice to protect the right to keep and bear arms. The move by the department’s Civil Rights Division is being decried, per Reuters, as “a sharp departure from the department’s longstanding approach.” Yet “the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Ms. Bondi avers. It’s good to hear the point marked by America’s top law enforcement officer.

Ms. Bondi has gone so far as to create a Second Amendment Task Force within the department. She is joined in her advocacy by the new head of the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon. As an opening move, the department is launching a probe of whether the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is delaying its handling of applications for concealed-carry permits. This “pattern or practice” investigation, Reuters reports, is a first for a firearms case.

The sheriff’s office faces a lawsuit by Second Amendment advocates who object to delays of some 18 months that followed their attempts to get a concealed handgun license. Justice says it is probing whether the police are “depriving ordinary, law-abiding Californians of their Second Amendment rights,” especially in light of a recent federal court finding that supported the applicants’ claims. The sheriff’s office blames the delay on staffing problems.

“Pattern or practice” investigations have, Reuters reports, previously centered on liberal causes like allegations of “systemic constitutional abuses as a response to the police beating of Rodney King.” The investigations have generally looked into concerns like “patterns of discrimination, use of excessive force or sexual misconduct by police departments and detention facilities,” per Reuters. So it’s nice to see this kind of scrutiny being applied to Second Amendment rights. 

The justice department’s new focus suggests an awareness of the historic importance of the Second Amendment as “the palladium of the liberties of a republic,” as Justice Joseph Story once put it, “since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers.” Story added that this liberty “will generally,” even if government overreaches “are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”

The Second Amendment, in short, is the freedom that enables the defense of Americans’ other liberties. That isn’t stopping liberal critics from denouncing the DOJ’s policy shift. “This is a gross misuse of the government’s civil rights enforcement authority,” a former deputy chief of the DOJ section handling “pattern or practice” cases, Christy Lopez, says. Yet Ms. Dhillon explains why the Second Amendment can use the intervention by the DOJ.

After all, “who is protecting the Second Amendment in the federal government?” Ms. Dhillon asks. Previous GOP presidents “haven’t paid a lot of attention to affirmatively doing that,” she laments. Even after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen vindicating the right “to own and use firearms,” she adds, “city after city or state after state are eviscerating those rights,” and “mocking the Supreme Court by passing laws that make it virtually impossible.”

Cue the outrage in the liberal press. Ms. Dhillon’s “civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups,” the Guardian reports with a straight face. Yet what group in America, one could ask, has been more marginalized, overregulated, and even denigrated than those law-abiding citizens seeking to exercise their constitutionally protected right “to keep and bear Arms”?