On December 16, 2025, the DOJ Civil Rights Division — under Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon — walked into the District Court of the U.S. Virgin Islands and filed an affirmative civil-rights lawsuit against the Government of the Virgin Islands, the Virgin Islands Police Department, and Commissioner Mario M. Brooks. The target is 23 V.I.C. § 454(3), the territory’s “proper reason” carry-permit provision, plus an administrative practice conditioning a permit on a bolted-in gun safe, a warrantless home inspection, and indefinite processing delays. This is the second affirmative Second Amendment lawsuit out of the new DOJ 2A Section. The first was the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s CCW suit. The second is in a U.S. territory whose appeals run straight to the Third Circuit. That is not a coincidence.
A “Proper Reason” Statute That Is Bruen on a Tee
23 V.I.C. § 454(3) conditions a carry license on the applicant satisfying the Commissioner of a “proper reason for carrying a firearm.” Read that sentence again. Then read the New York statute the Supreme Court struck down in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022) — which required an applicant to demonstrate “proper cause” to obtain an unrestricted carry license. The Virgin Islands kept its near-identical language on the books for three and a half years after Bruen came down. The DOJ press release does not mince words: VIPD “continues to enforce a proper cause regulation nearly identical to the law that the U.S. Supreme Court previously struck down” in Bruen.
This is exactly the kind of outlier the new DOJ 2A Section was built to hit. A territory that quietly kept a “proper reason” gatekeeper after the Supreme Court erased “proper cause” is not a hard case — it is low-hanging fruit. And it gives the Third Circuit, which is already chewing on the New Jersey AR-15 ban en banc, another aligned vehicle to build Second Amendment precedent.
Bolted Safes, Warrantless Searches, and the Heller Ready-Access Rule
The second prong of the complaint is the one I find the most legally interesting: the unconstitutional-conditions theory. VIPD, as a matter of administrative practice, has been requiring applicants to consent to a warrantless inspection of their home and to buy and install a bolted-down gun safe as the price of a carry license. From paragraph forty-something of the complaint:
The systematic practice by all three Virgin Islands defendants of requiring applicants to consent to unreasonable warrantless searches of their homes and to spend money to purchase and install safes has deprived and continues to deprive law-abiding citizens… by unconstitutionally conditioning the grant of a license to possess or carry a firearm on a waiver of a constitutional right to be free from unreasonable warrantless searches of their dwellings.
That is the unconstitutional-conditions doctrine doing real work. The government cannot force you to surrender one constitutional right as the price of exercising another. If my town said, “Sure, build that barn — but waive your First Amendment right to ever criticize the town council again,” every lawyer in the country would call it out instantly. This is the same architecture, applied to the Second and Fourth Amendments at once.
Then there is the bolted-safe condition itself. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), is explicit that a safe-storage rule that blocks ready access to a firearm for self-defense is unconstitutional. If seconds count and the police are minutes away, then bolting your firearm into a safe — as a precondition of being licensed at all — collides head-on with Heller’s ready-access holding. The DOJ flagged both points, and on my read both are winning arguments.
Licenses Delayed, Rights Denied
The third prong is delay, and this is the prong I have been writing about all year. My recent law-review article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy — Licenses Delayed, Rights Denied: How Contemporary Firearms Licensing Regimes Continue to Violate the Second Amendment — argues that bureaucratic choke points are the new front line. Bruen expressly left the door open: a licensing regime that takes too much time or too much money to navigate can itself violate the Second Amendment. The complaint hits that doorway dead-on, alleging at paragraph 47 a “coordinated effort… to nullify through unconstitutional bureaucratic barriers a right that the Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly recognized,” including failures to provide reasonable processing times, meaningful status notice, and timely annual inspections.
If you read my article and then read the complaint side by side, the framing maps almost one-for-one. Whether the DOJ lawyers were watching the Four Boxes Diner or simply running the same Bruen-derived playbook, they have figured out that delay is denial — and they are saying so in federal court.
The Bigger DOJ 2A Strategy
Step back and the pattern is unmistakable. The DOJ 2A Section sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff over CCW processing. It just sued the Virgin Islands over a “proper reason” statute and home-inspection conditions. It filed amicus briefs and showed up for argument in Barnett v. Raoul at the Seventh Circuit against the Illinois AR-15 and magazine ban. It filed an amicus brief in the consolidated New Jersey appeals — Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs and Cheeseman — against the New Jersey AR-15 ban, now en banc at the Third Circuit.
The through-line is laser focus on outlier state and territorial laws. My read is that this DOJ has correctly assessed the swing votes on the current Supreme Court — Chief Justice Roberts and, to a lesser degree, Justice Kavanaugh — and concluded that those votes are far more available to strike down a rogue state law than a longstanding federal one. That tracks the wins we already have: Bruen (New York), Heller (D.C.), McDonald (Chicago), Caetano (Massachusetts). And it contrasts with United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. 680 (2024), where the Court upheld 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8) — the domestic-violence restraining-order subsection, specifically — on a facial basis. State outliers fall. Federal statutes survive. The DOJ has read the room.
What This Means for Every May-Issue Holdout Left
For the remaining may-issue jurisdictions that have been slow-walking Bruen compliance, the message is now explicit: the federal government will sue you. The Virgin Islands is the test case, the Third Circuit is the runway, and the AR-15 fight is the bigger prize coming behind it. Outlier licensing regimes are next.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.