Ninth Circuit Rules Alien Registration Requirement on Gun Form Is Constitutional, as New Survey Shows Nearly 30 Percent of Americans Now Carry Concealed

Since the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in U.S. v. Rahimi reaffirmed that Second Amendment rights have limits, lower courts have been working out exactly where those limits sit. On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit handed down one concrete answer.

What the Court Decided

In Craghtten v. United States, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel ruled that ATF Form 4473's requirement that non-citizens provide an alien registration or admission number is constitutional. The ruling was written by Judges Kenneth Lee, Gabriel Sanchez, and Holly Thomas, according to Reason's Volokh Conspiracy.

The plaintiff, Isaac Craghtten, is a Canadian-born American Indian and lawful permanent resident of the United States. He tried to buy a gun at an Idaho gun store and couldn't complete the transaction because he lacked the registration number the form requires of non-citizens.

His argument: the form's requirement impinges on his Second Amendment rights. The court's answer: no.

The panel's reasoning turns on a specific legal test. The Second Amendment, as interpreted post-Heller and post-Rahimi, bars only regulations that meaningfully constrain the right to acquire firearms. Asking someone to supply an alien registration number, the court held, does not clear that bar. The number is obtainable. The form's purpose is to verify eligibility, specifically to screen out people unlawfully present in the United States under 18 U.S.C. § 922(d)(5) and (g)(5), and to facilitate the background check Congress requires.

The panel drew a direct line to its 2024 decision in U.S. v. Manney, which held that prosecuting someone for lying on Form 4473 does not violate the Second Amendment. If making someone fill out the form at all is permissible, requiring them to fill it out accurately and completely is permissible too.

The Strongest Counterargument

Craghtten's concern is not trivial. Lawful permanent residents have full Second Amendment rights under federal law. If an administrative requirement, a form field, operates as a practical barrier for a category of otherwise-eligible people, that deserves serious consideration. A tribal member who is a Canadian citizen by birth, has legal resident status, and lives in Idaho is precisely the kind of person federal gun law is not designed to exclude. His lawyers could reasonably argue that "just get the number" is easier to say than to do, depending on the individual's documentation history.

The court acknowledged this tension but found it insufficient. Craghtten can obtain the number. The burden is administrative, not prohibitive. That conclusion seems defensible on the law as it currently stands, but the case illustrates how paperwork requirements can create real friction for legally entitled people at the margins.

Who Is Actually Carrying Guns

While courts refine the legal edges, the carrying population is growing and looks nothing like the demographic stereotype.

According to a survey conducted by McLaughlin & Associates and published last month by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), 29.8 percent of Americans now carry a concealed handgun at least occasionally. That is up from 24.3 percent in December 2024, a 5.5 percentage-point jump, according to Reason.

The racial breakdown cuts against every lazy assumption about who gun owners are. Among survey respondents who carry "always" or "most of the time": 22.5 percent of Hispanics, 19.1 percent of Black Americans, and 11.5 percent of white Americans.

Since the 2024 survey, the share of Hispanic Americans carrying at least occasionally rose from 31.2 percent to 39.4 percent. For Black Americans, it went from 31.8 percent to 41.5 percent. For white Americans, from 22.2 percent to 27.5 percent.

CPRC attributes part of this gap to urban crime environments. Black and Hispanic Americans are, on average, more likely to live in cities with higher crime rates, making the calculus around self-defense more immediate.

Permits vs. No Permits

The survey also reinforces a consistent finding on permitting. In states that require a concealed-carry permit, 25.98 percent of respondents carry at least occasionally. In constitutional-carry states, where no permit is required, that number rises to 34.19 percent. The gap is not surprising: requiring government permission to exercise a right reduces how many people exercise it.

What Comes Next

The Craghtten decision is now binding Ninth Circuit precedent. Whether Craghtten petitions for en banc review or seeks certiorari at the Supreme Court is unknown. The underlying tension—administrative paperwork requirements as applied to lawful permanent residents with full gun rights—has not been addressed by the Supreme Court directly. The Rahimi framework leaves enough interpretive room that a future challenge with a plaintiff who genuinely cannot obtain the required number could produce a different result.