MINNEAPOLIS — After Carlton Johnson II carried out a mass shooting in downtown Minneapolis last week that left two people dead and multiple others injured — including two Minneapolis police officers — questions have swirled over how he received a permit to carry a gun in public in Hennepin County.

The fact that Johnson was not automatically denied a permit highlights how the state’s permit to carry laws, which were passed by the Legislature in 2003, are not uniformly vetted.

Rick Hodsdon, general counsel to the Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association, said state law requires sheriffs to review every gun permit application by using several databases to look for disqualifying criminal records and to see if an applicant has ever been civilly committed as mentally ill.

“Those are mandates,” Hodsdon said. “Beyond that, the level of digging, the level of investigation that sheriffs do varies based on resources and other levels of investigative discretion.”

Johnson’s criminal and civil history in the courts, which included violent tendencies, would not have automatically disqualified him for a gun permit. In order to deny permits to people like Johnson, county sheriffs are tasked with determining whether there is a “substantial likelihood that the applicant is a danger to self or the public.”

An annual report by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) showed that 75,782 people applied for gun permits in 2025 and 751 were denied. Of those, 129 were denied because a county sheriff deemed the person a risk to themselves or the public. Five were in Hennepin County.

Hodsdon said in smaller counties, a sheriff would have an easier time knowing individuals are in the community who arguably shouldn’t have a gun permit, even if they’re not automatically disqualified from having it.

“Across the state you’re going to see a varying level of depth of how deeply sheriffs can and do dive into these behavioral issues,” Hodsdon said. “I’ve got some counties, small rural counties, where there’s only maybe 100, 200 permits in the whole county.”

At the start of 2026, there were 49,314 active permits to carry in Hennepin County.

A person familiar with Johnson’s gun permit application said he was given a new permit this year and it was flagged for review inside the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. That review found the application lawful.

In a statement, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office said its discretion “cannot be used as an end run around established legal criteria for issuing permits.”

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher said that his office would have denied Johnson’s permit because of his court record, and the data supports the argument that his office is the most aggressive in the state for investigating questionable applicants.

Last year, Ramsey County denied 68 applicants because they were deemed a danger to themselves or the public. No other county in the state denied more than 10.

“In Ramsey we deny these types on a regular basis,” Fletcher said, adding that his office had denied 77 applicants this year for that same reason. “The sheriff has a duty to determine whether or not (the applicant is) a danger to himself or others. They have a right to appeal and then we go to a judge and a judge decides that.”

Rob Doar, a defense attorney and president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center, said when Minnesota’s permit to carry law was passed, county sheriffs fought to be able to deny gun permits based on investigations outside of background checks. The only risk is that if a judge determines the denial was inappropriate, the sheriff has to pay the applicant’s legal fees.

Each permit application costs $100 and $10 of that goes to a state fund, Hodsdon said. The amount of money each county pays to process gun permits is dependent on staffing and expenses. Last year, Hennepin County received $785,000 in gun permit fees and spent $975,000 processing applications.

Johnson’s court history includes a litany of red flags that, in the wake of his killings, look like missed opportunities to disarm him.

A harassment restraining order was granted against him in 2023 after allegations that he had sexually assaulted and threatened to kill the mother of his daughter were deemed credible, but it expired in 2025. Also in 2023, he was pulled over with an open marijuana container in his car; if he had been convicted he would have been prohibited from a gun permit, but the charge was dismissed in a plea deal.

In 2018, his sister alleged that during an assault he said he had a gun and wasn’t afraid to shoot people in the face, but the domestic assault charge was dismissed. Over a decade ago, he had been barred from owning a firearm for two years because he violated a domestic abuse no contact order, but that restriction had long ago expired.

“The threats from 2023 are what you would deny it on,” Fletcher said.

The fact that Johnson was under an active criminal investigation by the Minneapolis Police Department and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office has also come under criticism.

“There were numerous opportunities that any government official could have utilized to try and disarm this individual,” Doar said. “Our perspective is that these laws should be utilized before looking at more gun control measures to try and prevent these things.”

A resident of Shoreline Plaza filed a police report after Johnson allegedly threatened him with a gun. Two months passed between when the resident filed the report and MPD turned it over to the County Attorney’s Office for criminal charges. No charging decision was made in the two weeks between that exchange and Johnson carrying out his mass shooting.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said last week that her office was going to decline the charge because Johnson had a permit to carry his gun and hadn’t removed it from his waistband. Her office also declined to pursue an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) against Johnson, which would have given law enforcement the ability to take his guns if he was deemed a risk to himself or the public.

Moriarty’s office has been aggressive in its filing of ERPOs and its promotion of them as a crucial public safety mechanism, but said it found “insufficient evidence” in Johnson’s case file.

Doar found that argument lacking.

“The Extreme Risk Protection Order would have been a rather easy determination,” he said. “I know there are plenty of cities or county attorneys that if they saw somebody was wandering around threatening to shoot people, they would do a red flag on them.”

One day after the resident filed the police report against Johnson over his alleged threats in June, he also filed a petition for a harassment restraining order alleging Johnson had threatened him with a handgun. The restraining order asked that Johnson be kept from blocking the entrance and exits to the building and stay away from the 10th floor of the apartment complex.

The Shoreline Plaza was also trying to evict Johnson and argued part of the reason was over his displaying of firearms and threatening behavior. Johnson fought that eviction and argued in court that state law does not prohibit someone from carrying their permitted firearm in a public space of their residence.

Fletcher said it was easy to see a path where different law enforcement decisions could have stopped Johnson before the shooting if he was never granted a permit to carry.

“He would have been arrested for a gross misdemeanor or maybe the threats would have been a felony,” Fletcher said.

When the state Legislature made it easier to carry a gun in public in 2003, there were 12,000 active gun permits in Minnesota. Opponents worried that number could jump exponentially with the law change. In March of this year, there were 375,551 active permits in the state, or around 8.5% of the adult population in Minnesota.

Last year 5,467 crimes were committed by individuals with a gun permit, the highest number since 2003, though the BCA noted that was still just about 1% of permit holders.

While both Hodsdon and Doar argued that Johnson could have carried out a violent act regardless of whether or not he had a permit to carry, Fletcher said those arguments are inconsequential.

“We have to learn from this,” he said.

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