Love exhausted state administrative remedies without success, and then sued in state court. The court ordered the state police to approve her application. The defendants moved to dismiss, and the district court granted the motion. Love asserts only a substantive due process claim. To win her case, Love must first have a property right in the approval of her application to purchase a handgun.
Any significant discretion conferred upon the local agency defeats the claim of a property interest.
Whether Love has a property interest under Gardner is a close call, as is whether Gardner ought to even apply outside the context of land use. The police have the power to deny the application only if it is incomplete or any information on it is false. Nonetheless, because we decide below that Love's claim fails the second prong of the substantive due process test, we will assume without deciding that Gardner does govern here and that Love has a property interest in approval of her application. Irrationality and arbitrariness imply a most stringent standard against which state action is to be measured in assessing a substantive due process claim. Here we agree with the district court that Love's claim fails.