The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Hawaii law that makes it a crime for gun owners to bring their guns onto private property that is open to the public unless they have the property owner’s specific consent. In Wolford v. Lopez, by a vote of 6-3, the with a group of Maui residents with concealed-carry permits that the law violates the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms.
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Thursday’s decision will have an impact not only in Hawaii, but also in four other states – California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey – with similar laws.
In his 24-page opinion for the court, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the law “hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dissented, countered that the law “fairly applies a first principle of property law—the right to exclude—and does no harm to the Second Amendment.”
Hawaii passed the law in 2023, just under one year after the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In Bruen, the court invalidated a New York handgun-licensing law that required state residents who wanted to carry a handgun in public to show that they had a special need to defend themselves. The court also made clear that the Second Amendment protects a broad right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense. In his for the majority in Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas emphasized that courts should uphold gun restrictions only if they are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Before Hawaii’s ban could go into effect, three Maui residents with concealed-carry permits, as well as a local gun-rights group, went to federal court to challenge the law. A federal appeals court upheld the ban, finding that there was likely “a national tradition … of prohibiting the carrying of firearms on private property without the owner’s oral or written consent.”
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The challengers then went to the Supreme Court, the justices to weigh in. The court agreed to do so in October and heard oral argument in January.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court reversed. Alito found it clear that the Hawaii law fell within “the plain text of the Second Amendment.” The key question before the court, in his view, was whether there was a history of similar regulations in early U.S. and English history. But neither Hawaii’s assertion of a “long history of antipathy to the private possession of firearms” nor its reliance on “laws that prohibited unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property” support the current Hawaii law, Alito concluded. “The gap,” he wrote, “is just too wide.”
Alito also rejected the state’s reliance on “an 1865 Louisiana statute that made it unlawful ‘for any person or persons to carry fire-arms on the premises or plantations of any citizens,’” without the owner’s consent. That law was “neither widespread nor widely accepted,” Alito contended, and in any event, it was adopted to discriminate against formerly enslaved people in the wake of the Civil War.
In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson contended that “Hawaii’s law does not implicate the Second Amendment because there is no right to carry a gun onto private property without consent (as all agree), and the Constitution does not dictate the form of that required consent.”
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