On Thursday, June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Wolford v. Lopez, a case concerning citizens’ rights to carry firearms in the state of Hawaii. The court struck down a Hawaii law that sought to prohibit people from carrying concealed firearms unless the property owners had clear signage expressly allowing guns on the premises. The court ruled this violates citizens’ Second Amendment rights.
Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, noted that all other states presume legal firearms are allowed on private property, but this law “flips the presumption about private property.” Establishments have always been able to refuse armed customers. However, instead of requiring businesses to post signs stating their intolerance of certain people, the Hawaii law states that, instead, all businesses that want to allow guns on their premises need to put up the signs. The law switches the status quo from allowing firearms in all public spaces by default to banning them by default if there is no express signage. In reality, this law would have led to a loss of rights for people who routinely conceal and carry to continue with normal everyday errands. “Essentially what this did was eviscerate the right to bear arms in public,” Swearer noted.
Justice Samuel Alito and five other justices saw this unconstitutional problem with the law as well. The decision in Wolford v. Lopez was ruled 6-3 in favor of the Maui petitioners on the grounds that the law violated a myriad of constitutional rights.
In the majority opinion, Alito ruled that requiring people to carry only with the owner’s express affirmative permission violates a citizen’s Second and Fourteenth Amendment rights. He began the court’s opinion by arguing that no one can dispute the three petitioners counted as “people” under the vocabulary of the Second Amendment, and that their desire in this situation was to “bear arms.” Additionally, cases such as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen have set precedents for requiring states to stay consistent with previously applied gun laws in the country. And finally, Alito noted that trying to equate laws that restrict hunting in certain areas to gun control prohibition in everyday spaces was an unfair comparison.
Hawaii defended the law by appealing to “the spirit of Aloha,” which was also cited in a previous case in 2024, State v. Wilson. In that case, Hawaii argued, “The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities.” In other words, the state argued that Hawaiian culture should protect them from laws that safeguard citizens’ right to bear arms. The decision of the court in Wolford v. Lopez to uphold the Second Amendment shows that a “spirit” of a certain state’s tradition and culture does not permit special treatment under the U.S. Constitution. As the opinion attests, “The Second Amendment cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii … any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald). Merely local attitudes can neither shrink nor inflate the meaning of fundamental Bill of Rights guarantees that apply to the States.”
This case’s new precedent will directly affect other similar firearm restriction laws in states like California, New York, and New Jersey. Unconstitutional gun regulations are not just a Hawaii problem; the Supreme Court is watching the entire country.
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