https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/supreme-court-strikes-hawaii-gun-restriction/

Opinion Analysis

Supreme Court strikes down Hawaii gun restriction

amy-howe thumbnail

By

Amy Howe

Jun 25, 2026

Top of Supreme Court building

(Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Updated on June 25 at 1:25 p.m.

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 justices agreed 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.

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 opinion 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.”

The challengers then went to the Supreme Court, asking 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” and was therefore “presumptively unconstitutional.” “No party,” he wrote, “disputes that” the challengers in the case “are among ‘the people’ protected by the Second Amendment or that they seek to ‘bear,’ i.e., to carry, ‘arms.’” Alito stressed that the Hawaii law “unquestionably imposed a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right” to bear arms.

He acknowledged that under the Hawaii law, property owners can still “admit or exclude” gun owners “who are carrying guns for self-defense.” But the difference between the Hawaii law and the default rule elsewhere in the country – that gun owners with concealed-carry permits can enter private property open to the public “unless expressly prohibited from doing so” – “will determine where carry-permit holders may lawfully carry firearms,” Alito said, when “the owner either pays no attention or does not care about such issues.”

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. Alito first rejected Hawaii’s contention that, “whatever the situation in other parts of the country, in Hawaii, opening private property to the public” does not give permission to bring a gun onto that property. Alito countered that “the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” where there is “‘overwhelming evidence’” of “an ‘enduring American tradition permitting public carry.’”

Alito next rebuffed Hawaii’s efforts to rely on a group of 18th-century laws that Alito characterized as prohibiting “unauthorized hunting … on someone else’s private property.” Such laws, Alito said, were simply too different from Hawaii’s law, because they did not affect “the Second Amendment’s central objective” of “protecting the fundamental right to self-defense.” Instead, he wrote, they were intended to “prevent the distinctive harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting.”

Alito also strongly spurned 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, calling it “remarkable.” That law was “neither widespread nor widely accepted,” Alito contended, and in any event, it was adopted as part of the “so-called Black Codes” to discriminate against formerly enslaved people in the wake of the Civil War. “Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously.”

In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson contended that the majority was asking the wrong question. In her view, “Hawaii’s law does not implicate the Second Amendment because” “[t]here is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission, let alone with a firearm.” The question before the justices, therefore, Jackson wrote, is “merely how a property owner must communicate his decision to exclude or to invite armed carry, including whether a State may alter the background property-law rules that set the default as one or the other. The Second Amendment has nothing to say about that.”

Even if the Second Amendment did apply, Jackson continued, the early American laws that Hawaii offers meet the test outlined by the court in Bruen because they “demonstrate a tradition of state regulation within which Hawaii’s law fits comfortably. Like Hawaii’s,” Jackson said, “these laws required consent for armed entry onto private property open to the public. And like Hawaii’s, they did so to protect property owners’ rights and to prevent the harms that generally accompanied unauthorized armed entry onto private land.”

Jackson, who joined the court after its decision in Bruen, reiterated her view that the case “was wrongly decided.” But in any event, she said, “the Court has now manipulated Bruen into a free-for-all that lets the Judiciary thwart the will of legislatures by privileging access to firearms above all else. Today’s decision makes one thing clear: The Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion, joined in part by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, in which she pushed back against Jackson’s insistence that property law, rather than the Second Amendment, is at the core of the dispute. She contended that Jackson’s argument “misunderstands the role of historical evidence in a Second Amendment challenge.” For purposes of determining whether the Second Amendment is implicated at all, Barrett wrote, it does not matter “that a property owner has the right to exclude anyone who wishes to enter her property with firearms. No one doubts that all property owners in Hawaii could bar the carry of arms on their respective premises, if they wanted to.” But, Barrett continued, “the Second Amendment does not apply to private parties. It does apply to the States. And when a State enacts a property law that regulates arms-bearing conduct, that law implicates the Second Amendment.”

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a brief dissenting opinion of her own. In her view, the court could have upheld the Hawaii law “because … it is a modern-day analogue of colonial and founding era laws that similarly prohibited carrying firearms onto private property without the owner’s affirmative consent.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877512&forum_id=2).#49963544)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877512&forum_id=2).#49963551)