SCOTUS Strikes Hawaii Gun-Free Default

The Supreme Court ruled today that Hawaii can't slap a default "no guns allowed" presumption on every business open to the public.

State of play: In Wolford v. Lopez, a 6-3 Court struck down a Hawaii statute that barred anyone carrying a firearm from entering private property "held open to the public" unless they got specific, express permission from the owner first. Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion. The vote split along the Court's usual ideological lines, with Justices Jackson and Sotomayor dissenting.

The legal question: Hawaii argued the law wasn't really a gun restriction at all — it just tweaked the default rules of trespass law, since property owners can already exclude whoever they want. Justice Jackson's dissent leaned hard on that framing, calling it a vindication of property rights rather than a burden on the Second Amendment.

The majority didn't buy it, and neither did Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a concurrence that cut straight to the point: if a state passed a law banning hijabs from private property without the owner's express say-so, nobody would call that religiously neutral. Singling out a constitutional right for a presumption of exclusion is a burden on that right, full stop — you can't launder it through property law and call it something else.

Between the lines: A big chunk of the fight was over the Court's Bruen "history and tradition" test — whether Hawaii's law resembles historical gun regulations closely enough to survive. The majority said no, pointing out that old analogues (like poaching laws) were far narrower in scope and purpose. Jackson pushed back by citing the post-Civil War Black Codes, which disarmed freed Black Americans, as part of the relevant historical tradition.

That argument didn't land, and it shouldn't have. Laws designed to strip guns from a targeted minority were themselves unconstitutional — you can't use an unconstitutional law as a legal blueprint for a modern one. As legal scholars have noted since the ruling, if defending a law requires comparing it favorably to the Black Codes, that's a pretty good sign the law needed to go.

Yes, but: This case is also fresh ammunition for critics of the Bruen test itself. Even the majority and dissent here couldn't agree on which historical laws actually count as valid analogues — which suggests the test is loose enough to be argued either direction depending on who's holding the gavel. A text-and-original-meaning approach would have made this an easier call from the start: a blanket presumption against carrying anywhere open to the public, regardless of gun type or owner conduct, is about as severe a burden on the right to "bear" arms as a law can impose.

What to watch: Other states with similar "default exclusion" carry laws on private property open to the public should expect challenges soon. The ruling doesn't touch a property owner's right to post "no guns" signs and enforce them — it just kills the idea that the state can flip that switch by default for everyone.

The bottom line: Property owners still call the shots on their own land. States don't get to write the rulebook so the answer is always no.