SCOTUS: Hawaii’s Concealed Carry Restriction Is Unconstitutional

In a major win for gun owners, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Hawaii’s restrictions on concealed-carry permit holders violate the Second and 14th Amendments. The decision was 6-3, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the dissent.

Known as Wolford v. Lopez, the case stems from a 2023 legal challenge against Hawaii’s “vampire rule” restricting citizens with concealed carry permits from carrying on private property open to the public unless they received explicit authorization to do so from the property owner, manager, or lessee. The plaintiffs argued that the law infringed their Second Amendment rights.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito noted how the Hawaii law “severely burdens the ability to carry a firearm in much of the rest of the State by prohibiting firearms on private property without the express and affirmative consent of the property owner.” He further detailed the lengths concealed-carry holders must go to avoid violating these “severe restrictions,” which he added infringe upon their Second Amendment rights.

“When these permit holders leave home in the morning, not only must they take care to avoid all the territory where the possession of a gun is prohibited outright, but they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats,” Alito wrote. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives. We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”

[READ: SCOTUS Scolds Hawaii For ‘Relegating’ Americans’ Second Amendment Rights To ‘Second-Class Status’]

In expressing her intent to uphold Hawaii’s vampire rule, Kagan argued that it is comparable to “colonial and founding era laws that similarly prohibited carrying firearms onto private property without the owner’s affirmative consent.” She contended that both those and Hawaii’s statute “respond to the dangers and harms that someone with a gun can cause on another person’s property.”

Writing on behalf of Sotomayor and herself, Jackson authored a separate dissent arguing that the Aloha State’s law “fairly applies a first principle of property law — the right to exclude — and does no harm to the Second Amendment.” The two justices additionally claimed that the statute “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.”

“Today’s decision makes one thing clear: The Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law,” Jackson wrote.

In addition to joining Alito’s opinion in full, Justice Amy Coney Barrett authored a concurrence, which Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined in part.

The Trump appointee took to task Hawaii and the dissent’s argument that Wolford is about property law and not the Second Amendment. She furthermore chastised the Aloha State for its reliance on the Black Codes — a series of laws passed by Southern states following the Civil War to disenfranchise freed black Americans — to defend its gun control law.

“It is beyond me why Hawaii would claim that these vile laws can justify its present-day restriction,” Barrett wrote. “The Black Codes were enacted to subordinate newly freed slaves. Hawaii obviously does not contend that its law promotes an analogous interest. So its law and the default rules in the Black Codes are not ‘”relevantly similar.”‘ … Most would take that as a compliment.”

The court’s decision remands the case back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for further proceedings consistent with the majority opinion.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics and RealClearHealth. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood