The U.S. Supreme Court recently granted a petition for certiorari in a challenge to Hawaii’s law forbidding carry on private property open to the public without the property owner’s express consent.
The NRA had filed an amicus brief in the case earlier this year, urging the court to hear the case, titled Wolford v. Lopez. The brief argues that Hawaii’s law was deliberately designed to make it so difficult and impractical to carry that citizens would choose not to do so. It also explains that there is no historical tradition supporting this ban.
“Individuals who have gone through the trouble of getting a concealed carry permit (‘CCW’) will be limited to carrying on some streets and sidewalks, in banks, and in certain parking lots. Everything else is off limits—including 96.4% of the publicly accessible land in Maui County,” reads the brief.
Hawaii’s ban on carrying in such places was put in place after the NRA’s landmark victory in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which affirmed the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense and invalidated New York’s “may-issue” concealed carry permitting scheme.. Hawaii responded by turning upside down the presumption that carry is authorized on publicly accessible private property where the owner has not acted to ban it. This includes places like restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores and more. Under Hawaii’s statute, such places are off-limits to carry unless express permission is given by the property owner to concealed carry licensees.
Hawaii isn’t alone in enacting restrictions on carry on private property in attempts to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling. States like New Jersey and New York have implemented similar restrictions, only to see them invalidated by federal appellate courts in those jurisdictions.
But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Hawaii’s law.
“Bruen changed nothing for the Ninth Circuit, and the Wolford ruling is not even the most recent example of that court giving ‘a judicial middle finger to’ this Court,” reads the NRA’s amicus brief. “So brazen has the Ninth Circuit’s defiance become that even when the Wolford panel disgracefully relied on a racist Black Code to justify Hawaii’s law, the Ninth Circuit refused to correct it, denying en banc review over the dissents of eight judges.”
The NRA was joined on the brief by the Second Amendment Law Center, the California Rifle & Pistol Association, the Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, the Hawaii Rifle Association, Gun Owners of California, the Second Amendment Defense and Education Coalition, the Federal Firearms Licensees of Illinois, the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus and Operation Blazing Sword-Pink Pistols.
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