Gun control advocates criticize ‘deeply dangerous’ US supreme court decision on Hawaii law | US supreme court

The US supreme court has struck down a restrictive gun law in the state of Hawaii that prohibited people from carrying guns in certain public spaces and on private property without the permission of the property owner.

The decision was made by a vote of 6 to 3; Justice Samuel Alito delivered the majority opinion, supported by other members of the court’s right-wing supermajority, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissenting opinion.

The closely watched case evaluated Hawaii’s law’s compliance with the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which governs the right of individuals to bear arms.

“This regime undermines what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to bear arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives,” Alito wrote. “We think the law is unconstitutional.”

At issue was a 2023 state law that bans carrying firearms on private property without the owner’s consent and creates a list of more than a dozen “sensitive places” where guns cannot be carried, such as beaches and restaurants that serve alcohol.

Gun control advocates reacted to the decision.

“I won’t mince words: This extremely dangerous majority view privileges guns over everything else and over all people in society,” said Kris Brown, president of the gun control advocacy group Brady. “It is perfectly reasonable for visitors to obtain permission from property owners to bring firearms onto private, public property.

“Yet the court manipulated a legal test of its own devising to launch this attack on public safety and our freedom from gun violence. Moreover, they are thwarting the will of the people and the legislature.”

Supporters of the Hawaii law framed the debate as an issue about property rights, not gun rights.

“Hawaii’s private property law was not about prohibiting firearms,” ​​said Billy Clark, senior trial attorney at the Giffords Law Center. “Instead, it reflected the common-sense notion that property owners have the right to choose whether to allow firearms on their private property.”

The decision leaves intact state laws that prevent the use of guns in certain sensitive places, such as churches or government buildings. Other locations, such as a mall or grocery store, must post a notice prohibiting visitors from carrying firearms.

“Fortunately, this opinion still leaves open avenues for property owners to exercise this right,” Clark said. “But ultimately this case is just another example of the court’s conservative majority pushing a ‘guns everywhere’ agenda, and it will put too many lives at risk.”

The lawsuit was filed by three Maui residents who are allowed to carry concealed firearms and the Hawaii firearms coalition. Their challenge was supported by Donald Trump’s administration.

They argued that Hawaii’s policy violated second amendment rights and did not meet precedents set by the 2022 Bruen v. New York decision, which required gun laws to be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Plaintiffs also defended He noted that the police department’s definition of “sensitive places” is very broad and effectively includes “all public meeting places.” complaint filed by plaintiffs against Hawaii’s attorney general.

The case was the last to be brought to court based on the precedent Bruen had established; This case still has the potential to invalidate many state restrictions on carrying firearms in public or lifetime bans on people convicted of both violent and nonviolent crimes.

Besides Hawaii, four other states (New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and California) adopted similar language after the Bruen decision, creating a presumption in the law that property owners prohibit visitors from carrying guns. The Wolford v. Lopez decision puts these laws in doubt.

On Wednesday, Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation, a second amendment advocacy group and law firm, said: “Our position is that one of the most fundamental principles underlying the Second Amendment is the right to be carried in public in self-defense.”

Despite initial celebrations from gun rights groups over the Bruen decision, the decision did not lead to a wholesale repeal of all gun policies that lack a historical twin. In the first case that followed the decision, the 2024 Rahimi case, the majority conservative court decided to uphold a 30-year-old federal law that bans people subjected to domestic violence from owning guns.

During the same period, the high court took up another gun case, Garland v Cargill; this case led to the lifting of the ban on the sale of stockpiles, a device that allows weapons to be fired at a speed comparable to machine guns. The items were banned during the first Trump administration after they were used in the shooting deaths of 60 people in a mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017.

Unlike Rahimi, the Cargill case did not center around the question of whether stockpiling bans violated the second amendment and precedent established by Bruen; but it centered around the question of whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had overstepped the mark in its interpretation of the federal machine gun ban.