Supreme Court strikes down Hawaii law regulating firearms possession
A divided Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a law in Hawaii that prohibited a person with a concealed carry permit from bringing a handgun onto private property open to the public without the property owner’s consent.
In Wolford v. Lopez, Justice Samuel Alito in a 6-3 decision held that the law violated the Second and 14th Amendments. Alito said the current state law, adopted after the Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen in 2022, posed several problems.
In Bruen, a divided 6-3 Court struck down a New York state law that required a person to prove a special self-protection need to carry a licensed concealed firearm outside their residence or business. Hawaii then passed a new state law in 2023, Act 52, with the property owner consent provision. Examples of such locations included bars, restaurants serving alcohol, parks, and banks, in addition to the sensitive areas defined in Bruen.
“The restrictions imposed by Hawaii’s challenged law fall within the plain text of the Second Amendment, so the law is presumptively unconstitutional,” Alito said. “To be sure, owners of establishments that are open to the public can admit or exclude persons who are carrying guns for self-defense under either the common-law rule or Hawaii’s law. But Hawaii’s shift from the common-law rule unquestionably imposes a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right recognized in Bruen.”
Under that common-law rule, Alito said, “everyone, including those lawfully carrying firearms, may enter unless expressly prohibited from doing so. By contrast, under the new Hawaii law, no one carrying a firearm may enter without the property owner’s express authorization.”
“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,” he concluded. “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.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion.
In her concurrence, Barrett said Hawaii’s law failed the second part of a test posed by Bruen. The first part of the Bruen test determines if the plain text of the Second Amendment applies to an individual’s conduct. The second part requires the government to justify a firearms regulation by showing that it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of similar regulations.
“To satisfy Bruen, Hawaii must identify historical laws that pursued an analogous goal in an analogous way. Hawaii draws two analogies: one to 18th-century antipoaching laws and the other to 19th-century laws that were mostly designed to suppress newly freed blacks. Unsurprisingly, the analogies fail,” Barrett concluded. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch joined part of her concurrence.
Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent said she believed the colonial and founding era laws cited by the state in its arguments “similarly prohibited carrying firearms onto private property without the owner’s affirmative consent.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent, argued that Hawaii’s law fell under property law. “Hawaii’s law does 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.” She also agreed with Kagan’s conclusion that enough precedent existed to meet the Bruen test. Justice Sotomayor joined Jackson’s dissent.
And for good measure, Jackson added she felt Bruen was wrongly decided but the Court misapplied the required test under Bruen. “The Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law,” she concluded.
Three individuals and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition had sued the state of Hawaii. The group alleged that Hawaii’s law conflicted with a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling in Antonyuk v. James (2024), a decision that struck down a state law like the Hawaii ban. The Ninth Circuit upheld most of the Hawaii law. The Supreme Court then accepted the case on Oct. 3, 2025, and heard arguments on Jan. 20, 2026
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.