US supreme court strikes down Hawaii’s gun restrictions in major second amendment ruling

Ruling strikes down law that bans people from carrying guns in most public spaces and private property without owner’s permission

Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

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

The decision was made in a 6-3 vote, with Justice Samuel Alito offering the majority opinion – backed by the other members of the court’s rightwing supermajority – and Ketanji Brown Jackson writing the dissent.

The closely-watched case considered the Hawaii law’s compliance with the second amendment of the US constitution, which established the right of individuals to bear arms.

“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,” wrote Alito. “We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”

At issue was a 2023 state law that barred carrying a firearm on private property without the owner’s approval and created 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 recoiled at the decision.

“I will not mince words: this deeply dangerous majority opinion privileges guns over everything and all people in society,” said Kris Brown, president of gun control advocacy group Brady. “It is eminently reasonable that visitors receive property owners’ permission to bring firearms on to their private property open to the public.

“Yet the court has manipulated a legal test of their own design to launch this attack on public safety and our freedom from gun violence. What’s more, they are thwarting the will of the people and the legislature.”

Defenders of Hawaii’s law framed the argument as a question of property rights, not gun rights.

“Hawaii’s private property law wasn’t about banning firearms,” said Billy Clark, senior litigation attorney for the Giffords Law Center. “Instead, it reflected the commonsense notion that property owners have a right to choose whether to allow firearms on their private property.”

The decision leaves state laws that block guns at some sensitive places like churches or government buildings intact. Other places like a shopping mall or grocery store must post a notice barring visitors from carrying firearms.

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

The case was brought by three Maui residents who were permitted to carry concealed firearms and the Hawaii firearms coalition. Their challenge was backed by Donald Trump’s administration.

They argued that Hawaii’s policy violates their second amendment rights and does not meet the precedent set by a watershed 2022 Bruen v New York decision that requires gun laws to be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”.

The plaintiffs also argued that law enforcement’s definition of “sensitive places” was far too broad and virtually included “all places of public congregation”, according to the complaint the plaintiffs filed against Hawaii’s attorney general.

The case was the latest to be brought before the court based on the precedent set by Bruen, which still has the potential to void many state restrictions like carrying firearms in public, or lifetime bans for people convicted of violent and non-violent crimes alike.

Along with Hawaii, four other states – New York, New Jersey, Maryland and California – adopted similar language after the Bruen decision, establishing a presumption in the law that property owners barred visitors from carrying guns. The Wolford v Lopez decision casts those laws into doubt.

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

Despite initial celebration from gun rights groups over the Bruen decision, the ruling has not led to an en masse removal of all gun policies that lack a historical twin. In the 2024 Rahimi case , the first case to follow the ruling, the majority conservative court decided to uphold a 30-year-old federal law prohibiting subjects of domestic violence restraining orders from possessing guns.

In the same term, the supreme court took up another gun case, Garland v Cargill, which led to the repeal of a ban on the sale of bump stocks, a device that allows guns to fire with a speed comparable to machine guns. The items were banned during the first Trump administration after they were used when 60 people were shot and killed during a 2017 mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas.

Unlike Rahimi, the Cargill case was not centered around the question whether bump stock bans violate the second amendment and precedent set by Bruen, but whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) overstepped with its interpretation of the federal machine gun ban.