“Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears” is a blog series documenting the harmful impact of President Trump’s judges on Americans’ rights and liberties. It includes judges nominated in both his first and second terms.
What’s at stake in this case?
Wolford v. Lopez is the latest Supreme Court case where a state’s reasonable effort to address gun violence fell to the far-right’s continuing and dangerous transformation of the Second Amendment.
What happened in this case?
The Hawaii law being challenged in this case involves property rights. It sets a default assumption that you can’t carry weapons onto someone else’s property without permission. That includes places like shopping malls, restaurants, hotels, and parking garages, which are generally held open for access by the general public.
That part of the law was challenged under the 2022 Bruen case, which severely weakened the ability of states and cities to set reasonable restrictions on firearms. In Second Amendment challenges to gun safety laws, judges can no longer balance the individual’s right to own and carry firearms with the urgent need to prevent gun violence. Instead, under Bruen, judges can only uphold a firearms regulation if a comparable law existed at the time the Second or Fourteenth Amendments were adopted.
The Ninth Circuit upheld the law under that test, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.
How did the Trump justices rule?
In a 6-3 decision made possible by all three Trump justices, the Court reversed the Ninth Circuit and struck the Hawaii law down. Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by the other MAGA justices: Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
Alito wrote that the Hawaii law imposes a new and significant burden on people who want to carry weapons with them in areas open to the general public. And he found ways to distinguish the founding-era laws from today’s. For instance, he wrote that colonial and early American laws banning poaching were irrelevant, because they didn’t involve retail establishments and didn’t implicate the right to self-defense.
What did the dissenting justices say?
Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson dissented. Kagan explained how the Hawaii law is a modern-day analogue to founding-era laws that prohibited the carrying of weapons onto someone else’s property without their consent. She wrote that it didn’t matter that those old laws were passed to address poaching, because both sets of laws share the same principle: addressing the harms that occurs when someone carries guns onto another person’s land without permission.
Justice Jackson (joined by Justice Sotomayor) wrote a dissent that made the same point. But she also went further. She wrote that Bruen shouldn’t even be relevant to this case. She pointed out that there has never been a constitutional right to bring firearms onto someone else’s property without their permission. Since the Hawaii law doesn’t implicate the constitutional right to bear arms (as defined by Bruen), there isn’t even a need to take the next step and find historical analogues. She accused the majority of changing the right to bear arms into a right to do whatever one wants with one’s firearm.
Jackson didn’t mince words:
Today’s decision makes one thing clear: The Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law.
Why is the result harmful?
The current Supreme Court majority has again demonstrated its hostility to laws that seek to effectively address gun violence. The case shows the importance of having fair-minded judges who protect the rights and safety of all people.