The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in Wolford v. Lopez, a case that will determine whether the nation’s highest court is serious about its Second Amendment precedents. The matter is simple. Hawaii passed a law that, in practice, prohibits the state’s concealed carry permit holders from exercising their right to armed self-defense in virtually any location outside of their homes. Hawaii knows well that this law violates both the spirit and letter of Bruen v. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, the Supreme Court’s 2022 landmark case on public carry. It just does not care.  

Now, the state should brace itself for a more-than-deserved judicial head-bopping. 

Hawaii has long resisted so much as acknowledging that the Second Amendment applies within its borders. This resistance is often aided and abetted by the Supreme Court of Hawaii (which once invoked, I’m not kidding, the “Spirit of Aloha” as a legitimate reason for restricting the right to keep and bear arms) and by the 9th Circuit (which notoriously struggles to find any gun control measure restrictive enough to run afoul of the Constitution).

In Bruen, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that reserved concealed carry permits only for those lucky few applicants who could convince the government they had an extraordinary need to protect themselves with firearms outside the home. In doing so, the court affirmed that ordinary citizens have a right to bear handguns in public for self-defense.

Bruen both implicitly and explicitly implicated........

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