In a party-line ruling, the Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii gun law that required gun owners to obtain permission from the owner or manager of private businesses before bringing a firearm onto that property. The decision turns on the Court’s 2022 framework
On Thursday. the Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii gun law in a decision that folded into the Court’s sharply divided Second Amendment track record—and left one core question hanging over the ruling: how much historical similarity is enough. and what happens when the Court finds the wrong kind of history.
The case was Wolford v. Lopez. The ruling was decided along party lines. The Republican justices agreed with the Republican position that gun regulations are bad, while the Democratic justices agreed with the Democratic position that gun regulations are good.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito relied heavily on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). Bruen is widely criticized not only by its opponents, but also within the federal judiciary itself. In a 2024 dissent. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions—including some authored by Donald Trump appointees—that warned judges cannot figure out how Bruen is supposed to work.
Bruen’s approach. as described in the dissenting discussion. asks judges hearing Second Amendment disputes to determine whether a modern gun law is “relevantly similar” to a law that existed when the Constitution was written. The Court has offered little guidance on what “relevantly similar” means in practice. In Alito’s opinion in Wolford, the majority is said to have offered only limited clarification.
A large part of Alito’s opinion is devoted to revisiting earlier Second Amendment decisions and criticizing Hawaii for enacting many restrictions on gun owners. But the opinion’s most consequential move—what it does with the historical comparison required by Bruen—is described as coming up short. Alito is said to have spent six pages on whether the law at issue in Wolford was similar to an old law. and about three pages on Hawaii’s strongest argument.
Hawaii, however, identified four early American laws that it argued were exceedingly similar to its own. The majority dismissed those four laws.
The Hawaii law at the center of Wolford is an aggressive regulation. critics say. because it requires gun owners to get explicit permission from a private business’s owner or manager before bringing a gun onto that business’s property. The practical effect. according to the description of how the law operates. is that it bars guns from nearly all bars. restaurants. shops. gas stations. and other places of business—because few people are expected to enter a property unarmed. locate a manager. obtain permission to carry a firearm. and then go retrieve their weapon.
For the Republican justices, striking down an expansive restriction on gun possession fits with their reading of Bruen, which had struck down a New York state law that barred most people from carrying guns in public.
But Wolford posed a problem for those justices. at least as the ruling is framed here: while Hawaii’s law was aggressive. it was also said to be very similar to four laws enacted around the time of the founding. As Alito acknowledges. Maryland. Pennsylvania. New Jersey. and New York all had laws in the 1700s making it illegal to “carry any gun or hunt on the improved or inclosed lands of any plantation. other than his own. ” without securing “license or permission from the owner of such lands or plantation.”.
Alito downplayed the similarities by arguing the older laws were meant to prohibit “unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property,” and therefore were different from Hawaii’s law, which was not focused on hunting deer at hotels and gas stations.
In dissent, Justice Jackson pointed to a wider set of motives described in the historical laws. She quoted New York’s 1763 law. which stated it was enacted to avoid the “great Danger of the Lives of his Majesty’s Subjects. the Ruin and Destruction of the most valuable Improvements. the grievous Injury of the Proprietors. and the great Discouragement of their Industry.”.
The tension doesn’t stop there. The Wolford decision is also said to be in conflict with the Supreme Court’s only post-Bruen decision upholding a gun law: United States v. Rahimi (2024). Rahimi involved a federal statute barring people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing a gun. In upholding that law. the Court reasoned that the modern regulation was sufficiently similar to founding-era laws requiring “individuals suspected of future misbehavior to post a bond. ” money that would be forfeited if they “broke the peace.”.
As described here. Rahimi asked the Court to decide whether a narrow and sensible federal gun restriction—preventing people a court had already determined were violent from carrying guns—should stand. The Court upheld it by pointing to a founding-era law described as having little to do with firearms.
Wolford, by contrast, struck down a broader gun regulation despite four states having enacted nearly identical laws in the 1700s. With those two cases side by side. the critique is that it becomes hard to argue the Republican justices are applying Bruen’s history-based framework in good faith—especially since the argument is that Hawaii had a stronger case under Bruen than the federal government did in Rahimi.
Under the Bruen framework, the description argues, it is difficult to see how any gun control law that Republicans oppose would survive. In this view, Wolford eliminates lingering doubt that the historical research required by Bruen does not truly drive the Court’s decisionmaking.
The result is a ruling that not only ends a Hawaii gun law requiring permission from private property owners or managers, but also deepens the controversy over Bruen itself—and raises the question of whether the Court should revisit the framework that now governs how these cases are decided.
The argument accompanying the decision is blunt: the Court should stop “embarrassing itself” with Second Amendment rulings that. in this telling. cannot be taken seriously. and should overrule Bruen. The claim is that justices are not deciding based on whether new laws resemble old ones. The conclusion, in turn, is that the Court should “scrap Bruen” and be honest about what actually drives its outcomes.
Supreme Court Wolford v. Lopez Hawaii gun law Second Amendment Bruen Ketanji Brown Jackson Samuel Alito United States v. Rahimi domestic violence restraining orders