The Supreme Court struck down Hawaii’s law requiring people carrying firearms to have the explicit permission of private property owners Thursday, ruling it violated the Second and 14th Amendments.
Shortly after the Supreme Court struck down New York’s discretionary system for issuing concealed carry permits in June 2022, Hawaii, California and other states enacted laws that imposed extensive restrictions on where permit holders could carry. The high court struck the law down in a 6-3 ruling, saying that the provision violated the Second Amendment and overturning a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
“The effect of this new rule is to impose severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the State’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit,” Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “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, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats.”
The 2nd opinion is Wolford. The court holds Hawaii’s law barring licensed concealed-carry permit holders from carrying handguns on private property open to the public without the property owner’s express authorization violates the 2nd and 14th Amendmentshttps://t.co/KVe3PlUahe
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 25, 2026
“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,” Alito continued. “We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”
The law required private property owners who wished to allow concealed carry on the premises to clearly post signs that carrying guns was allowed, leading gun-rights advocates to call them “vampire laws,” referring to legends that say that a vampire must be explicitly invited into a house or room.
Provisions from a similar law enacted by Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul were struck down on at least two occasions, once in May and once in 2024, which created a “circuit split,” a situation making it more likely for the Supreme Court to hear the case.
On June 18, the Supreme Court pared back the applicability of a federal law prohibiting marijuana users from possessing firearms in Hemadi v. United States. In the unanimous ruling upholding a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch took aim at arguments from the Department of Justice and anti-Second Amendment groups.
“The government invites us to draw an analogy between its present regulation and historical laws addressing habitual drunkards,” Gorsuch wrote in the Hemadi opinion. “Those laws, the government contends, demonstrate a tradition of firearm regulation consistent with its effort to disarm any regular user of any controlled substance without any further showing. But the government’s analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider: The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways. And faced with all these shortcomings in the government’s submission, we cannot say it has carried its conceded burden of showing its prosecution of Mr. Hemani complies with the Second Amendment.”
(DCNF)