Supreme Court Strikes Down Hawaii Law Limiting Guns in Businesses Open to Public

MARY CHASTAIN JUN 25, 2026 11:08 AM

The Second Amendment: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s so straightforward. Like, how do you misinterpret the meaning of the Second Amendment?

The Supreme Court struck down a law in Hawaii known as the “Vampire Rule,” which required gun permit holders to obtain a business owner’s express permission to carry their guns onto the premises.

“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,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito.

In a 6-3 vote, the majority ruled in Wolford v. Lopez that the law violated the Second and Fourteenth Amendments:

• The restrictions imposed by Hawaii’s challenged law fall within the plain text of the Second Amendment, so the law is presumptively unconstitutional.
• Hawaii’s argument that its “particular customs and laws,” Brief for Respondent 24, support the new default rule fails because the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States.
• The State’s colonial and early state law analogues consist almost entirely of laws that prohibited unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property.
• An 1893 Oregon law prohibited armed trespass on “enclosed premises,” but it is unclear whether such premises included commercial establishments open to the public. Regardless, a lone statute adopted nearly a century after the adoption of the Second Amendment and well after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment sheds little if any light on the meaning of the Second Amendment right.

New York had a similar law, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which the Supreme Court ruled against.

New York responded with new legislation to prohibit people from carrying guns into “sensitive places.”

Hawaii took the same steps:

However, gun control states piled on with long lists of “sensitive places” to constructively create a broad ban. In Hawaii, the legislature listed 15 categories of property. It also imposed a different “default rule” that said that permit holders are barred unless a property owner expressly allows them, either verbally or in writing, to enter with a weapon.A federal court in Honolulu issued a preliminary injunction in August 2023, blocking portions of the law. When the state appealed, a Ninth Circuit panel reversed the injunctions as to bars and restaurants serving alcohol as well as beaches, parks and adjacent parking areas. The panel also upheld the default rule.

“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,” explained Alito.

I love how Alito doesn’t hold back. The emphasis is mine.

“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,” blasted Alito.

*snort*

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