{"id":495,"date":"2026-06-25T16:39:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T16:39:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=495"},"modified":"2026-06-25T16:39:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T16:39:38","slug":"the-supreme-courts-embarrassing-new-second-amendment-decision-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=495","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court\u2019s embarrassing new Second Amendment decision, explained"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii gun law, claiming that it violates the Second Amendment. As is almost always the case in the Court\u2019s Second Amendment decisions, was decided along party lines. The Republican justices agreed with the Republican Party\u2019s position that gun regulations are bad, while the Democratic justices agreed with the Democratic Party\u2019s position that gun regulations are good.<\/p>\n

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Regrettably, Justice Samuel Alito\u2019s majority opinion in Wolford<\/em> v. Lopez <\/em>relies on the Court\u2019s previous decision in (2022). Bruen<\/em> is one of the most widely criticized Supreme Court decisions within the federal judiciary itself \u2014 in a , Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions, some of them written by Donald Trump appointees, which warned that judges simply cannot figure out how Bruen<\/em> is supposed to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Briefly, Bruen<\/em> requires judges hearing Second Amendment disputes to ask whether a modern-day gun law that is being challenged in court is \u201crelevantly similar\u201d to a law that existed when the Constitution was written. The Court has offered little guidance on just how similar the two laws may be, and Alito\u2019s opinion does little to clarify Bruen<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While his opinion spends a great deal of time rehashing past Second Amendment decisions and criticizing Hawaii for enacting many restrictions on gun owners, Alito devotes only six pages to the question of whether the law at issue in Wolford<\/em> is similar to an old law, and only about three pages on Hawaii\u2019s strongest argument.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Worse, Hawaii actually identified four<\/em> early American laws that were exceedingly similar to the one at issue in Wolford<\/em>. But Alito brushed these four laws aside.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s hard to avoid the conclusion, in other words, that Bruen<\/em> is not just unworkable, but that it is being used in bad faith by the Republican justices. Hawaii did everything the Supreme Court asked of it in Bruen<\/em>, but the Republican justices still stuck down their law.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So what does the gun law at issue in Wolford<\/em> actually do?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The Hawaii gun law at the heart of Wolford<\/em> is, admittedly, a very aggressive gun regulation. It requires gun owners to get explicit permission from a private business\u2019s owner or manager before they can bring a gun onto that business\u2019s property.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a practical matter, this law bars guns from nearly all bars, restaurants, shops, gas stations, and other places of business, because few gun owners are going to enter a property unarmed, find the manager, obtain permission to carry their weapon, and then go retrieve it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So it\u2019s unsurprising that the Republican justices wanted to strike this law down. Again, it\u2019s a very expansive restriction on gun possession. And Bruen<\/em>, which struck down a New York state law that , made it clear that the Republican justices believe in public carry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But Wolford<\/em> presented a big problem for these six Republicans, because, while Hawaii\u2019s law is quite aggressive, it is also very similar to four laws enacted around the time of the founding. As Alito acknowledges in his opinion, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York all had laws in the 1700s that, in the words of the Pennsylvania statute, make it illegal to \u201ccarry any gun or hunt on the improved or inclosed lands of any plantation, other than his own,\u201d <\/p>\n

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Alito downplays these four laws by claiming that they were enacted to prohibit \u201cunauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else\u2019s private property,\u201d and thus are different from Hawaii\u2019s law because Hawaii wasn\u2019t concerned about people hunting deer at hotels and gas stations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In her dissent, Jackson points out that many of these laws had more expansive purposes. She quotes New York\u2019s 1763 law, for example, which states that it was enacted to avoid the \u201c, the Ruin and Destruction of the most valuable Improvements, the grievous Injury of the Proprietors, and the great Discouragement of their Industry.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Alito\u2019s opinion is also at odds with (2024), the Court\u2019s only post-Bruen<\/em> decision that upheld a gun law. Rahimi<\/em> upheld a federal law that bars people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing a gun. The Court reasoned that this modern day law should be upheld because it is sufficiently similar to founding era laws that required \u201cindividuals suspected of future misbehavior to post a bond,\u201d money that they would forfeit if they later \u201cbroke the peace.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Rahimi<\/em>, in other words, the Court was asked to decide whether a narrow and very sensible federal gun law \u2014 one prohibiting people that a court has already determined to be violent from carrying guns \u2014 should be upheld. And the Supreme Court upheld it, pointing to a fairly dissimilar founding era law that had little to do with firearms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Wolford<\/em>, by contrast, the Court struck down a more expansive gun regulation, despite the fact that four states enacted nearly identical laws in the 1700s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Given these two cases, it is difficult to argue that the Republican justices are applying Bruen<\/em> in good faith. Under Bruen<\/em>\u2019s completely arbitrary method for determining whether modern-day gun laws are constitutional, Hawaii had a much stronger argument in Wolford<\/em> than the federal government did in Rahimi<\/em>. But Rahimi<\/em> involved a fairly uncontroversial gun regulation that even most Republicans are likely to support, so it was upheld.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Given this arbitrary framework, it is difficult to imagine any gun control law that Republicans oppose will be upheld, no matter how closely it hews to Bruen<\/em>\u2019s confusing standard. Wolford<\/em> eliminates any remaining doubt that the historical research demanded by Bruen<\/em> does not actually play a role in the Court\u2019s decisionmaking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Court should stop embarrassing itself by handing down Second Amendment decisions that are impossible to take seriously, and overrule Bruen<\/em>. Clearly, the justices are not actually deciding these cases based on whether new laws resemble old ones. So they should scrap Bruen<\/em> and start being honest about what\u2019s actually driving their decisions.<\/p>\n

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See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
    \n
  • Criminal Justice<\/li>\n
  • Gun Violence<\/li>\n
  • Policy<\/li>\n
  • Politics<\/li>\n
  • Supreme Court<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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