SCOTUS Drives a Stake Through the Heart of Hawaii’s Vampire Rule, Ruling it Unconstitutional

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen almost exactly four years ago, the collective hissy fit on the part of America’s anti-gun community was as epic as it was satisfying. No matter where you were in the continental US, if you stood still for a moment, you could feel the faint vibrations emanating from thousands of politicians, media members and gun control industry apparatchiks impotently kicking their little feet and pounding their tiny fists as they absorbed the breadth of the ruling and the extent of the setback they’d been dealt.

Once they’d gotten themselves up, brushed themselves off and dried their tears, they did what all good hoplophobes do when they lose in the courts. They got to work predicting nationwide death, doom and destruction…and then they started legislating around the new reality.

Most of the usual suspect states that were forced to eliminate their arbitrary, capricious and intentionally onerous may-issue carry permitting schemes got busy enacting — among other restrictive anti-gun wish list items — new barriers designed to drastically limit the places that permitted carriers could legally carry a gun with the permits they were now forced to issue.

These Bruen response laws flipped the relationship between gun toters to private property. The model had always been that individuals who carry could enter private property that’s open to the public unless the property was posted with signage specifically prohibiting it. The Bruen response bills reversed that, banning carry on all private property unless the owners posted signs explicitly allowing guns to be carried there.

These “vampire rules” — like the blood-suckers, gun toters had to be invited in — became law in states like New York, New Jersey, California, Maryland and Hawaii. Federal courts have stuck down most of them as unconstitutional, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (naturally) upheld Hawaii’s vampire rule in Wolford v. Lopez. The circuit court split that created forced the Supreme Court to step and decide the matter and in a 6-3 party line decision announced today, the Court ruled that vampire rules violate Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

Justice Samual Alito wrote . . .

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 also explicitly rejected Hawaii’s desperate historical analogue defense of its vampire rule law that included Louisiana’s racist Black Codes that were enacted to disarm blacks after the Civil War.

Hawaii also relies on an 1865 Louisiana statute enacted as part of the notorious Black Codes to disarm blacks and leave them defenseless against attacks. As the Court laid out in McDonald, the right to keep and bear arms was crucially important for vulnerable blacks during this period. This was well-understood by the Republicans in Congress who were responsible for drafting, approving, and securing the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Against this history, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact from Louisiana’s Black Code illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously. And even setting aside this statute’s pedigree, it carries no weight because it was neither widespread nor widely accepted.

Oof.

You can read the full decision here. Enjoy.