John Commerford writes for the Daily Signal about a significant recent US Supreme Court decision.
Hawaii’s most recent Second Amendment defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court was both a major victory for the right to bear arms and entirely predictable.
Since the court’s landmark decision four years ago in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Hawaii’s anti-gun lawmakers had been trying to accomplish what Bruen had already forbidden: preventing ordinary, law-abiding citizens from carrying a firearm in public for self-defense.
Their tool of choice became known as the “vampire rule,” an absurd legal contrivance stipulating that licensed concealed-carry permit holders couldn’t carry onto private property open to the public unless the property owner had first given express permission. The state compounded that restriction by designating an expansive list of so-called sensitive places where carry was also prohibited, from parks and beaches to government buildings and restaurants serving alcohol.
For the past four years, Hawaii effectively annulled the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense by turning many of the places people visit every day into prohibited locations.
But on June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court rejected that effort in no uncertain terms.
In Wolford v. Lopez, the court held that Hawaii’s attempt to treat nearly every publicly accessible private business as presumptively off-limits to licensed carry violated the Second and 14th Amendments.
Americans spend much of their day on private property that is open to the public, and that’s precisely why Hawaii’s law was so egregious. They stop for gas, buy groceries, pick up prescriptions, grab coffee, meet friends for dinner, and run countless other errands without giving a second thought to whether the building they are entering is privately owned.
Under Hawaii’s law, every one of those routine stops could expose licensed citizens—people who had passed background checks, completed training, and satisfied every red-tape requirement the state has imposed—to criminal penalties unless a business owner had affirmatively granted permission.
