The Supreme Court dismantled Hawaii's requirement that licensed gun owners get explicit permission before carrying firearms into businesses open to the public, ruling 6-3 in Wolford v. Lopez that the restriction violated the Second Amendment. The decision exposed an uncomfortable fact about Hawaii's legal defense: the state leaned on an 1865 Louisiana Black Code, a law designed to disarm newly freed Black Americans, as historical justification for keeping the restriction alive.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, dismissed the post-Civil War statute as a "tainted artifact" that "cannot be taken seriously" as evidence of the Second Amendment's original public meaning. The ruling leaves business owners free to post "no firearms" policies if they choose. What it forbids is a blanket state mandate treating every private property open to the public as a gun-free zone unless the owner personally grants entry to armed, licensed citizens.
The attorney who represented the plaintiffs did not hold back. Kevin O'Grady, speaking to Fox News Digital, called Hawaii's reliance on the Black Code "disgraceful."
"It is disgraceful that any state would rely on a law specifically aimed at taking away the Second Amendment rights or any constitutional right of Black Americans as it was at that time."
O'Grady added that he and his legal team fully expected the Supreme Court to identify the 1865 statute as precisely the kind of law no one should use to measure constitutional legitimacy, "because this is the perfect example of something which is not constitutional."
Hawaii's restriction, sometimes called the "vampire rule" because a gun owner effectively needed an invitation to enter, required concealed-carry permit holders to obtain express permission from a property owner before bringing a firearm onto any private property open to the public. That meant stores, hotels, gas stations, and shopping malls were all functionally off-limits to lawful carriers unless the owner affirmatively said yes.
Under the 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen framework, courts evaluate modern gun regulations by asking whether they are consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. Hawaii tried to meet that test by citing several historical laws, chief among them the 1865 Louisiana statute, which made it unlawful to carry firearms onto another person's property without the owner's consent.
The problem, as Fox News reported, is that the Louisiana law was not a neutral property-rights measure. It was part of a coordinated set of Black Codes enacted across the post-Civil War South to strip newly freed Black Americans of basic rights, including the right to keep and bear arms. Alito's majority opinion rejected Hawaii's attempt to launder that history into a legitimate constitutional tradition.
The Trump administration supported striking down the Hawaii law, calling it a Second Amendment violation, AP News reported.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, filed a dissent that took aim at the majority's reasoning, and at the Bruen framework itself. Jackson acknowledged the Black Codes were racist and used to oppress newly freed Black Americans. But she argued the Court skipped an important constitutional question before tossing the 1865 statute out of the analysis.
Jackson outlined two possibilities. Either the firearm restrictions in the Black Codes were independently unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, or they were facially constitutional but enforced in a racially discriminatory way, making the real defect an equal-protection problem, not a gun-rights problem. The majority, she argued, never resolved that distinction before excluding the Louisiana law from consideration.
"It might well be that the Black Codes are invalid inputs for Bruen's test, but only if they violated the Second Amendment, which may or may not be the case."
Jackson went further, writing that "either history does matter, and if so, all potentially relevant historical experiences must be thoroughly examined. Or, it does not, and the Court should just admit that the test it has created is boundless."
That argument drew sharp criticism from Second Amendment advocates, and it revealed a deeper tension in Jackson's jurisprudence. If the Bruen framework requires courts to examine historical tradition, Jackson seemed to suggest that even laws born from racial oppression might count as valid data points unless separately proven to violate the Second Amendment on their own terms. That is a position with uncomfortable implications, and the majority declined to follow her there.
Jackson's broader complaint, that the majority was manipulating Bruen into "a free-for-all that lets the Judiciary thwart the will of legislatures by privileging access to firearms above all else", was reported by the Washington Examiner. She also cited an 1833 order from King Kamehameha III of the Kingdom of Hawaii as historical precedent to justify the restriction, a reference that struck many observers as reaching well beyond the constitutional tradition the Bruen test was designed to examine.
This is not the first time Jackson's public commentary has drawn scrutiny for the gap between her stated principles and her practical conclusions.
Hannah Hill, vice president of the National Association of Gun Rights, responded directly to Jackson's dissent in comments to Fox News Digital. Hill pointed to Alito's majority opinion, which noted that the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted precisely in response to laws like the Black Codes.
"That right there is your answer. Yes, there was a historical tradition, they enacted a constitutional amendment to fix that deprivation of rights, and that is also in the Constitution now, so I think she should probably go back to law school."
Tyler Yzaguirre, president of the Second Amendment Institute, echoed the criticism. He told Fox News Digital that the Black Code statutes "were not legitimate expressions of our Nation's constitutional tradition; they were examples of government using its power to deprive Americans of a fundamental right. The Court was right to reject the notion that such laws could define the historical limits of the Second Amendment."
Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, called Hawaii's law "nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to disarm peaceable citizens," adding that he was "grateful the Supreme Court saw through the ruse."
The 6-3 majority included Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett alongside Alito. That lineup reflects a Court whose composition continues to shape the trajectory of constitutional law on questions ranging from firearms to redistricting.
The decision does not strip private property owners of control. Businesses that want to prohibit firearms can still post signs or enforce policies banning guns on their premises. What the ruling eliminates is Hawaii's default presumption that every business is a no-carry zone unless the owner personally invites armed customers inside.
That default presumption, as O'Grady argued, functionally gutted the concealed-carry permits Hawaii was required to issue after Bruen. A permit that lets you carry a firearm everywhere except every business, hotel, and public-facing property is not much of a permit at all.
The ruling fits a broader pattern. Since Bruen, the Court has repeatedly struck down state-level attempts to limit Second Amendment rights through regulatory workarounds, restrictions that comply with the letter of the 2022 precedent while undermining its substance. The Court's willingness to check legislative overreach, even when it produces sharp dissents, has become a defining feature of this era.
Several open questions remain. It is unclear whether the ruling applies only to Hawaii or sets a broader national precedent for states with similar laws. The identities of the other two justices who joined Jackson's dissent beyond Sotomayor are not specified in available reporting. And the full range of historical statutes Hawaii cited, beyond the 1865 Louisiana law, has not been publicly detailed.
What is clear is that Hawaii chose a remarkable hill to defend. Faced with the task of justifying a sweeping firearms restriction under the Bruen framework, the state reached back to a law written to keep Black Americans disarmed and subordinate. The majority called that what it was. The dissent suggested the Court moved too fast in doing so.
The justices who joined the majority did not need to agonize over whether a law designed to strip constitutional rights from an entire race of people should be treated as a legitimate constitutional tradition. Some questions answer themselves.
When a state has to cite a law built on racial oppression to defend its gun policy, the policy was never really about safety. It was about control, and the Court was right to say so.
