The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed gun rights proponents and concealed carry holders a victory by striking down a Hawaii gun law that mandated that people with concealed carry permits gain permission before carrying their firearms on any private property in the state.

The high court’s 6–3 decision on Thursday means people can carry guns onto privately owned property such as shopping malls and gas stations, unless the owners specifically state that guns are banned at their establishments.

Hawaii in 2023 passed a measure, Act 52, that specifically blocked handgun owners who have a concealed carry permit from taking their firearms onto private property unless the owner or the operator provided the carry permit holder “express authorization to carry a firearm on the property.”

The state had passed the law in the wake of a 2022 Supreme Court ruling, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, that found the Second Amendment provides most people the right to carry guns in public and established a test that modern firearms regulations must be consistent with U.S. historical traditions around gun laws.

Gun rights advocates and several Hawaii residents who filed the legal challenge against the measure said it violates the Second Amendment rights of firearms owners. Lawyers for the state presented the case as a matter of private property rights while arguing that Hawaii has a history of enforcing restrictions on firearms, meaning it passes the Bruen test.

What the Majority Said

Writing for the court’s majority, Justice Samuel Alito stated that the Hawaii gun law “severely hampers” gun owners’ Second Amendment rights by mandating them to seek permission to carry weapons in essential places. Alito wrote that he rejected arguments from Hawaii that the state’s long tradition of gun-control laws was relevant.

“The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” Alito wrote. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii.”

Writing that “merely local attitudes can neither shrink nor inflate the meaning of fundamental Bill of Rights guarantees that apply to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment,” Alito said early state laws around guns centered on hunting game on someone else’s private property.

“Those laws had little if any impact on the Second Amendment’s central objective of protecting the fundamental right to self-defense, and their obvious aim was to prevent the distinctive harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting,” he wrote. “The gap between the state’s anti-poaching analogues and its new rule is too wide.”

The majority sided with Second Amendment group the Hawaii Firearms Coalition and three residents in Maui, Hawaii.

A lower court judge originally blocked the measure, but an appeals court allowed it to be enforced.

3 Justices Dissent

In a dissenting opinion issued by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson argued that the case isn’t about Second Amendment rights, but turned on the fact that there is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission.

“So the question this case presents is merely how a property owner must communicate his decision to exclude or to invite armed carry, including whether a State may alter the background property-law rules that set the default as one or the other,” Jackson wrote. “The Second Amendment has nothing to say about that. Petitioners’ constitutional rights are thus not implicated here, and their claim should meet its end at Bruen’s first step.”

Jackson also suggested that Hawaii, as both a kingdom and later as a U.S. territory and state, has a long history of gun-control laws.

“Hawaii maintained this tradition of strictly regulating weapons both before and after it was annexed as a U. S. territory in 1898,” she wrote, adding that the state in 1927 “began regulating firearms in particular by carefully controlling who may carry them.”

Justice Elena Kagan wrote her own dissent, arguing that Hawaii’s restrictions are similar to founding- and colonial-era laws that restricted firearms from being taken onto private property without permission from its owner.

“The new law, just like the old ones, sets a default rule against gun carry that a private landowner may reverse,” Kagan wrote, adding that the old and new restrictions “respond to the dangers and harms that someone with a gun can cause on another person’s property. That the old laws had a special (though by no means exclusive) concern with poaching does not matter.”

Gun Rights Groups Hail Ruling

The National Rifle Association (NRA), the largest gun rights group in the United States, hailed the decision on Thursday and panned Hawaii’s law as “unconstitutional” because it had “prevented gun owners from carrying their firearms in public places without express permission.”

“Law-abiding gun owners will no longer be forced to beg for special permission simply to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms in public places,” NRA Executive Director John Commerford said in a statement posted on X.

The Hawaii Firearms Coalition described the ruling as a “historic victory” for residents of the state in a post on social media, disputing arguments that the case is merely about private property.

“This lawsuit was never about forcing firearms onto private property against an owner’s wishes,” it said. “Property owners have always had—and will continue to have—the absolute right to decide whether firearms are allowed on their property.”

“Hawaii attempted to reverse more than two centuries of American legal tradition by making it a crime for licensed concealed carry holders to enter virtually any business or private property open to the public unless the owner first gave express permission. Instead of allowing individual property owners to make that decision for themselves, the State imposed a blanket prohibition and turned nearly every business in Hawaii into a government-created gun-free zone by default.”

The Trump administration had backed the gun rights’ appeal to the Supreme Court. In a submission to the high court last November, the Department of Justice (DOJ) contended the state law was unconstitutional and essentially restricted the public carry of firearms nearly anywhere in the state.

Gun-Control Groups Disagree

The gun-control group Everytown Law called the decision disappointing but noted that business owners can still post signs forbidding firearms on their properties.

“The Supreme Court may have changed the default rule, but it cannot take away a private property owner’s authority over their own land,” said Janet Carter, managing director of Second Amendment Litigation, in a statement to multiple news outlets following Thursday’s decision.

Brady United and Giffords Law Center, a similar group, expressed disappointment over the high court’s ruling on Thursday.

“We’re disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Hawaii’s law requiring permission to carry guns onto private property,” a Giffords Law Center attorney, Billy Clark, said in a statement. “This measure respected private property rights and reflected what Hawaiians wanted to keep their communities safe.”

The head of Brady United, Kris Brown, said in a statement that the order is “deeply dangerous” because it “privileges guns over everything and all people in society,” adding further that it believes the Supreme Court’s majority “manipulated a legal test of their own design to launch this attack on public safety.”

Hawaii also restricts guns in such places as parks, beaches, and restaurants that serve alcohol, but those rules weren’t before the high court in this case. They are being challenged in lower courts.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.