The Supreme Court Just Got Caught in Its Gun Rights Contradictions

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also noted that the Hawaii law brought reasonable clarity to a status quo that Bruen had disrupted. “Once Bruen said you can carry the gun outside of your home, and there was an alternative, well-established principle that private property owners can exclude people,” she explained to Neal Katyal, the lawyer representing the state of Hawaii in the case, “I think the states were trying to make sure that property owners had the opportunity to do that.”

That did not stop the plaintiffs from claiming that Hawaii had some sort of animus against them. “There’s a clear body of evidence here that this was done to undermine Bruen and to undermine the Second Amendment right,” Beck claimed, “and, thus, this law very clearly implicates the Second Amendment.”

The reality of Hawaii’s law is that it would significantly impact the practical ability to carry a firearm in the state if one needs affirmative permission whenever entering private property. Under Bruen, however, the level of a law’s impact isn’t supposed to matter. The conservatives dispensed with balancing tests in that decision because too many gun restrictions were being upheld under those tests, leading Thomas, Alito, and others to make a familiar complaint: “Mr. Katyal, you’re just relegating the Second Amendment to second-class status,” Justice Samuel Alito bluntly told Katyal. “I don’t see how you can get away from that.”