Hawaii highest court defies Supreme Court with gun restrictions

Hawaii’s Supreme Court Wednesday issued a ruling restricting gun rights for taxpayers in defiance of a US Supreme Court decision.

In State v. Wilson, Hawaiian taxpayer Christopher Wilson was arrested in 2017 for carrying a firearm in public while hiking in West Maui. Although Wilson invoked the Constitution’s Second Amendment, the state’s supreme court has now ruled that there is no such right to carry a firearm — neither in state nor constitutional law.

“We hold that in Hawaiʻi there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public,” Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins wrote in the majority opinion for State v. Wilson last week. While the state’s constitution contains a clause that “mirrors” the Second Amendment, Hawaii’s Supreme Court justices say they “read those words differently than the current United States Supreme Court.”

In 2022 the US Supreme Court issued an historic Second Amendment ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. According to the court, the Constitution recognizes that taxpayers hold a presumptive right to carry firearms. Therefore, instead of the government demanding that taxpayers justify their need for a gun, the onus is on the government to prove why a taxpayer should not be allowed one.

But Hawaii’s top court believes the US Supreme Court is viewing the Constitution through an outdated lens.

“We believe it is a misplaced view to think that today’s public safety laws must look like laws passed long ago,” Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Eddins wrote. “Smoothbore, muzzle-loaded, and powder-and-ramrod muskets were not exactly useful to colonial era mass murderers. And life is a bit different now, in a nation with a lot more people, stretching to islands in the Pacific Ocean.”

“As the world turns, it makes no sense for contemporary society to pledge allegiance to the founding era’s culture, realities, laws, and understanding of the Constitution,” the justices concluded.

But this objection was addressed by the US Supreme Court in another landmark Second Amendment case, District of Columbia v. Heller.

“Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding,” read the majority opinion.