The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to weigh arguments over the constitutionality of Hawaii’s law that forbids the carrying of handguns by concealed carry permit holders on private property open to the public without express permission.

Hawaii argues the law protects private property rights, while those challenging say it violates their constitutionally protected right to carry guns in public for self-defense.

The justices are hearing oral argument over the law on Jan. 20 in a case known as Wolford v. Lopez. The case was brought by three Hawaii permit holders and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, a gun rights organization, alleging that the state violated their right to bear arms. 

‘Vampire Rule’

Known as Act 52, the law bans handguns on private property unless the permit holder has received “express authorization to carry a firearm on the property by the owner, lessee, operator, or manager of the property.” It also bans firearms in bars, beaches, parks, and “sensitive places” such as hospitals, schools, and government buildings.

The law places the burden on private property owners who wish to allow concealed carry on their property to publicly communicate their policy. 

The state calls the express authorization requirement the “default rule,” but critics call it the “vampire rule,” naming it after the mythical creatures that need permission to enter a property, Second Amendment expert Cam Edwards told The Epoch Times.

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, signed the law in 2023, alongside another providing active shooter training for teachers, saying they would make the state safer.

“Gun violence represents an urgent public health and public safety issue,” he said in a statement at the time. “These bills strike a very appropriate balance between public safety, and protecting people and children in Hawaii, along with respecting the Second Amendment right of individuals.”

Act 52 was a response to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which found New York’s restrictive handgun licensing law violated the Second Amendment. The ruling affirmed the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense, and created a legal test requiring that gun laws be consistent with the nation’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation” to survive constitutional scrutiny.

When Act 52 was signed, Hawaii state Rep. David Tarnas, a Democrat, said it was “carefully crafted” to comply with Bruen while creating “a fair system of regulation for concealed carry” that balanced gun rights with “the need to maintain safe and protected spaces in Hawaii.”

Three residents of Maui County who have concealed carry permits and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, which has members who have permits, carried handguns at various places in the state, such as parks and restaurants that serve alcohol, until Act 52 forbade that practice. They sued to block the law, arguing it violated their Second Amendment rights, according to their petition.

At first, a federal district judge blocked the law, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit largely reversed that decision. In a 2–1 vote, the court allowed Hawaii to enforce much of the law because, in its view, it was consistent with Bruen, which recognized a sensitive places exception.

Role of History

The Ninth Circuit said in its 2024 opinion that it disagreed with the challengers’ argument that only a place that has “armed government guards and metal detectors” at entry points qualifies as a sensitive place where carrying firearms may be prohibited.

The appeals court said the Supreme Court has emphasized that its Second Amendment rulings in recent decades do not question longstanding laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as government buildings and schools. 

The nation has “a clear historical tradition of banning firearms at sensitive places.” Hawaii’s ban on guns in parks is acceptable because such bans have been in place throughout the country since the mid-1800s, but the ban on guns in banks is not because such bans are not part of a “comparable national tradition,” the appeals court said.

The Ninth Circuit said the ban on carrying in establishments that serve alcohol should stand because such bans have been around since the country was founded. Since colonial days, it has been recognized that “firearms and intoxication are a dangerous mix.”

Hawaii filed a brief with the Supreme Court, arguing that Act 52 was enacted to reconcile the right to bear arms with property owners’ “undisputed right to choose whether to permit armed entry onto their property.”

The brief said the law is consistent with the Second Amendment because when the country was founded, no right to armed entry into private property without consent existed. 

The brief also said the conduct covered by the law “fits comfortably within our Nation’s history of firearm regulation.” When the United States was born, several states had laws on the books requiring consent to carry a gun onto private property, the brief said.

Conservative-leaning experts are predicting that the challengers will prevail.

Experts told The Epoch Times that they expect the Supreme Court will not accept Hawaii’s argument that it is allowed to impose a “vampire rule.” Those rules place the burden on concealed carry permit holders to obtain permission to carry on private property.

“Hawaii has presented really no evidence that the default rule is part of the national tradition of gun ownership,” said Edwards, a board member at the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Edwards said Hawaii is arguing it is Bruen-compliant by citing questionable historical examples such as a 1771 New Jersey law banning firearms on improved land and plantations, and a series of Louisiana laws from the 1860s that forbade firearms on plantations without the owner’s permission.

The Louisiana laws, enacted by local governments, were part of that state’s Black Codes passed after the Civil War to control freed slaves and deny their constitutional rights.

In Bruen, the Supreme Court said location-specific bans are the exception and not the rule, he said. 

If the Supreme Court is faithful to the history and tradition test in Bruen, “I don’t think they have any other choice but to declare Hawaii’s law unconstitutional,” he said.

Stephen Stamboulieh, an attorney with Gun Owners of America, said he expects that the challengers will win because the state law fails Bruen’s historical analogue test.

There is no historical tradition supporting this type of law “that makes 96 percent of Hawaii off-limits without you getting prior permission to do anything with a firearm,” he said.

‘Pretty Intense’ Oral Argument

Jim Burling, senior counsel at Pacific Legal Foundation, said Act 52 will fall because it can’t meet the historical tradition test, and that the oral argument will be “pretty intense.”

Along the way, there are going to be “some snide remarks coming from the liberal side,” he told The Epoch Times.

Burling said he expects that Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will say Bruen was a mistake and the court should “undo the mess that we made.”

In United States v. Rahimi (2024), the court upheld a federal law that prevents people under domestic violence-related restraining orders from possessing firearms. Sotomayor said in a concurring opinion that she believed Bruen was “wrongly decided,” but said she agreed with the Rahimi majority’s ruling that a challenged gun regulation should be consistent with Second Amendment principles, but did not have to have “a precise historical match” to be deemed constitutional.

The conservative justices, by contrast, will ask questions about what it means for a property owner to grant “express authorization,” he said.

Dan Greenberg, a senior legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said he was “extremely optimistic” that the challengers will win their case.

The law amounts to “a de facto prohibition” on carrying guns altogether, which is contrary to Bruen, and creates a “public relations problem” by forcing businesses to take a public stand on concealed carry, he told The Epoch Times.

Greenberg added that the federal government’s filing of a friend-of-the-court brief in the case in support of gun owners was “unprecedented.”

When the brief was filed, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a Nov. 24, 2025, post on X, that “Hawaii’s law plainly violates the Second Amendment.”

A ruling to invalidate the Hawaii law that is “effectively banning public carry” in the Aloha State could cause similar laws in California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York to fall, she said.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Jan. 20, 2026, in The Epoch Times.