Left: Samuel Alito (YouTube/The Heritage Foundation); Center: Clarence Thomas (YouTube/Library of Congress); Right: Neil Gorsuch (Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)
The U.S. Supreme Court denied review Monday in a case which challenged gun licensing laws in Hawaii — and the court’s conservative trio made no secret of its shared disdain for the Aloha State’s take on the Second Amendment.
The case stems from a December 2017 during which a man named Christopher Wilson went for a nighttime hike with friends in the West Maui Mountains. When the group strayed onto private property, the owner called the police. Upon their arrival, Wilson informed them he was carrying a gun. The firearm was unlicensed, and Wilson said he had purchased it in Florida four years earlier.
Wilson was prosecuted by Hawaii authorities for carrying an unlicensed firearm in public. Although Wilson had never applied for a gun license, he moved to dismiss the charges against him on the grounds that Hawaii’s licensing regime violated the Second Amendment by restricting him from carrying a firearm for self-defense. Wilson relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In that case, the nation’s highest court struck down New York’s handgun licensing regime and held that the Second Amendment demands a “historical analogue” before upholding the restrictions on guns.
The Hawaii Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Wilson on the grounds that he had no standing to challenge Hawaii’s gun laws, given that he never applied for a license at all. In its ruling, it said that Wilson’s prosecution did not violate the Second Amendment.
The state supreme court also took the opportunity to rail against the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen.
In that case, the Hawaii court wrote, the Supreme Court justices were merely “handpick[ing] history to make its own rules.” The Bruen test, Hawaii found, was “fuzzy,” and “backward-looking.”
“Time-traveling to 1791 or 1868 to collar how a state regulates lethal weapons — per the Constitution’s democratic design — is a dangerous way to look at the federal constitution,” Eddins wrote. “The Constitution is not a ‘suicide pact.””
Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins also wrote that the “spirit of Aloha” present in Hawaii law “clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities” — a quote with which Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch took issue in their statements on the denial of certiorari.
Thomas chastised the opinion for “denigrat[ing] the need for public carry in particular, and rejecting [public carry] as un-Hawaiian.” Thomas practically mocked the court for — in his characterization — suggesting that “sounder approach to constitutional interpretation would give due regard to the ‘spirit of Aloha’” rather than strict constitutional analysis.
In his statement, Thomas slammed the Hawaii court for relegating the Second Amendment to a second-class right, just as the justice has done in other cases involving post-Bruen gun cases. Thomas acknowledged that because of procedural reasons, Wilson’s case may not be proper for Supreme Court review, and lamented that the “correction of the Hawaii Supreme Court’s error must await another day.”
Thomas reminded that “Americans are always free to invoke the Second Amendment as a defense against unconstitutional
firearms-licensing schemes,” and suggested that perhaps Wilson will return at a later time to raise the “important and recurring” legal issue to the justices.
Justice Samuel Alito joined Thomas’ statement on the denial of certiorari.
Gorsuch penned a brief statement on the denial that was less harshly critical than Thomas’, but centered on the Court’s responsibility to make sure that criminal defendants are afforded the right to raise a complete defense. Gorsuch noted that he was not opining on the merits of Wilson’s defense, but simply that there is a “distinct possibility” that the Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision may have led Wilson to be convicted and sentenced to prison for violating an unconstitutional law.
You can read the justices’ statements here.
