Hawaii changed the rules after Bruen. Instead of allowing concealed carry on public-facing private property—think stores, restaurants, and their parking lots—unless the owner says “no,” Hawaii did the opposite. Now it’s banned unless the owner explicitly says “yes.”
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Gun-rights attorney Alan Beck is asking the Supreme Court to put that genie back in the bottle.
This isn’t a niche fight. If almost no businesses post “guns allowed,” then a carry permit becomes a sidewalk-only pass. You can walk armed down the block, but you’re disarmed the moment you step into normal life. On Maui alone, petitioners estimate that more than 96% of publicly accessible land is off-limits once you layer in Hawaii’s long “sensitive places” list and this new default rule. That flips Bruen’s warning—sensitive places should be the exception, not the rule.
Beck’s Core Pitch, in Plain English
Beck’s strategy is simple: use Bruen as written. The State has to point to a historical tradition that’s meaningfully similar in the how and the why. Hawaii and the Ninth Circuit leaned on two old laws that don’t carry the load: a 1771 anti-poaching rule about trespass with long guns on land not open to the public, and an 1865 Louisiana “Black Code” aimed at disarming freedmen after the Civil War. Neither matches modern carry in a store that invites the public in, and neither adds up to a real “tradition.” Two outliers, decades apart, don’t rewrite the Second Amendment.
Click the link to read the whole article: Wolford v. Lopez: Flipping the Default on Carry Bans
