The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 on June 25 that Hawaii's law barring licensed concealed-carry holders from entering private businesses open to the public without first obtaining the property owner's express permission violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. The opinion in Wolford v. Lopez, No. 24-1046, was authored by Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The decision strikes down what critics of the law had dubbed the "vampire rule" — the principle that a carry permit holder could not enter a business unless affirmatively invited, mirroring the old folk belief that vampires need permission to cross a threshold.

Hawaii's law, enacted after the Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen decision compelled the state to issue carry permits to qualified applicants, required permit holders to obtain the express consent of each private property owner before bringing a firearm onto any premises open to the public — restaurants, gas stations, retail stores, and similar commercial spaces. The state argued this was consistent with a historical tradition of property-owner control over who could enter with arms. The majority rejected that framing. "This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives," Alito wrote. The Court applied the Bruen historical test and found no established tradition in American law requiring affirmative advance permission as a precondition for lawful carry in publicly accessible commercial spaces.

Justice Barrett filed a concurrence joined by Thomas and Gorsuch in Part II-B of the decision, which AmmoLand and Bearing Arms both flagged as potentially more consequential than the majority opinion itself. The concurrence signals that a portion of the Court's conservative wing is willing to revisit and potentially narrow the historical-analog approach established in Bruen, moving toward a more text-based reading of the Second Amendment that would be harder for states to circumvent with creative historical arguments. That avenue will draw attention from Second Amendment litigators watching the Court's next term.

Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson each wrote separate dissents. Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined Jackson's dissent. The dissenters argued that property owners and state legislatures retain legitimate authority to set default carry rules for private premises and that the majority's ruling imposes a nationwide standard at the expense of local commercial regulation.

Hawaii is the only one of five affected states where the carry default law remained fully in force at the time of the ruling. Similar measures in California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey had already been blocked by lower courts following earlier Second Amendment litigation. The Second Circuit struck down New York's version of the rule in May, and Tuesday's decision from the high court confirms those lower-court rulings were correctly decided. Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation, and state gun rights groups in California, Maryland, and New Jersey are expected to file supplemental citations in pending litigation citing Wolford as controlling authority.

Property owners retain the right to prohibit firearms on their premises. Under the ruling, a "no firearms" sign posted at the entry of a business — or other clear notice to customers — establishes the owner's preference, and a permit holder who ignores that notice remains subject to trespass law. What the state can no longer do is make that prohibition the default rule for every property that fails to post a sign.

The ruling is the Court's second major Second Amendment decision of the term. The Court held 9-0 in United States v. Hemani on June 18 that the federal "unlawful user" gun ban could not be applied to a non-dangerous casual marijuana user without a showing that the individual posed an actual danger — a narrower, as-applied win for the Second Amendment that left the underlying statute in place while requiring the government to prove dangerousness in future cases under Section 922(g)(3).