Hawaii’s Supreme Court Attempts to Sidestep the 2nd Amendment

Why do this? It’s not going to accomplish anything except maybe to reinforce that the 2nd Amendment cannot be sidestepped by state courts. Is this literally virtue signaling? Whatever the case, this is just embarrassing.

Hawaii’s highest court on Wednesday ruled that Second Amendment rights as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court do not extend to Hawaii citizens, citing the “spirit of Aloha.”

In the ruling, which was penned by Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins, the court determined that states “retain the authority to require” individuals to hold proper permits before carrying firearms in public. The decision also concluded that the Hawaii Constitution broadly “does not afford a right to carry firearms in public places for self defense,” further pointing to the “spirit of Aloha” and even quoting HBO’s TV drama “The Wire.”…

“The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities,” it adds. “The history of the Hawaiian Islands does not include a society where armed people move about the community to possibly combat the deadly aims of others.”

Over at the Reload, Stephen Gutowski has some background about where this case came from and why it probably won’t be around for long.

Hawaii’s Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision that found charges leveled against Christopher Wilson for carrying a gun without a permit violated his rights. Instead, the court ruled its state constitution provides no gun-rights protections whatsoever. That’s despite it including a provision protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms identical to the one in the federal Constitution…

The ruling directly contrasts with the core holdings at the center of SCOTUS’s gun rights precedents. The state supreme court’s ruling explicitly rejects the federal supreme court’s findings in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller and 2022’s New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. The lower court’s straightforward rejection of the higher court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence could provoke SCOTUS to take up the case and issue a rebuke, as it did when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled protections don’t extend to modern weapons in 2016’s Caetano.

It’s clear from the decision that the author of this decision is looking for a fight with the US Supreme Court.

[Justice] Eddins heaps scorn on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Second Amendment precedents. “Until Heller, the Supreme Court had never ruled that the Second Amendment afforded an individual right to keep and bear arms,” he writes. “Heller flipped the nation’s textual and historical understanding of the Second Amendment. The majority insisted there was ‘no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.'”

In Eddins’ telling, that position, which scholars by that point were describing as the “standard model” based on research that Heller described at length, had no historical basis. “History by historians quickly debunked Heller’s history,” Eddins declares. “In the Second Amendment cases, the Court distorts and cherry-picks historical evidence. It shrinks, alters, and discards historical facts that don’t fit.”

Again, I’m left wondering what the point of this pointless tantrum is. Justice Eddins is going to lose this battle, possibly after being directly admonished by the Supreme Court. Does he really think quoting the Wire and citing “the Spirit of Aloha” is going to help his argument gain credibility? I don’t see the upside to this at all.