This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Tuesday in Wolford v. Lopez, a case about whether states can ban people from carrying concealed firearms on private property without getting the owner’s consent. Under the Hawaii law at issue, any armed person who wants to enter a shopping center, restaurant, or other privately owned property that is open to the public needs “express authorization” first—for example, a sign at a store’s entrance or a verbal “okay” from an employee. Gun laws like Hawaii’s are often called “vampire rules” because, like the rules that applied to vampires in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, they keep out a deadly threat unless the deadly threat receives an explicit invitation to enter.
Hawaii enacted its law in 2023 in response to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a 2022 Supreme Court case that created a new test for determining the constitutionality of gun control laws. Under Bruen, laws that regulate “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” violate the Second Amendment unless there is a “well-established and representative historical analogue.” This rigid standard calls on courts to invalidate all gun laws unless, in a judge’s estimation, people in the Founding era imposed similar restrictions for similar reasons.
Bruen immediately caused chaos in the lower courts, as it called the legality of previously uncontroversial gun laws into question. And in July 2024, after a federal appeals court ruled that laws disarming domestic violence offenders are unconstitutional because the country did not historically disarm domestic abusers, the Court began to backpedal. Writing for the eight-justice majority in United States v. Rahimi, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that lower courts had “misunderstood” Bruen, and that modern gun safety laws need only a historical “analogue,” not a historical “twin.” (For what it’s worth, the author of Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented in Rahimi to say that the lower court had understood his opinion just fine.)
