Hawaii is not a state marked with an asterisk, and its citizens do not live under a different U.S. Constitution from the rest of the nation.
A recent gun control case ignored this stark reality, and now the U.S. Supreme Court has given credence to the misguided notion of some unique status for the Aloha State.
The high court disappointed Second Amendment advocates on Monday when it denied a request for certiorari in Wilson v. Hawaii. Justices were asked to hear the appeal of a Hawaii man charged with carrying a weapon without a permit.
Christopher Wilson was arrested in 2017 after he was found with a loaded firearm while trespassing on private property. The hiker did not have a permit, though at the time the state employed procedures that systematically denied these permits to law-abiding citizens.
Then came 2022’s New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen ruling. Such may-issue laws as those in Hawaii were tossed aside as violations of the Second Amendment.
Wilson’s attorneys got his gun charges dismissed after the Bruen decision, only to suffer an almost immediate setback.
The Hawaii Supreme Court reinstated the charges against the defendant despite the state’s draconian permit system being unconstitutional.
In doing so, the state’s high court miraculously discovered an avenue through which Hawaii law superseded the U.S. Constitution. The court wrote concerning the Second Amendment and the state Constitution: “We read those words differently than the current United States Supreme Court. We hold that in Hawaii, there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public.”
The justices continued with a shocking legal argument. “The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities. 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.”
Pause for a moment to consider this ruling.
The Hawaii Supreme Court readily admitted that instead of following the Constitution and the law of the land, it sees the 50th state as a unique cultural institution capable of ignoring the Bill of Rights.
Is freedom of religion next? Freedom of speech or the press?
The one positive aspect is that the Supreme Court refused to hear the case based on procedural issues rather than constitutional grounds. A justice noted for respecting Second Amendment rights took Hawaii jurists to task for ignoring the Constitution’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms.
Justice Clarence Thomas chastised the Hawaii court for giving “the latest example of a lower court failing to afford the Second Amendment the respect due as an enumerated right.” The justice then reiterated that “the constitutional right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’”
Thomas further charged that the Hawaii Supreme Court gave far too much credence to a state law that the Constitution supersedes.
Unfortunately, this latest high court action adds to a series of refusals to intervene in Second Amendment-related cases that are still pending in lower courts.
The good news is that despite failing to act immediately and end Hawaii’s judicial foolishness, the possibility of a Supreme Court showdown remains.
The Second Amendment does not apply only to 49 states, and the high court’s clear ruling is not null and void in the 50th. Hawaii’s Supreme Court does not get to pick and choose which laws and rulings it follows using the “spirit of Aloha,” whatever that is.
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