Two Second Amendment cases are headed for decision at the United States Supreme Court before this Term ends in late June, and the implications for millions of gun owners nationwide could not be more significant. United States v. Hemani, No. 24-1234, and Wolford v. Lopez, No. 24-1046, represent the first time the Court has ever agreed to hear more than one 2A merits case in a single Term. Oral arguments in Wolford were held January 20, 2026; Hemani was argued March 2, 2026. Both decisions are pending. Here is where each case stands — and why I am cautiously optimistic about both.
Wolford — Hawaii’s Default No-Carry Rule and the Vampire Analogy
After the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), Hawaii scrambled to replace its old permit system with something worse. On June 2, 2023, Governor Josh Green signed Act 52 into law. The statute flips the baseline entirely: instead of a presumptive right to carry your licensed firearm onto private property open to the public, Act 52 makes carry presumptively prohibited unless a property owner gives affirmative permission. Walk into a store, a restaurant, a parking lot — your constitutional right to carry vanishes unless the owner opts in. This is not a sensitive-place carve-out. It is an inversion of the Bruen right across virtually all of civil society.
The Ninth Circuit, in Wolford v. Lopez, 116 F.4th 959 (9th Cir. 2024), upheld Hawaii’s default rule. The Supreme Court granted certiorari on October 3, 2025 — 146 S. Ct. 79 (2025) — limited to the private property question.
At oral argument on January 20, 2026, Hawaii’s lawyers leaned heavily on an 1865 Louisiana statute that required property owners’ consent before anyone could enter with a weapon. Justice Gorsuch made short work of that. He marveled that “a lot of people” who would normally react to statutes from that period “like garlic in front of a vampire” were now citing them to support modern gun restrictions. That Louisiana law was a Reconstruction-era enactment designed specifically to disarm Black Louisianans — a Jim Crow predecessor dressed up as a historical analogue. That is Hawaii’s best shot at satisfying Bruen’s history-and-tradition test? Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Barrett, and Justice Gorsuch all pressed Hawaii’s counsel with pointed skepticism. The Trump administration filed an amicus brief in support of the Wolfords, the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, and the other plaintiffs challenging Act 52. The momentum at argument was unmistakably against Hawaii.
Hemani — Marijuana, History, and the Limits of 922(g)(3)
United States v. Hemani is a different kind of case but just as consequential. In 2022, FBI agents searched the Texas home of Ali Danial Hemani and found a Glock 9mm pistol, approximately 60 grams of marijuana, and 4.7 grams of cocaine. Hemani told agents he used marijuana roughly every other day. He was charged under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) — the federal statute that bars firearm possession by any person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, in the Eastern District of Texas, dismissed the charge on Second Amendment grounds. The Fifth Circuit affirmed, United States v. Hemani, No. 24-40137 (5th Cir. Jan. 31, 2025), applying Bruen’s history-and-tradition test and finding no adequate founding-era precedent for disarming this category of person. The government petitioned for certiorari, which was granted on October 20, 2025 — 146 S. Ct. 326 (2025).
At the March 2 oral argument, defense attorney Erin Murphy of Clement & Murphy argued that the government’s historical record is fatally thin. Marijuana as a controlled substance is a twentieth-century regulatory invention. There is simply no 1791 analogue for stripping Second Amendment rights from someone because they use a plant that a mid-century Congress decided to ban. The government tried to draw an analogy to historical laws disarming “habitual drunkards,” but Murphy correctly pressed back: those laws targeted people who were dangerously impaired at the moment of possession, not someone who is completely sober when handling a firearm but happened to use a substance at another time.
Justice Alito appeared most sympathetic to the government’s position, noting that the drugs banned under § 922(g)(3) did not exist at the founding. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, arriving from a different direction, were openly skeptical that Congress provided any finding that marijuana users as a class are dangerously impaired with firearms. The center of the Court appeared broadly ready to rule for Hemani, at least as applied to non-impaired, recreational marijuana users.
What These Two Cases Mean — Together
The pairing matters. Both Wolford and Hemani travel under Bruen’s history-and-tradition framework, and the government lost the oral argument optics in both cases. Wolford will determine whether states can effectively nullify the Bruen carry right by flipping the default to a no-carry zone across all private property open to the public. A ruling for the plaintiffs will take down Hawaii’s Act 52 and put similar laws in New Jersey and New York on notice.
Hemani will define how far § 922(g)(3) can reach when Congress tries to disarm a category of people with no real founding-era historical pedigree for that disarmament. A win for Hemani does not touch the legality of marijuana. It says only that gun rights cannot be stripped from someone because they use a federally classified controlled substance, absent a genuine historical tradition of such disarmament. That matters enormously for the tens of millions of Americans who use marijuana legally under state law but are technically federal outlaws under the Controlled Substances Act.
For the first time in this decade, the Supreme Court is deciding two 2A cases in a single Term. Decisions are expected by late June 2026. I will be watching every word.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.