The Supreme Court has held that Hawaii cannot use its own islands’ history to carve out a smaller Second Amendment than the rest of the country enjoys. In Wolford v. Lopez, No. 24-1046 (U.S. June 25, 2026), a 6-3 majority struck down Hawaii’s so-called vampire rule — the statute that flipped the ordinary presumption of lawful carry and barred permit holders from entering ordinary businesses open to the public unless the owner expressly authorized it. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The opinion does two things that matter far beyond Honolulu: it dismantles the idea that a state’s local tradition can dilute a national right, and it hands the Trump Justice Department a clean victory it intends to press elsewhere.
A State Cannot Localize a National Right
Hawaii’s central defense was that it is different. It pointed to what Alito called its “long history of antipathy to the private possession of firearms,” reaching back to one of the very first written laws of the Kingdom of Hawaii — an 1833 edict issued under King Kamehameha III restricting deadly weapons — and continuing through statehood. From this the state spun a theory it branded the “spirit of aloha”: because Hawaiians have long disfavored guns in their midst, the argument ran, the default rule of armed entry that governs everywhere else simply does not reflect implied consent in Hawaii.
Alito framed the move precisely:
Hawaii’s argument is little different from the central argument offered by the city of Chicago in McDonald, and Hawaii’s version fares no better. As the plurality explained in McDonald, the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States. It cannot give way to the spirit of aloha in Hawaii any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple in Bruen or the Windy City in McDonald.
That is the whole ballgame. A right incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment is uniform by definition. As Alito put it, “merely local attitudes can neither shrink nor inflate the meaning of fundamental Bill of Rights guarantees that apply to the states.” The Second Amendment is not a regional ordinance subject to local seasoning.
Why McDonald Already Decided This
The reason this argument failed so completely is that the Court resolved it sixteen years ago. In McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), the lead plaintiff, Otis McDonald, was a man in his late seventies living in a dangerous Chicago neighborhood, barred by city ordinance from keeping a handgun for self-defense. Chicago argued, as Alito recounted, that “law enforcement needs and public attitudes about guns vary from state to state and city to city” and that local lawmakers should have leeway to regulate as they saw fit. The Court rejected that contention and held that the right recognized in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), applies equally against the states.
Alito drew the line directly to the case before him:
But either way, McDonald settled the question whether the Second Amendment embodies a uniform national standard or one that varies from one locale to another.
The contrast he chose is devastating in its simplicity. The right “applies in the same way to our 50th state, where about 8% of the adults possess guns, and our 49th state, where the figure is roughly 59%.” Whether a community owns many guns or few, the constitutional floor is identical. This is precedent doing what precedent is supposed to do — Heller in 2008, McDonald in 2010, Bruen in 2022, and now Wolford — each ruling reinforcing the next. Hawaii’s “spirit of aloha” theory was foreclosed before it was ever filed.
The DOJ Civil Rights Division Goes on Offense
What separates this win from past Second Amendment victories is who stood behind it. The United States filed as amicus supporting the petitioners, and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon — has made Second Amendment enforcement part of its docket. Dhillon, who attended the argument, celebrated the ruling in plain terms, thanking the Court for applying Bruen: the plaintiffs sought to carry for the lawful purpose of self-defense, and the state could identify no historical analogue from the founding era to justify its inverted presumption.
She noted that Hawaii had tried to lean on Reconstruction-era black codes as historical support, an argument the Court treated with open contempt. And she signaled what comes next. “Today, throughout the United States,” she said, “I think you’re going to be seeing challenges to other vampire statutes” in jurisdictions hostile to the right to bear arms.
That posture is the real story for gun owners outside Hawaii. California, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland enacted comparable default-closed carry regimes after Bruen, and Wolford renders them constitutionally indefensible. A Civil Rights Division willing to stand up for armed self-defense as a civil right — the same way it would defend any other liberty secured by the Fourteenth Amendment — changes the enforcement landscape.
What Wolford Settles
The lesson of Wolford is one I have taught for years: the Bill of Rights is national, not local. No state gets a bespoke Second Amendment tailored to its own self-image, however cherished that self-image may be. Hawaii is free to celebrate the spirit of aloha in a thousand ways. Using it to disarm law-abiding citizens who have already cleared the state’s own permitting process is not one of them. The vampire rule is dead, and the principle that killed it — that an incorporated right means the same thing in all fifty states — now stands as another brick in the wall protecting the right to keep and bear arms.
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.