WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down two new rulings that further broaden the Second Amendment’s constitutional protection of the right “to keep and bear arms,” even as the justices weigh taking on more gun rights cases in their upcoming term.
In a 6-3 decision Thursday, the court’s conservative majority struck down a Hawaii law that required gun owners to obtain a property owner’s permission before bringing a handgun onto private property that is open to the general public, such as most businesses.
Just last week, the court ruled unanimously to narrow the reach of a long-standing federal law that prohibits certain drug users from possessing firearms. That ruling limited a law that had put the gun rights of millions of marijuana users at risk.
Together, the two decisions highlight the court’s consistent stance of broadly protecting Second Amendment rights — even as the country remains sharply divided over how to respond to ongoing gun violence and repeated mass shootings.
Legal scholars say the rulings have made an already demanding legal standard even harder for gun control laws to meet. That standard stems from the Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, which reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Jacob Charles, a law professor at Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law, said the decisions reflect a deep distrust of gun regulations at the highest court. “The two cases confirm the court’s extreme skepticism about all manner of gun regulations, especially new ones,” Charles said.
“It has created and elaborated a test that makes it exceedingly difficult for legislatures to create gun laws to protect their citizens,” he added.
The rulings came near the close of the court’s current term, which started last October. Gun rights advocates, buoyed by the wins, are now hoping the justices will agree to hear more Second Amendment cases when the new term opens in October.
During their private weekly conference Thursday, the justices reviewed a number of appeals, including legal challenges to state bans on assault-style rifles like AR-15s and restrictions on large-capacity ammunition magazines. Those cases could be accepted for review as early as Monday.
Stephen Stamboulieh, an attorney with the pro-Second Amendment organization Gun Owners of America, said “it’s past time for the court to enforce” its earlier rulings when it comes to those types of weapons restrictions.
“It is critical that the Supreme Court take an AR-15 and magazine case and end the lower courts’ rebellion against the court’s precedents,” Stamboulieh said.
The court last year declined to hear similar appeals, though three conservative justices dissented from that decision. A fourth conservative justice, Brett Kavanaugh, expressed agreement with challengers who argued that AR-15s are commonly used by “law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment.” Kavanaugh said the court “presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon.”
The justices are also considering a challenge to a federal rule barring licensed gun dealers from selling handguns to adults younger than 21, along with comparable state-level restrictions.
Both of the new rulings applied what is known as the “Bruen test,” a legal standard that came out of a landmark 2022 Supreme Court decision written by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Under that test, gun regulations must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” — not just serve an important government interest — to hold up under the Second Amendment.
That same test was applied in the 2024 case U.S. v. Rahimi, where the court ruled 8-1 to uphold a federal law making it illegal for people under domestic violence restraining orders to possess firearms. That remains the only law to survive the Bruen test intact at the Supreme Court level.
David Kopel, a Second Amendment expert at the libertarian Independence Institute think tank, said the danger posed by domestic abusers is what distinguished the Rahimi ruling from the two recent decisions.
“Peaceable people who use marijuana, and persons with concealed-carry permits, are not dangerous,” Kopel said, referring to the individuals at the center of the recent gun rights cases. “The broad historic traditions invoked by Bruen point towards a dangerousness standard as the rule for when some Americans can be disarmed,” he added.
Hawaii officials had argued their law struck a reasonable balance between gun rights and the rights of property owners to keep firearms off their premises. But the court disagreed.
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing in dissent, accused the conservative majority of having “manipulated” the Bruen test “into a free-for-all that lets the judiciary thwart the will of legislatures by privileging access to firearms above all else.”
Pepperdine’s Charles pushed back on the idea, floated by some conservative justices, that gun rights are being treated as a lesser right. “The court’s doctrine has elevated the Second Amendment right far above a first-class right,” he said.
