The Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority struck down a Hawaii gun law on Thursday, ruling 6-3 that the state can’t make concealed carry permit holders get property owners’ permission before bringing guns onto private property open to the public.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion that deemed the law unconstitutional. He said the state’s “regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a brief solo dissent that said she would have upheld the law because it’s a “modern-day analogue of colonial and founding era laws that similarly prohibited carrying firearms onto private property without the owner’s affirmative consent.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a much longer dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in which she said, among other things, that the law “fairly applies a first principle of property law — the right to exclude — and does no harm to the Second Amendment.”   

The challengers argued that the ban ran afoul of the high court’s 2022 ruling in the Bruen case that said gun regulations can’t stand unless they’re “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The challengers said that Hawaii’s rule was “without historical support.”

The state disagreed, maintaining that there is a long history of a right to exclude people from private property and that a property owner who opens their property to the public doesn’t forfeit their right to exclude firearms.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in a concurring opinion that Hawaii’s historical analogies under Bruen were to “18th-century antipoaching laws” and “19th-century laws that were mostly designed to suppress newly freed blacks. Unsurprisingly,” she wrote, “the analogies fail.”

Jackson’s dissent continued her ongoing criticism of the Bruen test and how the majority has applied it. She reiterated her view that Bruen “was a grave mistake,” and she said the majority mangled its test in this case to override the state’s judgment “that the property interests of its residents should be protected against unauthorized armed entry.”

Regarding the laws designed to suppress Black people, Jackson said she wasn’t suggesting that the court must accept those laws as historical analogues under Bruen. But she said the court can’t “have it both ways.” She said the court had to either accept all potentially relevant history or “just admit that the test it has created is boundless, allowing it to accept or excise any historical analogue it chooses for any reason it prefers.”

Thursday’s ruling in Wolford v. Lopez followed another Second Amendment decision this term, United States v. Hemani, where the court unanimously sided last week with a Texas man who challenged his prosecution under a federal law that bans gun possession for drug users, marijuana in his case.

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