Supreme Court takes case that could allow more guns in malls and restaurants

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide if states may bar people from carrying guns on private property without permission from the property owner, wading into a thorny Second Amendment dispute that could expand carry rights in malls, restaurants and stores.

It is the first major Second Amendment case the 6-3 conservative court has agreed to hear in more than a year. In recent years the court has decided a number of high-profile Second Amendment cases in ways that have expanded access to guns.

The court granted five new cases on Friday as it builds out a new term that will begin on Monday and run through June.

The new term is shaping up to be one of enormous consequence, with cases dealing with executive power during President Donald Trump’s second term, transgender rights and the future prospects of a landmark civil rights era law to protect minority voters.

In the guns case, Hawaii enacted its law in 2023 in response to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling a year earlier that made it easier for Americans to obtain carry permits. That decision struck down a New York law that required residents to show “proper cause” to carry a handgun.

The appeals court was “absolutely right to say it’s constitutional to prohibit guns on private property unless the owner says they want guns there,” said Janet Carter, managing director of Second Amendment litigation at Everytown Law. “This law respects people’s right to be safe on their own property, and we urge the Supreme Court to uphold it.”

Previously, the state’s law allowed someone with a permit to carry their handgun into a store, for instance, unless the property owner explicitly prohibited it. The new law flipped that around and required unambiguous written or verbal authorization. The law also barred the carrying of guns on beaches and in parks as well as bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

Three gun owners who hold carry permits sued, along with a gun rights group, claiming the new law and an appeals court decision upholding it rendered “illusory the right to carry in public.”

Five states – Hawaii, California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York – enacted similar restrictions, according to the Trump administration, which urged the Supreme Court to hear the case.

The administration told the high court that people could bring “bicycles, roller skates, protest banners, muddy shoes, dripping umbrellas, melting ice cream cones” into private stores without permission.

“Only if someone wants to carry a gun must he obtain ‘express authorization’ under the arbitrary presumption that all property owners would view guns differently,” the Department of Justice said.

Anne Lopez, the Democratic attorney general of Hawaii, argued that the state’s law “represents a permissible effort to vindicate the rights of Hawai‘i’s citizens to exclude armed individuals from their private property.”

A federal district court in Hawaii preliminarily barred the state from enforcing the law, but the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision.

“Nothing in the text of the Second Amendment or otherwise suggests that a private property owner – even owners who open their private property to the public – must allow persons who bear arms to enter,” the appeals court wrote in a unanimous opinion.

Undergirding the fight over Hawaii’s law is the Supreme Court’s requirement that judges look to US history when deciding whether to uphold or strike down gun prohibitions under the Second Amendment. In its 2022 decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court said that a gun regulation must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

That prompted a flurry of challenges to gun laws from Second Amendment groups, who argued many of those prohibitions have little connection to history, and it required many federal judges to dabble in history as well as law. But then the Supreme Court appeared to alter course slightly in 2024, upholding a federal law that bars guns for domestic abusers even though there was no domestic abuse law on the books at the time of the nation’s founding.

At a higher level of generality, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for an 8-1 court, the nation did have a history of disarming “individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others.”

The Hawaii case deals primarily with permission to carry on private property but it also touched on prohibitions on carrying guns in bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, beaches, parks, and similar areas. Expanding those so-called “sensitive place” restrictions has been a major goal for blue states in the wake of the court’s 2022 decision in Bruen.

The court declined to take up a second question in the case that appeared to focus more directly on those provisions. Lower courts have upheld those sensitive place restrictions by looking in part to post-Reconstruction history. The gun owners had suggested the Supreme Court should make clear that the historical analysis should end with the founding era.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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