A lot of people are very upset today. They really wanted Wolford to be decided differently, though if they actually thought it would, they probably shouldn't be allowed out in public, even with adult supervision.
And some in the media are even more unhinged than usual because they didn't get their way.
In particular, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate.
The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez on Thursday confirms our worst fears about the supermajority’s Second Amendment jurisprudence: It is a freewheeling policy project utterly unmoored from history that allows the Republican-appointed justices to implement their preferred gun laws under the thin guise of judicial review. These justices struck down Hawaiʻi’s law restricting guns on private property not because the Constitution required them; to the contrary, the state proved beyond doubt that its statute was deeply rooted in history and tradition. Rather, the supermajority killed the law because it was offended that Hawaiʻi would dare try to mitigate the violence that SCOTUS has unleashed through its radical, incoherent gun rights jurisprudence. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the court bristles with annoyance toward the state government’s attempts to protect people on private property from getting shot to death. Constitutional law has given way to six justices’ ad hoc nullification of any law that favors human life over the paranoid obsessions of gun enthusiasts.
However, what Stern failed to note is that the "history" in question was laws that were targeted toward black gun owners in the Reconstruction South, as Cam noted on Thursday.
Stern rails for however many words, and it's mostly filled with him swooning over Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent, with bits like this:
There are key problems with this argument, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explained in dissent. First, Bruen ostensibly compels courts to figure out what conduct the Second Amendment protected when ratified; if a contemporary law infringes on that conduct, it is presumptively unconstitutional. But, Jackson wrote, “there is no right to carry a gun onto private property without the permission of the owner.” The majority did not even contest this point, because it is uncontestable. Instead, Alito ratcheted up Bruen’s level of generality: Rather than asking if Hawaiʻi’s law actually burdens a concrete, well-defined right, he merely asked if it “hampers” an individual’s ability to take their gun anywhere they want. Because it does, he concluded, it must be supported by appropriate “historical analogues.”
He says the right to carry on private property uncontestably doesn't exist, but I'd argue that it most certainly does. At least, it does if you assume any other right continues to exist on private property, particularly with regard to businesses open to the public.
Because that's a big difference in my mind between the laws cited as supporting the vampire rule and the actual vampire rule. Saying a person can't carry a gun onto a plantation without permission, even as a black code that was never intended to be enforced evenly, is that a plantation is generally not open to the public per se. It's not a store that someone might need to enter to conduct business. It's basically a fancy farm, especially at that time, and so it's a different animal on the surface.
But if I go to a coffee shop with a friend to discuss the political issues of the day, is there a presumption that my right to do so ends at the door? Obviously not. We may be asked to leave because the owner doesn't want that in their establishment or whatever, but we're within our rights to presume we can do so.
What the vampire rule did in Hawaii was establish the Second Amendment as a second-class right. It was presumed to not exist at the door of a business, unlike any other civil liberty you care to name.
And while Stern is very upset about it, the truth is that he's simply wrong on every level, much like everyone else who is losing their freaking minds about this.
Look, if I have a Second Amendment failing, it's that I'm actually OK with signs on the door telling me I can't bring my gun into a store or other business. They do have property rights, and I absolutely respect that. Plus, frankly, I don't want to do business with them anyway if they're that anti-gun.
But to frame this as a property rights issue is ridiculous, and Stern is just one of many who have done that. In fact, my cursory understanding of Alito's decision isn't that private property owners can't bar guns from their establishments; it's that the state can't unilaterally declare them forbidden without express permission. That means stores can make that decision for themselves.
That's how it should be.
While there will be plenty of doomsaying over the next week, though, let's remember they did the same thing after Bruen, only for the homicide rate to plummet like P-Diddy's reputation. This will be no exception.
