By John Kruzel

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court was set on Tuesday to weigh a challenge to a Hawaii law restricting the carry of handguns on private property that is open to the public, such as most businesses, without the owner’s permission.

The court will hear arguments in an appeal by the challengers – three Hawaii residents with concealed-carry licenses and a Honolulu-based gun rights advocacy group – of a lower court’s ruling against them. The lower court found that Hawaii’s measure likely complies with the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. 

Hawaii’s law requires “express authorization” to bring a handgun onto private property open to the public, either as verbal or written authorization, including “clear and conspicuous signage.”

Hawaii argued in court papers that its law strikes a proper balance between “the right to bear arms and property owners’ undisputed right to choose whether to permit armed entry onto their property.”

The plaintiffs sued to challenge Hawaii’s restrictions weeks after Democratic Governor Josh Green signed the measure into law in 2023. They are being backed by President Donald Trump’s administration, which argued in court papers that Hawaii’s law “deprives individuals who want to exercise their Second Amendment rights of their ability to go about their daily lives.”

“A person carrying a firearm cannot pick up a cup of coffee, get lunch at a drive-through restaurant, stop for gas, enter a parking lot, go into a store, buy groceries or perform other routine tasks that require setting foot on private property,” Justice Department lawyers wrote.

A federal judge preliminarily blocked Hawaii’s restrictions. But the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely ruled against the law’s challengers, prompting their appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court did not take up an aspect of the legal challenge that focused on the law’s provisions banning the carrying of handguns at beaches, bars and other sensitive places.

In a nation bitterly divided over how to address persistent firearms violence including frequent mass shootings, the Supreme Court often has taken an expansive view of Second Amendment protections. The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, widened gun rights in three major rulings in 2008, 2010 and most recently in 2022.

The plaintiffs in the Hawaii case have cited that 2022 ruling’s holding that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense. That landmark 6-3 decision, called New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, was powered by the court’s six conservatives, over dissents from the three liberal justices.

The Bruen decision invalidated New York state’s limits on carrying concealed handguns outside the home. In doing so, the court created a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying that restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” not simply advance an important government interest.

The court in 2024 ruled 8-1 that a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns satisfied the court’s stringent history-and-tradition test.

In March, the court will hear a bid by Trump’s administration to defend a federal law that bars users of illegal drugs from owning guns.

(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)

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