The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would review a Hawaii law that forbids gun owners from bringing firearms on private property without the property owner’s explicit permission. If the law falls, the court could make it significantly harder for states and cities to keep guns out of everyday life.

Wolford v. Lopez traces its origins to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions that rewrote the nation’s gun-related jurisprudence. The court’s conservative majority first recognized an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller and then applied it to the states in McDonald v. Chicago in 2010. After that, the high court did not take up another Second Amendment case for 10 years, despite many opportunities to do so.

Gun rights advocates who hoped that Heller and McDonald would lead to a sea change in the nation’s gun laws were quickly disappointed. Lower courts throughout the country left many existing gun regulations intact, citing broad language in Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller that signaled the court’s desire to largely preserve the status quo.

“Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment,” Scalia wrote, “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

The lower courts’ general refusal to expand the Second Amendment’s scope—and the Supreme Court’s decade-long refusal to intervene—led Justice Clarence Thomas to complain in dissenting opinions that the court had reduced the Second Amendment to a “second-class right.” So too it might have remained had the court not undergone a major rightward lurch during President Donald Trump’s first term.

In 2022, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to New York’s restrictive concealed-carry law in New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen. (The court originally planned to hear the........

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