The Supreme Court is running into a problem: There appears to be a gap between what the court writes in its opinions and what the justices in the majority actually mean.

Over the last year, the conservative justices have chastised lower court judges for not following their unsigned orders in unrelated cases. Those orders often don’t have a majority opinion upon which other judges can rely, and they typically aren’t seen as a final view on the merits.

In a case in August, however, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh gratuitously accused a lower court judge of “defy[ing]” the Supreme Court’s rulings—a cardinal sin in the federal judiciary—because the judge blocked the Trump administration from freezing certain grants by the National Institutes of Health.

“Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote. He pointed to an unrelated stay the court had issued in a Department of Education case, which involved different federal grants, different laws, and a completely different agency. I noted afterward that the justices were essentially asking the lower courts to read their minds and guess the right outcome instead of applying existing law and precedent.

This problem was originally confined to the court’s shadow docket cases, where things have proven to be a little more freewheeling. At oral arguments in Wolford v. Lopez on Tuesday, however, the telepathy gap now appears to be affecting the court’s merits cases—the ones that receive full briefing, oral argument, and a written opinion—as well.

Wolford is a follow-up case to New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen, the court’s landmark Second Amendment ruling in 2022. In Bruen, the conservative majority struck down New York’s restrictive law for obtaining a concealed-carry permit and announced a new judicial test for evaluating whether a gun restriction violated the Second Amendment. (More on that test later.)

After the ruling in Bruen, multiple states revised their existing concealed-carry laws to comply with what they thought was the new legal framework. Among them was Hawaii, which did not allow concealed carry at all prior to Bruen. In addition to other changes, the Hawaii legislature passed a law that forbids gun owners from bringing firearms on private property that is accessible to the public without the owner’s permission.

This “default-property” rule flips the burden from the property owner to the gun........

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