Two Supreme Court rulings in June 2026 reinforced the trend toward broad gun rights under the Second Amendment, overriding attempts to limit concealed carry and to punish the ownership of guns by drug users.

The ruling in the concealed carry case, Wolford v. Lopez, was no surprise. It followed the expected 6-3 division of the conservative and liberal wings of the court to block the state of Hawaii from making concealed carry a practical impossibility.

As a longtime observer of the Supreme Court, I believe the unanimous ruling in the second case, U.S. v. Hemani, is more surprising from the conservative court. That’s because it strikes down the long-standing federal law restricting gun ownership by consumers of controlled substances. The ruling suggests the current court is so pro-gun it has decided it must also be pro-drugs.

Concealed carry protected

In Wolford v. Lopez, the gist of the ruling comes in the first sentence: “For years, the State of Hawaii made it almost impossible to obtain a license to carry a firearm.”

After the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen ruling recognized the right to carry a concealed handgun in public for personal defense, Hawaii continued to attempt to restrict the right. The state’s recent gun law flipped the script on allowable concealed carry regulations: Rather than the normal limitation that a property owner can ban concealed carry by posting a sign, all concealed carry was assumed to be banned unless the owner posted a sign allowing it.

As Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the decision, summarized the effect of the law, citizens would “be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats.”

If those restrictions make concealed carry........

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