The Supreme Court’s embarrassing new Second Amendment decision, explained

Every Second Amendment case handed down by this Court is arbitrary, because the Court’s leading precedent makes no sense.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii gun law, claiming that it violates the Second Amendment. As is almost always the case in the Court’s Second Amendment decisions, Wolford v. Lopez was decided along party lines. The Republican justices agreed with the Republican Party’s position that gun regulations are bad, while the Democratic justices agreed with the Democratic Party’s position that gun regulations are good.

Regrettably, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Wolford v. Lopez relies on the Court’s previous decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). Bruen is one of the most widely criticized Supreme Court decisions within the federal judiciary itself — in a 2024 dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions, some of them written by Donald Trump appointees, which warned that judges simply cannot figure out how Bruen is supposed to work.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Briefly, Bruen requires judges hearing Second Amendment disputes to ask whether a modern-day gun law that is being challenged in court is “relevantly similar” to a law that existed when the Constitution was written. The Court has offered little guidance on just how similar the two laws may be, and Alito’s opinion does little to clarify Bruen.

While his opinion spends a great deal of time rehashing past Second Amendment decisions and criticizing Hawaii for enacting many restrictions on gun owners, Alito devotes only six pages to the question of whether the law at issue in Wolford is similar to an old law, and only about three pages on Hawaii’s strongest argument.

Worse, Hawaii actually identified........

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