Category: News

The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared skeptical of the constitutionality of a Hawaii law that sharply restricts where people can carry firearms — a case that may offer a strong indication of how far the justices will go in their push to loosen restrictions on guns.

Hawaii’s law bans people from carrying firearms on private property open to the public unless they have the owner’s consent. The court’s conservatives sharply questioned an attorney defending Hawaii’s law, suggesting it unduly burdened a constitutional right to bear arms.

The decision will reverberate beyond Hawaii because four other states, including California and New York, have enacted similar laws in response to a landmark 2022 ruling by the high court that made it easier to challenge gun limits.

The default rule in most states is that gun owners can carry firearms onto private property open to the public until they have been told otherwise. The Hawaii law flipped the rule. Property owners generally have the right to restrict guns on land closed to the public.

“You are relegating the Second Amendment to second-class status,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told Neal Katyal, an attorney for Hawaii.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the First Amendment permitted a political candidate to walk up to someone’s door to campaign, and he questioned why Hawaii could place limits on another constitutional right in the same context. He said gun rights are often disfavored.

“You say it’s different for the Second Amendment,” Roberts said to Katyal. “What exactly is the distinction?”

The court’s three liberal justices all indicated they thought Hawaii’s law probably passed constitutional muster. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that Hawaii had long had some of the nation’s strictest gun-control laws and cited polling that indicates the restriction on public carry is popular.

“Nothing about Hawaii’s customs, tradition or culture creates an expectation that the general public carries guns wherever they go, correct?” Sotomayor said.

A trio of gun owners with concealed-carry permits and a gun rights group challenged the Hawaii law, which was enacted in 2023. The Trump administration is backing the gun owners.

The law also bans the carrying of firearms in 15 sensitive locations, including bars, parks, restaurants that serve alcohol and youth centers. The legality of those restrictions is not at issue in the Supreme Court case.

The petitioners argue Hawaii’s law violates the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision inNew York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen,which found that “the Second Amendment guarantees a general right to public carry.”

That ruling held that any restriction on firearms must have precedent rooted in American history. The decision has sparked thousands of challenges to gun-control laws across the country, resulting in rulings that have relaxed restrictions on high-capacity magazines, age limits for firearms purchases and other rules. The decision has also created some confusion among judges about how to conduct the historical analysis.

The Supreme Court clarified the Bruen decision last term in a case in which it held that states could bar people with domestic violence restraining orders from obtaining guns. The court found modern gun restrictions need not have a “historical twin” but rather a “historical analogue.”

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh questioned whether Hawaii’s law was based on precedents deeply rooted in American history. “There’s no sufficient history,” he said. “Case closed.”

The court has largely expanded gun rights since the Bruen ruling, but not in all cases. In one ruling, the justices struck down a federal ban on bump stocks, devices that allow semiautomatic rifles to fire hundreds of rounds a minute. In a major case last term, the justices upheld Biden-era restrictions on ghost guns.

In Hawaii’s case,a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the statelaw in 2023, but a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with the state last year. The appeals court cited historical laws from New Jersey and Louisiana that were “dead ringers” for Hawaii’s statute as it upheld the state law.

The ruling created a split among appeals courts because a Second Circuit panel struck down a similar New York law.

Alan A. Beck, an attorney for the gun owners and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, said the Ninth Circuit ruling illegally constrains their rights since Hawaii’s law essentially outlaws public carry in much of the state. He also said the historical precedents that the appeals court relied on were outliers that should be discounted.

“There’s a clear body of evidence this law was passed to undermine Bruen and the Second Amendment,” Beck said.

Katyal countered that the state’s law had precedent in anti-poaching laws and — controversially during arguments — a Louisiana “Black Code” statute aimed at preventing African Americans from possessing firearms.

“There is no constitutional right that every invitation to enter property is a right to bear arms,” Katyal said.

The case is not the only Second Amendment challenge the justices will hear this term.

The court will also decide the constitutionality of a federal law that bans habitual drug users from possessing firearms. Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, was convicted of violating the law in 2024. Biden later pardoned him.

The Trump administration, which usually supports gun rights, urged the high court to uphold that ban.

“By disqualifying only habitual users of illegal drugs from possessing firearms, the statute imposes a limited, inherently temporary restriction — one which the individual can remove at any time simply by ceasing his unlawful drug use,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief

As the Trump administration intervenes in Venezuela, readies troops for a possible deployment to Minnesota, and threatens to seize Greenland, the Catholic archbishop for the U.S. armed forces said it “would be morally acceptable” for troops to disobey what violated their conscience.

Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio is one of a chorus of Catholic leaders questioning the administration’s use of force. His comments also underscored the mounting concern being voiced by the first American pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, as well as his top cardinals in the United States, over the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

“Greenland is a territory of Denmark,” Broglio told the BBC Sunday. “It does not seem really reasonable that the United States would attack and occupy a friendly nation.”

Asked whether he was “worried” about the military personnel in his pastoral care, Broglio replied: “I am obviously worried because they could be put in a situation where they’re being ordered to do something which is morally questionable.”

“It would be very difficult for a soldier or a Marine or a sailor to by himself disobey an order,” he said. “But strictly speaking, he or she would be, within the realm of their own conscience, it would be morally acceptable to disobey that order, but that’s perhaps putting that individual in an untenable situation — and that’s my concern.”

As head of the D.C.-based Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, Broglio oversees the chaplains who serve Catholics and others at U.S. military bases, Veterans Affairs healthcare facilities and diplomatic missions worldwide.

A former president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Ohio native is seen as a church conservative. As the Obama administration was ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, he spoke against allowing LGBT troops to serve openly. When the Trump administration disqualified transgender people from serving in the military, he said “sexual orientation and gender identity issues” reflected an “incorrect societal attitude.”

He has also criticized military strikes on boats the administration says are smuggling drugs. U.S. forces have killed at least 115 people in more than 30 such strikes in international waters in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September.

“In the fight against drugs, the end never justifies the means,” he said in a statement last month. “No one can ever be ordered to commit an immoral act, and even those suspected of committing a crime are entitled to due process under the law.”

He issued the statement after the Washington Post reported that commanders in the first known boat strike saw survivors and ordered a second barrage to kill them. He did not refer to the incident, but appeared to allude to it.

“As the moral principle forbidding the intentional killing of noncombatants is inviolable,” he said, “it would be an illegal and immoral order to kill deliberately survivors on a vessel who pose no immediate lethal threat to our armed forces.”

Trump is set to arrive Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, at which European leaders plan to discuss his demand to seize and annex Greenland — a demand that has transformed the annual gathering of the world’s political and financial elite into an emergency diplomatic summit.

Members of the military take an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. They swear an oath of enlistment to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies” and “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me,” according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They have an obligation not to follow “manifestly unlawful orders,” but such situations are rare and legally fraught, The Washington Post reported. Military personnel can be court-martialed for failing to obey lawful orders.

The Pentagon in November announced an investigation into Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), a prominent Trump critic and combat veteran, after he spoke in a video with five other Democrats reminding U.S. service members of their duty under military law to disobey illegal orders. The message move criticized by Trump at the time as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR,” and the other lawmakers said this month they were now under investigation by his administration for the video.

Kelly filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking to reverse Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s letter of censure and effort to potentially demote him in rank.

Broglio’s comments echoed concerns made in a joint statement Monday by the three highest-ranking U.S. Catholic archbishops, who warned that a resurgence in the use or threat of military force, including by the United States in Venezuela and Greenland, had thrown “the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world” into question.

“The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace,” wrote Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark.

In the days after the U.S. operation in Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro, and after Trump said he was now “in charge” of that nation, the pope insisted on respect for Venezuela’s sovereignty.

In a Jan. 9 meeting with diplomats in Vatican City, Leo decried a new era in which multilateralism is being replaced by “a zeal for war” and “peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.” He did not name the United States.

Broglio, in his comment on the U.S. boat strikes, invoked just war theory. In Catholic teaching, the “defensive use of military force” against an aggressor may be legitimate as a final resort under strict criteria.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the damage inflicted by the aggressor must be “lasting, grave and certain”; all other means of stopping it “must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective”; there must be “serious prospects of success”; and the action “must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”