The attorney who just won a massive Second Amendment case at the Supreme Court is ripping Hawaii for trying to justify its gun ban using a racist Reconstruction-era law aimed at disarming freed Black Americans.
Kevin O’Grady, who represented the plaintiffs in Wolford v. Lopez, told Fox News Digital that Hawaii’s reliance on the Black Code was disgraceful.
“It is disgraceful that any state would rely on a law specifically aimed at taking away the Second Amendment rights or any constitutional right of Black Americans as it was at that time.”
The Supreme Court struck down Hawaii’s concealed-carry restriction Thursday in a 6-3 decision. The law required licensed gun owners to get express permission before carrying firearms onto private property open to the public — what gun-rights groups dubbed the “vampire rule” because lawful carriers had to be “invited in” before entering businesses.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, rejected Hawaii’s defense outright. He called the 1865 Louisiana statute Hawaii cited a “tainted artifact” enacted to disarm newly freed Black Americans after the Civil War.
The law cannot be taken seriously as evidence of the Second Amendment’s original meaning, Alito wrote.
Hawaii had tried to justify its restriction under the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, which requires modern gun laws to align with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The state cited several historical laws, including the Louisiana Black Code that made it unlawful to carry firearms onto another person’s property without the owner’s consent.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, arguing the Court should have first decided whether the Louisiana law itself violated the Second Amendment or whether the problem was racially discriminatory enforcement. She outlined two possibilities but claimed the Court never resolved the question before excluding the law.
“Either history does matter, and if so, all potentially relevant historical experiences must be thoroughly examined. Or, it does not, and the Court should just admit that the test it has created is boundless.”
Gun-rights groups fired back immediately.
Hannah Hill, vice president of the National Association of Gun Rights, pointed to Alito’s majority opinion: the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted specifically to respond to laws like the Black Codes that stripped freed Black Americans of constitutional rights.
“That right there is your answer,” Hill said. “Yes, there was a historical tradition — they enacted a constitutional amendment to fix that deprivation of rights, and that is also in the Constitution now, so I think she should probably go back to law school.”
Tyler Yzaguirre, president of Second Amendment Institute, echoed the criticism.
“Those laws were not legitimate expressions of our Nation’s constitutional tradition; they were examples of government using its power to deprive Americans of a fundamental right,” Yzaguirre told Fox News Digital.
The ruling makes clear: businesses can still ban guns by posting a “no firearms” policy. But Hawaii cannot treat every business as off-limits to licensed gun owners unless the owner specifically allows firearms.
O’Grady summed up the stakes: “We fully expected that the Supreme Court would identify that as the kind of law that one absolutely should not look to determine whether or not something is constitutional because this is the perfect example of something which is not constitutional.”
