Opinion
Gun rights attorneys are calling it “monumental” and “a huge deal,” and at least one national gun rights organization is hailing the Trump administration for turning the U.S. government’s position on the Second Amendment a full 180 degrees by submitting an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court supporting petitioners in a case challenging the constitutionality of a state gun control law.
It appears to be the first time in history the government—in this case the Department of Justice—has taken the side of gun owners. The case, known as Wolford v. Lopez, challenges Hawaii’s Act 52, an extremely restrictive gun law adopted in response to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen ruling, which struck down New York’s unconstitutional concealed carry law.
Civil rights Attorney Mark W. Smith, host of the Four Boxes Diner on YouTube, declared, “This is a huge deal, a sea change in the way the Supreme Court will be functioning in the way the Department of Justice will be interacting with the United States Supreme Court when it comes to our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This is a big deal.”
He was referring to the government’s declaration in the amicus brief that, “The United States has a substantial interest in the preservation of the right to keep and bear arms and in the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment.”
Likewise, fellow civil rights attorney William Kirk, president of Washington Gun Law and host of his own YouTube broadcast, asks his viewers, “Did you ever believe, especially during the last four years, that you would ever hear the Department of Justice have this as their official statement?”
Kirk referred to the DOJ’s Thursday brief filing as “a monumental day.”
The 29-page amicus bears some significant signatures: Solicitor General D. John Sauer, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, Deputy Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris and Vivek Suri, assistant to the Solicitor General. Dhillon is also making headlines for expanding the mission of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to include a sharp focus on protecting and enforcing the Second Amendment.
As reported previously by AmmoLand News, the establishment media is attacking Dhillon on the contention that she is decimating the Civil Rights Division staff at the risk of abandoning the division’s traditional job of protecting voting rights and pursuing discrimination against minorities. By taking this approach, the media is literally—perhaps intentionally—ignoring the division’s expanded role of defending the Second Amendment.
The brief is a gold mine of quotable quotes.
“Hawaii’s novel default rule defies—indeed, effectively nullifies—the “general right to publicly carry arms” that Bruen recognized…” the brief states. “That is no accident. The structure and operation of Hawaii’s law reveal that the law serves no legitimate purpose and instead seeks only to inhibit the exercise of the right to bear arms.”
In another paragraph, the brief recalls, “Until NYSRPA v. Bruen…Hawaii maintained a may-issue regime for licenses to carry firearms. Individuals could apply for carry licenses only in narrow circumstances, and police chiefs retained broad discretion to deny applications. In practice, that may-issue regime operated more like a no-issue regime. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit noted that Hawaii had issued ‘only four concealed carry licenses’ to private citizens ‘in the past eighteen years’ and that, in one county, ‘not a single concealed carry license ha[d] ever been granted.’”
Later, the brief notes, “Under traditional property law, a person who enters private property open to the public does not need specific permission from the owner to carry a gun—or, for that matter, to carry anything else, or to engage in any other constitutionally protected con duct, such as prayer or speech…Hawaii’s singling out of firearms confirms that the default rule has nothing to do with protecting property rights. For everything but firearms, Hawaii presumes that owners welcome it on their property unless they affirmatively object.”
And then there is this: “The scope and operation of Hawaii’s default rule thus establish that the rule serves no legitimate objective and that it instead seeks simply to impede the carrying of firearms. That is plainly unconstitutional.”
Into this unprecedented legal drama steps the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which notes in a Friday statement that Hawaii is one of the 12 states it named in an online petition to Attorney General Pamela Bondi, calling on her Second Amendment Task Force to investigate for patterns of 2A infringements and impairments.
“We’re hoping the submission of this important amicus brief signals the beginning of the administration’s promised effort to defend the Second Amendment from infringements enacted over the years by various states,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “It is time to end these blatant and deliberate constitutional violations, and we finally have an administration willing to accomplish that task.”
The DOJ amicus brief identifies five states, including Hawaii, which “reacted to Bruen by enacting the type of default rule at issue here.”
By no small coincidence, all five states—Hawaii, California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York—are on the“Dirty Dozen” list specified in the CCRKBA online petition, which is still gathering signatures.
As attorney Kirk acknowledges in his YouTube presentation, it’s always possible the high court may not take the Hawaii case. But at least now, for what appears to be the first time ever, the Justice Department has jumped into a legal battle on the side of individuals fighting to protect their Second Amendment rights.
While it would be conjecture to suggest this is really what the political left fears and finds so offensive about a second Trump administration, the notion also cannot simply be dismissed because of the political earthquake which would almost certainly result from an aggressive DOJ campaign to right what Second Amendment advocates contend have been decades of wrongs against a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights.
Media Bashes Dhillon, Ignores Her Civil Rights Div. 2A Focus
CCRKBA Launches Petition to Bondi for ‘Dirty Dozen’ Investigations
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
