June 29, 2026
Sean Maloney, Attorney with Second Call Defense
In what may be the most consequential Second Amendment ruling since the Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, the Supreme Court today drove a stake through Hawaii’s so-called “vampire rule” — and the implications stretch far beyond the islands.
In a 6-3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez, the Court struck down Hawaii’s law requiring licensed concealed carry permit holders to obtain explicit permission from a property owner before bringing a firearm onto privately owned property open to the public. Justice Samuel Alito authored the majority opinion, finding the law unconstitutional under the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. Justice Elena Kagan issued a dissenting opinion, which the Court’s other two liberal justices joined to complete a 6–3 split. The ruling closes a chapter that began with three Maui County residents — Jason Wolford, Alison Wolford, and Atom Kasprzycki — who, along with the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, had the audacity to argue that a constitutional right shouldn’t evaporate the moment you step into a gas station, pharmacy, or diner.
Why They Called It the “Vampire Rule”
The nickname is darkly fitting. In vampire mythology, the undead cannot cross the threshold of a private home without being invited in. Hawaii’s law applied the same logic to law-abiding gun owners: carry your legally permitted firearm near any business open to the public, and you are automatically committing a misdemeanor — punishable by up to a year in prison — unless the property owner has affirmatively posted permission for you to be there.
Think about what that means in practice. You’re a licensed concealed carry holder running your Saturday errands. You pull into a gas station, pop into a pharmacy, and grab a bite at a local diner. Under Hawaii’s law, you were potentially committing three separate crimes, because none of those businesses had put up a sign explicitly saying guns were welcome. The default was criminal. The burden was on the citizen to prove permission, not on the government to prove danger.
Gun rights advocates argued — correctly, as it turned out — that this effectively abolished the right to carry a firearm in public altogether. What good is a carry permit if carrying is presumptively illegal everywhere you might actually go?
The Bruen Framework: A Two-Step Test That Is Changing Everything
To understand Wolford, you have to understand the legal engine driving it: the Bruen standard established in 2022.
Before Bruen, courts typically applied a balancing test, weighing public safety interests against individual gun rights. Judges could uphold almost any gun restriction if they found the government’s safety rationale compelling enough. The Second Amendment, in practice, often functioned as a second-class right.
Bruen threw that approach out entirely. Under the new framework, courts ask two questions in sequence:
Step one: Does the plain text of the Second Amendment cover the person and the conduct in question? If a law-abiding citizen wants to carry a lawfully owned firearm, the answer is almost certainly yes.
Step two: If the text covers it, the burden shifts entirely to the government. To defend a modern gun restriction, the government must demonstrate that a genuinely similar regulation existed in the founding era — around 1791 or 1868. Abstract safety arguments are not enough. The government must find real historical analogues.
This is a demanding test, and it has been quietly reshaping Second Amendment law ever since Bruen was decided. Hawaii’s vampire rule was always a weak candidate to survive it.
Hemani Set the Stage
Wolford did not arrive in isolation. Just days ago, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Hemani, and that unanimous ruling cast a long shadow over Hawaii’s case.
Ali Danial Hemani was a Texas man who admitted to using marijuana roughly every other day. He kept a firearm in his home. He was not accused of being armed while intoxicated, not accused of threatening anyone, not accused of any violent conduct whatsoever. The government’s theory was simply this: because he fell into the legal category of an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance under federal law, he could be automatically stripped of his right to possess a firearm.
The Supreme Court unanimously rejected that theory. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the Court, examined the historical analogues the government offered — primarily 18th-century laws targeting “habitual drunkards” — and found them inadequate. The founding era’s approach to intoxication and firearms was narrow and situational: you couldn’t fire a weapon in a public square while drunk, for instance. But the Founders never created a sweeping, categorical, lifetime disarmament of citizens simply because they consumed an intoxicating substance while sober at home.
Because the historical analogy failed, the modern blanket ban fell.
Hemani mattered for Wolford because it showed the Court’s willingness to apply the Bruen test rigorously, without softening it. Hawaii had tried to defend its vampire rule by pointing to 19th-century anti-trespass laws — statutes that historically barred armed intruders from entering private farms and plantations without permission. But as gun rights advocates argued, those laws were designed to protect enclosed domestic estates from hostile strangers, not to prohibit a paying customer from lawfully carrying a firearm into the restaurant where he’s about to buy lunch.
While Justices Sotomayor and Kagan wrote separately to express ongoing institutional concerns with the historical framework, they fully agreed with the unconstitutionality of the government’s overreach.
The historical analogy, in other words, didn’t fit. And under Bruen, a bad analogy means an unconstitutional law.
What the Ruling Means for the Rest of the Country
Hawaii was one of five states with laws presumptively restricting licensed carry on publicly accessible private property. Similar laws in New York, California, and Maryland are all facing fierce lower-court fights. Now, with Wolford decided, those restrictions face a much steeper constitutional climb.
The broader stakes are significant. For years after Bruen, several restrictive states shifted tactics. Unable to deny carry permits outright, they instead designated enormous swaths of public life as “sensitive places” where carry was forbidden — government buildings, parks, beaches, restaurants serving alcohol, hospitals, museums, public transit, and more. Then they added the private property default rule as a catch-all: even if a business wasn’t on the sensitive-places list, licensed carriers were still presumptively prohibited unless given permission.
The effect was to make the right to carry theoretical at best, illusory at worst.
Wolford doesn’t resolve every sensitive-places question — those battles will continue in courts across the country. But the ruling firmly establishes one constitutional principle: a state cannot flip the presumption of a fundamental right. Carry is lawful. The government, not the citizen, bears the burden of justifying restrictions. And that justification must be rooted in genuine historical tradition, not modern policy preferences dressed up in founding-era costume.
The Power Still Held by Property Owners
One point deserves emphasis, because it’s been lost in much of the political noise surrounding this case: Wolford does not prevent private business owners from banning firearms on their property.
It never did.
The constitutional problem was never that a business owner might say “no guns here.” Private property rights are real, and a business owner retains full authority to post a sign prohibiting carry. The constitutional problem was that the government had stepped in and declared that every business was a gun-free zone by default, unless the owner actively opted out. That is the government commandeering private property rights to do the work of gun control — and that is what the Court rejected.
Under the ruling, the default flips: lawful carry is permitted, and business owners who wish to exclude firearms remain free to say so. The power stays with the owner, not with the state.
What Comes Next
If history is any guide, some states will respond to Wolford the way they responded to Bruen — with creative new legislation designed to restrict carry through other means. Hawaii’s legislature had already been drafting workaround bills while the case was still pending, a sign that its politicians had little confidence in the outcome.
Those efforts will face immediate legal challenges, and they will face them under a constitutional framework that is now more clearly defined than it has been at any point in recent memory. The Bruen test is not weakening. Hemani demonstrated that the Court intends to apply it with rigor. Wolford demonstrates that the same rigor applies to state-level restrictions on where law-abiding citizens can carry.
For tens of millions of Americans who hold carry permits, the message from today’s ruling is straightforward: your right to bear arms does not vanish when you walk through a door into a privately owned business open to the public. The government has to show a real, historical reason to take that right away. And “we’d prefer you didn’t” is not a reason the Constitution recognizes.
The vampire rule is dead. The right to carry lives on.
Sources: Wolford v. Lopez (No. 24-1046, decided June 25, 2026); United States v. Hemani (No. 24-1234, decided June 18, 2026); NYSRPA v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022); reporting from CBS News, NBC News, and AmmoLand.
About Sean Maloney
Sean Maloney is a Defense Attorney specializing in firearm-related law in State and Federal Courts, covering Concealed Carry, 2nd Amendment rights, gun rights restoration, NFA defense, FFL representation, and Federal NICS appeals. A firearms law consultant and expert witness, Sean also serves as a Continuing Legal Education Instructor on Federal and State Firearms Laws and is a national speaker on 2nd Amendment rights, self-defense, lethal force, and concealed carry. Beyond the courtroom, he is a multi-discipline firearms instructor, Legislative Director and Lobbyist for the Buckeye Firearms Association, and Co-Founder of Second Call Defense.