How The New Republic Lies to Hide Reality of Hawaiian Court's Gun Take

by Tom Knighton, Townhall, October 30, 2024

The state of Hawaii has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Some of those regulations make New York and California gun control activists green with envy because they can't do the same just yet.

OK, that might be a bit extreme, but they're bad. And the state supreme court is just as bad. What's worse is how The New Republic blatantly lied about what that court actually said regarding the Second Amendment by hiding their actually comments.

Now, The New Republic loves to prattle on about gun control as if it's some kind of unquestioned good. I see their stuff pretty regularly and most of the time, it's just a regurgitation of debunked claims, biased studies, and utter nonsense that's par for the course in the media as a whole. TNR just takes these points, adds a flourish of progressive insanity, and calls it quality commentary.

But at least they can point to someone else making the claims in most cases, thus preventing them from being accused of falsehood in and of itself.

Yet in talking about a Hawaii case, they crossed the line.

A lot of people disagree with the Supreme Court these days. A potential Second Amendment case from Hawaii could give the court’s conservative majority a chance to push back on some of those critics.

In Wilson v. Hawaii, the defendant is asking the Supreme Court to side with a petitioner who was charged with unlawful possession of a gun and criminal trespass. The Hawaii Supreme Court rejected his arguments on various grounds—and took the opportunity to rebuke its federal counterpart for its recent Second Amendment rulings in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen and others.

“The Supreme Court makes state and federal courts use a fuzzy ‘history and traditions’ test to evaluate laws designed to promote public safety,” Justice Todd Eddins wrote for the Hawaii court. “It scraps the traditional techniques used by federal and state courts to review laws passed by the People to protect people. And by turning the test into history and nothing else, it dismantles workable methods to interpret firearms laws. All to advance a chosen interpretive modality.”

Now, the quote is true, as far as it goes, but the Hawaii State Supreme Court didn't try to "rebuke" the Supreme Court. It basically denied that the Second Amendment even existed in Hawaii in the first place, even after acknowledging that their own state constitution also included protection of the right to keep and bear arms.

From our sister site, Bearing Arms:

You see, not only did they figure that their own text from their own state constitution with language identical to the Second Amendment means something completely different but also that their state's history and culture completely override people's rights anyway.

Instead of American history, the Hawaii court looked at the island’s pre-American history for guidance on the protections provided by its state constitution.

“We reject Wilson’s constitutional challenges,” the court wrote. “Conventional interpretive modalities and Hawaiʻi’s historical tradition of firearm regulation rule out an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Hawaiʻi Constitution.”

...

“The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities,” the Hawaiian Supreme Court wrote. “The history of the Hawaiian Islands does not include a society where armed people move about the community to possibly combat the deadly aims of others.”

Seriously?

Apparently, this is, in fact, a serious ruling by the Hawaii state supreme court. More accurately, it's intended to be a serious ruling, because nothing about this feels serious to me. These "arguments" look like this draft was meant as an internal joke and got released by accident.

The whole "spirit of Aloha" is essentially a claim that the Second Amendment doesn't actually apply to Hawaii simply because they're their own state.

That's not a "rebuke" of the Court's decision in Bruen. That's simply pretending you don't have to listen because you're special.

But if states were going to decide their own history trumps the rulings of the Supreme Court, then what's to stop a Southern state from bringing back segregation because the "spirit of Dixie" or some such nonsense supersedes the Court's authority to rule on the constitutional protections of individual rights?

No one is talking about that, of course, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is that The New Republic hides the middle finger with no judicial reasoning behind the word "rebuke."

Either the writer knows that this wasn't so much a rebuke as a claim that the rules don't apply to Hawaii if they don't want them to or they're literally too stupid to be opining on literally anything short of which boy band is the dreamiest. Either he's willfully twisting the word--a lie--to try to convince people the state's court offered up sound legal reasoning why Bruen was decided wrongly or he doesn't understand language enough to effectively communicate important ideas.

Or, you know, it's the New Republic. It's entirely possible for it to be both.

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Hawaii Takes Aim at the Supreme Court’s Most Chaotic Gun Rights Ruling

from The New Republic, Oct 30, 2024 (excerpt)

In Wilson v. Hawaii, the defendant is asking the Supreme Court to side with a petitioner who was charged with unlawful possession of a gun and criminal trespass. The Hawaii Supreme Court rejected his arguments on various grounds—and took the opportunity to rebuke its federal counterpart for its recent Second Amendment rulings in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen and others....

… The irony is that while Hawaii’s highest court had effectively renounced Bruen with its ruling in Wilson’s case, so too has the Supreme Court itself in a follow-up case. I’ve written before how Bruen led to chaos in the lower courts as state and federal judges reached wildly different interpretations of “history and tradition” on major gun restrictions. In United States v. Rahimi, the court set out to address those problems in a challenge to the federal ban on gun ownership for domestic abusers.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, archly noted that “some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases.” Heller and Bruen “were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” in which only laws existing in 1791 could survive. Instead of searching for a direct historical analogue, Roberts explained, “the appropriate analysis involves considering whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” That gives lower courts far more leeway to uphold laws without historical analogues.

Though the Supreme Court claimed it was applying and clarifying Bruen, the practical effect was to rewrite it entirely. Thomas, the author of Bruen, acknowledged as much by authoring the lone dissent in Rahimi and applying it strictly to the case at hand. “After [Bruen], this Court’s directive was clear: A firearm regulation that falls within the Second Amendment’s plain text is unconstitutional unless it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” he wrote. “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue. Therefore, I respectfully dissent.”

While the Supreme Court will still not look lightly upon the Hawaii court’s defiance and criticism, there are some hurdles that may prevent it from readily taking up Wilson’s case to overturn it. In its opposition brief, the state of Hawaii argued that Wilson’s case was procedurally unsound. The state noted that Wilson could have easily challenged the concealed-carry law with a civil lawsuit instead of by bringing it in a criminal appeal. “When [he] was arrested, he was carrying his illegally acquired firearm while committing the offense of first degree criminal trespass,” it added. “Unlike the Bruen plaintiffs, nothing about [his] conduct in this case was remotely ‘law-abiding.’”

The state of Hawaii argued, as it did in its own courts, that Wilson had no standing to challenge the concealed-carry law in an unrelated criminal appeal. It pointedly noted that Wilson himself does not disagree with that conclusion since he did not dispute the state Supreme Court’s ruling on standing in his own petition. And since standing in this case is based on state law, not federal law, the Supreme Court would also have no grounds to overturn it, the state claimed.

Finally, and perhaps most notably, the state argued that the Supreme Court can’t overturn the court’s ruling because the court was interpreting the state constitution, not the federal one. When a state Supreme Court interprets a state constitution, it typically has the final say in the matter. The state also raised other procedural issues that might wave the justices off from taking up Wilson’s case.

Will that be enough? The justices might be reluctant to take another major Second Amendment case so soon after Bruen and Rahimi, preferring instead to let the lower courts digest last year’s ruling before making any other significant moves. At the same time, it might be hard for them to stomach a state Supreme Court ruling that defies one of their own decisions—definitely in spirit and, according to gun rights groups, in substance. A decision on whether to take up or turn down the case could come at any time.…

read … Hawaii Takes Aim at the Supreme Court’s Most Chaotic Gun Rights Ruling