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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Supreme Court takes case that could allow more guns in malls and
restaurants
By John Fritze, CNN
Updated:
10:50 AM EDT, Fri October 3, 2025
Source: CNN
The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide if states may bar people from
carrying guns on private property without permission from the property
owner, wading into a thorny Second Amendment dispute that could expand
carry rights in malls, restaurants and stores.
It is the first major Second Amendment case the 6-3 conservative court
has agreed to hear in more than a year. In recent years the court has
decided a number of high-profile Second Amendment cases in ways that
have expanded access to guns.
The court granted five new cases on Friday as it builds out a new term
that will begin on Monday and run through June.
The new term is shaping up to be one of enormous consequence, with
cases dealing with executive power during President Donald Trump’s
second term, transgender rights and the future prospects of a landmark
civil rights era law to protect minority voters.
In the guns case, Hawaii enacted its law in 2023 in response to the
Supreme Court’s that made it easier for Americans to obtain carry
permits. That decision struck down a New York law that required
residents to show “proper cause” to carry a handgun.
The appeals court was “absolutely right to say it’s constitutional
to prohibit guns on private property unless the owner says they want
guns there,” said Janet Carter, managing director of Second Amendment
litigation at Everytown Law. “This law respects people’s right to
be safe on their own property, and we urge the Supreme Court to uphold
it.”
Previously, the state’s law allowed someone with a permit to carry
their handgun into a store, for instance, unless the property owner
explicitly prohibited it. The new law flipped that around and required
unambiguous written or verbal authorization. The law also barred the
carrying of guns on beaches and in parks as well as bars and
restaurants that serve alcohol.
Three gun owners who hold carry permits sued, along with a gun rights
group, claiming the new law and an appeals court decision upholding it
rendered “illusory the right to carry in public.”
Five states – Hawaii, California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York
– enacted similar restrictions, according to the Trump
administration, which urged the Supreme Court to hear the case.
The administration told the high court that people could bring
“bicycles, roller skates, protest banners, muddy shoes, dripping
umbrellas, melting ice cream cones” into private stores without
permission.
“Only if someone wants to carry a gun must he obtain ‘express
authorization’ under the arbitrary presumption that all property
owners would view guns differently,” the Department of Justice said.
Anne Lopez, the Democratic attorney general of Hawaii, argued that the
state’s law “represents a permissible effort to vindicate the
rights of Hawai‘i’s citizens to exclude armed individuals from
their private property.”
A federal district court in Hawaii preliminarily barred the state from
enforcing the law, but the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of
Appeals reversed that decision.
“Nothing in the text of the Second Amendment or otherwise suggests
that a private property owner – even owners who open their private
property to the public – must allow persons who bear arms to
enter,” the appeals court wrote in a unanimous opinion.
Undergirding the fight over Hawaii’s law is the Supreme Court’s
requirement that judges look to US history when deciding whether to
uphold or strike down gun prohibitions under the Second Amendment. In
its 2022 decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen,
the court said that a gun regulation must be “consistent with this
nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
That prompted a flurry of challenges to gun laws from Second Amendment
groups, who argued many of those prohibitions have little connection to
history, and it required many federal judges to dabble in history as
well as law. But then the Supreme Court appeared to alter course
slightly in 2024, that bars  even though there was no domestic abuse
law on the books at the time of the nation’s founding.
At a higher level of generality, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for
an 8-1 court, the nation did have a history of disarming “individuals
who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others.”
The Hawaii case deals primarily with permission to carry on private
property but it also touched on prohibitions on carrying guns in bars
and restaurants that serve alcohol, beaches, parks, and similar areas.
Expanding those so-called “sensitive place” restrictions has been a
major goal for blue states in the wake of the court’s 2022 decision
in Bruen.
The court declined to take up a second question in the case that
appeared to focus more directly on those provisions. Lower courts have
upheld those sensitive place restrictions by looking in part to
post-Reconstruction history. The gun owners had suggested the Supreme
Court should make clear that the historical analysis should end with
the founding era.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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