The bottom line
For the first time in American history, the sitting attorney general and the Department of Justice have filed an amicus brief against the government in a Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court. That has never happened before. It happened in Wolford v. Lopez, a case about Hawaii’s so-called Vampire Rule, and it matters far beyond the state of Hawaii.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What Hawaii actually did
After the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, anti-gun states faced a choice: comply with the Constitution or find new ways to strangle the right to carry in public without technically reimposing the permit regimes Bruen struck down. Hawaii chose the latter path aggressively.
In June 2023, Hawaii enacted Act 52, which created what the gun rights community has called the Vampire Rule. The name comes from the old folklore premise that a vampire cannot enter your home without an invitation. Under Hawaii’s law, a licensed concealed carry holder cannot bring a firearm onto any private property open to the public without express permission from the property owner, delivered either through signage, oral consent, or written consent.
That sounds neutral until you think through what it means on the ground. Restaurants, stores, malls, parking structures, medical offices, apartment building lobbies — every square foot of publicly accessible private property becomes a default gun-free zone. And I mean every piece of it. Hawaii did not carve out a narrow set of locations. It flipped the entire premise: carry is prohibited everywhere that lacks explicit owner authorization, rather than permitted everywhere that lacks explicit prohibition.
The practical effect is a near-total elimination of public carry for licensed holders. You and I do not know who owns the office building we walk into. There is no realistic way to solicit permission from the ownership entity of a commercial property before you step through the door. Hawaii used property law as a mechanism to do what Bruen said it couldn’t do directly: make public carry so difficult it effectively doesn’t exist.
Before Bruen, Hawaii had issued four carry permits in the prior 22 years. Four. In 22 years. After Bruen forced them to issue permits, they invented the Vampire Rule to make those permits worthless.
The case and the historic brief
The plaintiffs who challenged this law are three Maui residents — Jason Wolford, Alison Wolford, and Atom Kasprzycki — along with the Hawaii Firearms Coalition. All three individual plaintiffs are licensed concealed carry holders. They sued Attorney General Anne Lopez in June 2023, arguing that Hawaii’s private property default rule violates the Second Amendment.
The case worked its way through the district court and a Ninth Circuit panel that split with the Second Circuit’s treatment of a similar New York provision, creating a circuit split that gave the Supreme Court a clean reason to take it. The Court granted certiorari on October 3, 2025, limiting the question to how the Second Amendment applies to licensed carry on private property open to the public.
Then came the brief.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s DOJ filed an amicus brief arguing that Hawaii’s law “plainly violates the Second Amendment.” The brief called the rule “blatantly unconstitutional” and stated directly that states cannot evade Bruen by banning public carry through indirect means. Bondi posted on X that California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York have laws with the same structure, meaning a win for the plaintiffs in Wolford restores Second Amendment rights for millions of people in blue states, not just 1.4 million residents of Hawaii.
In all of American history, no DOJ has ever done this. Every prior administration’s Justice Department has either sided with gun control plaintiffs in Second Amendment cases or stayed out entirely. The federal government’s lawyers have never walked into the Supreme Court and told the justices that a state’s gun law is blatantly unconstitutional and needs to go. This is the first time. That is not a small thing.
The Supreme Court heard oral argument on January 20, 2026. Reporting from the argument indicated the conservative justices were skeptical of Hawaii’s position throughout. Several pushed on why the Second Amendment should be treated differently from the First Amendment — specifically, why a political activist can wear a campaign button into a restaurant without the owner’s explicit consent, but a licensed carry holder cannot bring a firearm. Justice Samuel Alito pressed Hawaii’s lawyers on whether any comparable consent requirement exists for other items people bring onto private property. The justices also raised pointed questions about the historical precedents Hawaii cited in its defense, including an 1865 Louisiana law — a Black Code enacted specifically to strip newly freed Black citizens of their right to bear arms — as a supposed historical analogue supporting the Vampire Rule. That the state of Hawaii thought that was a winning argument tells you everything you need to know about the quality of the legal case they’re defending.
Bondi’s record and why that matters
I need to talk about this honestly, because I’ve seen too many people in the Second Amendment community give Pam Bondi credit she has not earned uniformly.
As Florida’s attorney general following the 2018 Parkland shooting, she supported the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, which included Florida’s red flag law. Red flag laws allow the government to seize a person’s firearms without due process — without a hearing, without an opportunity to defend yourself, based solely on an accusation. She also supported raising the handgun purchase age from 18 to 21, effectively denying adults their constitutional rights for three years based on nothing more than their age. She supported handgun carry bans and certain sensitive places restrictions. She defended these laws in court against NRA challenges.
None of that disappears because she filed a good brief in Wolford. She also requested the membership lists of Second Amendment organizations as attorney general, which functions as a de facto registry of gun owners. She has opposed removing the NFA tax stamp requirement. Her record is genuinely mixed, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make a talking point easier.
What I will say is this: what she has done as U.S. Attorney General is, on balance, meaningfully better than anything that office has done for the Second Amendment in recent history. She created a Second Amendment task force. She has pursued rights restoration for non-violent felons. And now she has filed a brief that no AG has ever filed before in an active Supreme Court case. Those are real things.
The honest assessment is that the Trump administration has been inconsistent on the Second Amendment. The bump stock decision was a disaster. Some of their inaction on NFA reform has been frustrating. But the direction of their Second Amendment litigation has been genuinely pro-rights in a way that has not been true of any prior administration. They have not restricted any existing rights — the failures are mostly failures to advance restoration, which is a different and lesser category of harm.
What comes next
The Supreme Court’s decision in Wolford is expected before the end of the current term. Based on the oral argument reporting, the trajectory looks favorable for the plaintiffs. A ruling striking down the Vampire Rule creates binding national precedent that similar laws in California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York cannot survive.
The Bruen framework Justice Thomas wrote in 2022 requires that any firearms restriction be justified by a historical tradition of analogous regulation at the time of the founding. Hawaii’s lawyers are citing Black Codes from 1865 Louisiana to meet that standard. The justices noticed. When your best historical analogue is a law specifically designed to oppress Black Americans immediately after the Civil War, you have already lost the argument.
For licensed carry holders in blue states running similar structures, the Wolford decision has the potential to be more consequential than Bruen itself was in practical terms. Bruen forced shall-issue permitting. Wolford could force those permits to actually mean something — the ability to carry in the places where people actually go every day.
That is what is at stake here, and that is why the DOJ brief matters beyond its historic novelty. It is not just symbolism. Amicus briefs from the United States government carry weight with the justices. The DOJ brief in Wolford is also, according to reporting, the reason the case was granted at all — a Department of Justice signal at the certiorari stage changes the political and legal calculus around which cases the Court chooses to hear. This administration pointed the Court’s attention at Wolford. That is power being used correctly.
Applaud the brief. Hold Bondi accountable for the rest of her record. And pay attention to what the Court does when it hands down its decision.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
Get the Weekly Briefing
New analysis delivered every week. Court decisions, case updates, and expert commentary.