Hawaii’s high court last week thumbed its nose at the U.S. Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence, declaring that the right to bear arms in public clashes with the “Aloha spirit” and therefore doesn’t really apply in that state.
That’s right. The Hawaii Supreme Court believes it can water down and reinterpret the federal Bill of Rights, because—well— “vibes.”
In a legal world where state and lower courts routinely find new and absurd ways to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and pivot their way around the right to keep and bear arms, this opinion by the Hawaii Supreme Court stands apart as particularly ludicrous.
The court argues that Hawaii’s pre-statehood history “does not include a society where armed people move about the community to possibly combat the deadly aims of others,” as though this somehow determines the scope of federal constitutional rights that Hawaii, as a part of the United States, is bound not to violate.
The court decries “a freewheeling right to carry guns in public” as “degrading other constitutional rights,” ironically missing the point: The Second Amendment, properly understood, doesn’t degrade other unalienable or political rights, but rather gives us the “teeth” to enforce those rights adequately.
The Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t promote public safety, as it claims to do. Instead, it only encourages criminals by prohibiting ordinary, law-abiding citizens from exercising their constitutional right to carry a firearm to defend themselves against violent crime.
Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.
For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read other accounts here from past years.)
The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in January. You may explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.
(The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.)
Regardless of what the Hawaii Supreme Court claims, these examples demonstrate that the Second Amendment continues to play a vital role in preserving—not degrading—Americans’ rights to life and liberty.
The “spirit of Aloha” doesn’t protect innocent citizens from criminal violence any more than it frees the Hawaii Supreme Court to unilaterally reinterpret the meaning of the Second Amendment.
And anti-gun zealots’ insistence that ordinary Americans are safer when unarmed doesn’t negate the natural right of self-defense.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
14 Defensive Gun Uses That Show Armed Citizens Promote Public Safety
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16.02.2024
Hawaii’s high court last week thumbed its nose at the U.S. Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence, declaring that the right to bear arms in public clashes with the “Aloha spirit” and therefore doesn’t really apply in that state.
That’s right. The Hawaii Supreme Court believes it can water down and reinterpret the federal Bill of Rights, because—well— “vibes.”
In a legal world where state and lower courts routinely find new and absurd ways to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and pivot their way around the right to keep and bear arms, this opinion by the Hawaii Supreme Court stands apart as particularly ludicrous.
The court argues that Hawaii’s pre-statehood history “does not include a society where armed people move about the community to possibly combat the deadly aims of others,” as though........
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