In a historic first, the Department of Justice has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in a Second Amendment case that sides with plaintiffs challenging a gun control law.
The DOJ’s brief in Wolford v. Lopez, filed with the Supreme Court on Monday, argues that Hawaii’s law prohibiting lawful concealed carry by default on all private property effectively negates the right to keep and bear arms. As the Justice Department notes, before the Supreme Court struck down “may issue” carry regimes in Bruen, it was virtually impossible to obtain a license in Hawaii. Once the state was forced to adopt a “shall issue” standard, lawmakers decided to make it virtually impossible to exercise your right to carry by banning guns on all private property, including property open to the public, unless property owners provide “[u]nambiguous written or verbal authorization” or post “clear and conspicuous signage” allowing firearms.
In Hawaii, public-carry licensees who stop for gaswith a pistol in the glove compartment risk a year inprison if they fail to obtain the gas-station owner’s unambiguous consent. The same goes for licensees who run errands at grocery stores, dine at restaurants, or stop to buy coffee. A mere nod from the property owner—or an insufficiently conspicuous sign—puts licenseholders at risk of prosecution even if the owner welcomes firearms but failed to express his approbation clearly enough. Meanwhile, Hawaii exempts non-licensees from this restriction—so hunters, target shooters, and out-of-state police officers can publicly carry firearms on the same property without the owner’s affirmative consent.
… Hawaii designed its novel affirmativeconsent rule to inhibit the exercise of the right to bear arms. Hawaii’s restriction singles out the carrying of firearms for discriminatory treatment; requires owners who have opened their property to the public to satisfy a special clear-statement rule for firearms; and contains exemptions that make sense only if Hawaii were trying to limit arms-bearing to favored groups and to exclude everyone else. Further, Hawaii’s law is so broad that it effectively nullifies licenses to carry arms in public. Because most owners do not post signs either allowing or forbidding guns—and because it is virtually impossible to go about publicly without setting foot on private property open to the public—Hawaii’s law functions as a near-total ban on public carry.
The DOJ’s brief is thorough and well-written, and it’s great to see the DOJ side with gun owners in trying to strike down a flagrant infringement on a fundamental civil right.
The brief doesn’t exist in a vacuum, though, and as Gun Owners of America pointed out on X, the DOJ continues to take some confounding positions in other 2A cases challenging federal gun control laws.
In the past week @AGPamBondi & @TheJusticeDept have:
– Supported national gun registration
– Demonized machineguns
– Called guns “weapons of war”
– Expanded government power over 2A
– Said SBRs are for criminalsFiling this brief is great—these other actions are unacceptable. https://t.co/0TxdxIWVDD
— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) November 24, 2025
It can be true that this is both the most pro-2A Justice Department in history and it’s still not going far enough to support our rightt to keep and bear arms. I’m not surprised to see the DOJ defending NFA restrictions on machine guns, but the agency’s defense of NFA taxes and registration on items it admits are protected by the Second Amendment rightfully rankles 2A activists.
The DOJ has been far more critical of state-level gun control laws like the “vampire rule” challenged in Wolford, and the significance of the agency’s actions in support of lawsuits taking on Hawaii’s carry ban and the semi-auto and magazine ban in Illinois shouldn’t be ignored. The DOJ is also suing the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department over its glacially-slow pace of approving carry permits, which is another action we never would have seen under the Biden administration.
Still, so long as the DOJ continues to defend virtually every federal firearms statute that’s being challenged in court, the criticism from groups like GOA is likely to continue. The agency’s involvement in Wolford is much appreciated. It’s ongoing support for NFA restrictions and every one of the prohibited persons statutes that are subject to legal challenges? Not so much.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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