Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

‘Aloha Spirit’ Strikes Again: Hawaii Court Continues To Deny Gun Rights For Gen Z

President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden and elected officials board Marine One at Kahului Airport in Kahului, Hawaii on Monday, August 21, 2023, to take an aerial tour of the devastation from deadly wildfires on the island of Maui. Flickr/Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz

A federal judge in Hawaii Monday allowed the state to continue prohibiting young adults under the age of 21 from owning firearms.

United States District Judge Jill Aiko Otake of the District of Hawaii, a Trump appointee, upheld the state’s prohibition on firearm ownership without a license that could not be issued to anyone under 21 in the ruling. The judge said the law, which was challenged in a suit brought by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on behalf of several individuals, didn’t violate the Second Amendment.

“The State presents significant evidence that both society and technology changed dramatically from the Founding to a century later. Technological advancements in firearms in the 19th century rendered them more portable, lethal, and available,” Otake claimed in her opinion granting Hawaii’s motion for summary judgment.

“We were certainly disappointed to see the District of Hawaii uphold the law,” SAF Senior Director of Legal Operations Bill Sack told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It was not unforeseen because unfortunately, Hawaii seems to really like its unconstitutional gun control.”

Although Otake was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2018, Democratic Hawaii Sens. Brian Schatz and Maizie Hirono exercised substantial influence through the a mix of constitutional voting power and long-standing Senate customs, including the “blue slip” process, which was outlined in a 2013 report by the Congressional Research Service.

“Even when neither of a state’s Senators is of the President’s party, a consultative role is contemplated, if not mandated, for them in the appointment process by means of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ‘blue slip’ policy,” the report said. “Under this policy, as it has evolved in recent decades, the Judiciary Committee has come to expect that, as a courtesy, a state’s Senators, no matter what their party affiliation, will be consulted by the Administration prior to the President nominating persons to U.S. district judgeships in the state as well as to U.S. circuit court judgeships historically associated with their state.”

In June, Associate Justice Samuel Alito had harsh words for Hawaii’s highest court when the Supreme Court struck down Hawaii’s law requiring people carrying firearms to have the explicit permission of private property owners, ruling it violated the Second and 14th Amendments. The Hawaii Supreme Court previously invoked the “spirit of Aloha” to uphold a gun law against a Second Amendment challenge.

“The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” Alito wrote in the majority opinion in Wolford v. Lopez in response to the 2024 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling, which the Supreme Court allowed to stand on a technicality. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald). It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8% of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59%). Merely local attitudes can neither shrink nor inflate the meaning of fundamental Bill of Rights guarantees that apply to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.”