Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

Supreme Court Could Potentially Take Up Another 2A Case Originating From Hawaii

Sdkb, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Supreme Court could see another Second Amendment case in its docket emerge from Hawaii, depending on how a federal appeals court rules on a pending case.

The case, Yukusake v. Lopez, is currently under consideration by an 11-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that includes a Clinton appointee, three Obama appointees, five Trump appointees and two Biden appointees. A divided three-judge panel upheld a district court-ruling that struck down two laws regarding firearms sales in March 2025.

In a Friday letter, attorney Alan Beck advised the panel of a ruling from the Fifth Circuit that struck down a federal law banning interstate sales of handguns. The Ninth Circuit panel is hearing this case months after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Wolford v. Lopez, which struck down Hawaii’s “vampire law;” in a 2024 ruling involving a person charged with illegally carrying a firearm, the Hawaii Supreme Court invoked the “spirit of Aloha” while ignoring Supreme Court precedents, including New York State Rifle and Piston Association v. Bruen.

“Plaintiffs’ challenge to H.R.S. §§ 134-2(e) & 134-3 survive step 1 of the Bruen analysis,” Beck wrote in the letter filed Monday. “And as Hawaii has produced no historical evidence to justify these laws, this Court should find the challenged laws violate the Second Amendment.”

The laws in question provide up to 30 days for a person to buy a handgun once a permit to purchase is granted and also requires a person to bring a purchased firearm for inspection and registration within five days of the firearm being acquired. In the initial panel decision, United States Circuit Judges Daniel Collins and Kenneth Lee, both Trump appointees, said that under the Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, Hawaii’s laws were unconstitutional, while Senior Circuit Judge Carlos Bea, a George W. Bush appointee, dissented.

“The State has not carried this burden to justify its very short temporal limit on firearms-acquisition permits. As noted earlier, the State’s justification for the challenged temporal limit is that a person who could lawfully acquire firearms at the time the permit was granted might, due to a change in circumstances, no longer be eligible at the actual time of acquisition,” Collins wrote for the majority. “But the State has pointed to no evidence to support the view that it may reasonably be expected that qualified citizens may suddenly become disqualified within the span of 10 or even 30 days.”

“While the State presumably has a valid interest in ensuring that the background-check results are not stale, the State has pointed to no evidence that would support the extravagant view that anything over 10 days or 30 days counts as stale,” Collins continued.

The case could be picked up by the Supreme Court, largely due to the Ninth Circuit’s track record in upholding restrictive gun laws. In a September 2025 brief filed with the Supreme Court, Second Amendment Foundation Director of Legal Research and Education Konstadinos Moros accused the Ninth Circuit’s en banc panels of almost automatically overriding pro-Second Amendment decisions by three-judge panels.

“The hostility of the Ninth Circuit towards the Second Amendment has been confirmed by several judges on that court and demonstrated by its own statistics as to granting petitions for en banc rehearing,” Moros wrote. “By way of timely and illustrative example: recently, the Ninth Circuit decided to rehear en banc a case challenging Hawaii state laws which impose a ten-day (later amended to 30-day) time limit to buy a firearm after having received the requisite permit to purchase, and then require the purchaser to appear with their new firearm at their local law enforcement agency for ‘inspection’ within five days. As there is no historical tradition to support these novel restrictions the three-judge panel correctly struck them down.”

“By Amici’s count, since Heller, there have been at least nine instances of the Ninth Circuit vacating Second Amendment rulings and granting en banc review,” Moros added later. “Besides Yukutake, Peruta, Young and McDougall which were already mentioned, the court also granted en banc review and vacated Second Amendment victories in Teixeira v. Cty. of Alameda, 873 F.3d 670 (9th Cir. 2017), Duncan v. Bonta, 19 F.4th 1087 (9th Cir. 2021), Teter v. Lopez, 125 F.4th 1301 (9th Cir. 2025), Duncan v. Bonta, 133 F.4th 852 (9th Cir. 2025), and United States v. Duarte, 137 F.4th 743 (9th Cir. 2025).”

The Supreme Court will be considering whether to grant petitions to hear multiple Second Amendment cases during the Sept. 28 “long conference,” a lengthy meeting in which a backlog of as many as 2,000 requests to hear cases filed since the end of the Supreme Court’s term in late June.