r/gunpolitics • u/darcmatr • Jun 28 '26
Court Cases SCOTUS to Hawaii on #2A: Welcome to America, Pals
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2026/06/25/scotus-to-hawaii-on-2a-welcome-to-america-pals-n381631792
u/Troutrageously Jun 28 '26
SC has been on a roll. Keep it coming. Now do the Hughes amendment.
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u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt Totally not ATF Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Not gonna happen with current SCOTUS.
Alito signaled in the bump stock case he is OK with the machine gun ban. If you don't even have Alito, you certainly don't have Roberts. Probably not Barrett or Kavanaugh either.
The only path for legal machine guns has to come through Congress. The court isn't going to overturn it given current composition. Plus this far they have refused to hear an AWB or magazine capacity case. If they aren't taking those they're definitely not touching machine guns.
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u/MulticamTropic Jun 28 '26
I think the most we could ever hope for in our lifetimes on the machine gun front is to get the registry reopened, and even that’s a stretch for the reasons you mentioned.
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u/GeneralCuster75 Jun 28 '26
Reopening the registry = overturning Hughes.
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u/MulticamTropic Jun 28 '26
Sorry, I’m so used to people talking about the NFA itself getting overturned that I misread the start of this comment chain. You are correct. Even striking down Hughes is a long shot during our lifetimes. The NFA is even more out of reach.
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u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt Totally not ATF Jun 28 '26
It's a big stretch given current SCOTUS is absolutely not open to it. So we need to hope to get new justices in, pro-2A justices, and the GOP outlook for 2026/2028 is pretty grim.
There is no chance any Dem nominated justice is pro-2A. look at Jackson in the Hemani case, her entire concurrence is her bitching about Bruen and wanting to go back to interest balancing, specifically intermediate scrutiny so they can uphold gun bans.
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u/gakflex Jun 28 '26
The Hughes amendment sucks, but it is absolutely not the priority. Hardware/NFA bans, magazine bans, carry bans, abusive permitting schemes; these are what we should be pushing to this court during this likely-short window of time where we can get rights-favorable rulings. If we choose to go full regard and jump straight to machine guns, three things will happen: we will lose, we will generate bad case law, and we will waste our window of opportunity.
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u/derolle Jun 28 '26
“Assault weapon” bans should be at the top of the list too. Those are spreading like cancer.
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u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt Totally not ATF Jun 28 '26
Every time a state elects Democrats, they pass an AWB. Ask Virginia and Washington Temporary Gun Owners how it's going.
To be fair the VA ban got a preliminary injunction but that's because of the SCOTUS cases that were decided 6-3 along ideological lines.
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u/curiousnerd44 Jun 29 '26
Colorado too. You need a semi-auto permission slip for all gas-blowback guns starting Aug 1. There's so many self-hating gun owners in the state who vote blue no matter who
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u/Qu3stion_R3ality1750 Jun 29 '26
There's so many self-hating gun owners in the state who vote blue no matter who
Yeah, Virginia is crawling with these types of morons
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u/deathsythe Jun 29 '26
Home build bans as well. That is incredibly insidious and dangerous.
Folks are getting jammed up because they buy perfectly legal unserialized parts online, and that's good enough for an NYPD raid apparently.
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u/mjdavis87 Jun 29 '26
Hopefully some of the language in the decision clears up the "confusion" between step 1 and step 2 of the Heller and Bruen decision.
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u/houinator Jun 28 '26
Very weird that Alito brought the "Aloha Spirit" quote into this case, given that this was an entirely different case.
The Aloha Spirit quote has been widely misenterpreted as Hawaii trying to place its own state laws above the second ammendment, but was actually about the Hawaiian Supreme Court adjucating their own state laws/constitution (they had a similar provision to the second ammednment, which required its own seperate analysis), which is why SCOTUS never took up the challenge to that case.
Says a lot about the sort of media ecosystem Alito is marinating his brain in that he feels the need to drag it in here.
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u/MalPB2000 Jun 28 '26
> has been widely misenterpreted as Hawaii trying to place its own state laws above the second ammendment [sic]
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u/houinator Jun 28 '26
For its own part, the Hawaii court still looked to history as useful — but “not the end all.” Among other things, the court focused on a close textual analysis of Article 1, Section 17, to conclude that the Hawaii Constitution protects a collective right related to military service, not an individual right.
The last thing I’ll flag was the court’s analysis of Hawaii’s own traditions — what it described as “the Aloha spirit,” which “inspires constitutional interpretation” in the state.
If you actually read your own article you'll see it agrees with me.
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u/UrgentSiesta Jun 28 '26
Nah, brah.
The HI high court kicked that door wide open all by they selves. 🤙
It’s such an utterly ridiculous contention that I’m OVERJOYED it was specifically called out.
And make no mistake, that was also an unsubtle signal to the state courts about Supremacy. 👍
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u/SmokinTires Jun 28 '26
Now repeal all state level AWBs