By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
A quartet of gun rights organizations has submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court supporting a challenge to Hawaii’s restrictive concealed carry law, dubbed the “Vampire Rule” because it requires legally-armed citizens to get permission from individual property owners before entering ordinary places which are open to the public.
Joining in the brief are the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Second Amendment Foundation, Connecticut Citizens Defense League and Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. The case is known as Wolford v. Lopez.
“This is the post-Bruen rebellion in its purest form,” said Konstadinos T. Moros, SAF Director of Legal Research and Education. “Anti-gun states invented the ‘Vampire Rule’ for the sole purpose of nullifying the right to carry. They are not protecting private property rights – they are deliberately making public carry so burdensome that citizens will simply give up. The Ninth Circuit blessed this transparent end-run around the Second Amendment and only the Supreme Court can stop it.”
That much is said in the 28-page brief, which may be read here.
“The Vampire Rule was originally conceived as a way to undermine the right to carry,” the brief states. “Its main academic proponents have explicitly written that the point of it was to make carry inconvenient, so less people choose to do it.”
“As we point out in our brief,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “the ‘Vampire Rule’ is unconstitutional because presumptively denying those exercising their right to carry from entering almost every relevant place ‘would eviscerate the general right to publicly carry arms for self-defense,’ which is precisely the intent of the politicians who authored the statute now being challenged.”
Gottlieb noted that a few other states have adopted similar restrictions, and they are all mentioned in the brief.
“Our brief to the Supreme Court carefully defines the problem in Hawaii, and other states, where this abhorrent strategy has been adopted to effectively dance around the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen,” Gottlieb explained. “We are hopeful the Court makes it clear that such statutes, which are literally too-clever-by-half, belong in the same scrap heap as the two-step process for deciding Second Amendment cases that was clearly rejected by this court in the Bruen ruling.”
When the Supreme Court struck down New York’s restrictive carry law in 2022, in a case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, other states with similar statutes—all Democrat-controlled—scrambled to adopt laws which essentially recognized the right to carry in name only. They adopted statutes prohibiting carry in so-called “sensitive places,” and allowed the broadest definition possible.
As noted by Moros in his brief’s closing paragraph, “Bruen was meant to vindicate the right to bear arms. Instead, that right has been under siege by Hawaii and a handful of other states ever since that landmark ruling.”
