The state of Hawaii has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Some of those regulations make New York and California gun control activists green with envy because they can't do the same just yet.
OK, that might be a bit extreme, but they're bad. And the state supreme court is just as bad. What's worse is how The New Republic blatantly lied about what that court actually said regarding the Second Amendment by hiding their actually comments.
Now, The New Republic loves to prattle on about gun control as if it's some kind of unquestioned good. I see their stuff pretty regularly and most of the time, it's just a regurgitation of debunked claims, biased studies, and utter nonsense that's par for the course in the media as a whole. TNR just takes these points, adds a flourish of progressive insanity, and calls it quality commentary.
But at least they can point to someone else making the claims in most cases, thus preventing them from being accused of falsehood in and of itself.
Yet in talking about a Hawaiian case, they crossed the line.
A lot of people disagree with the Supreme Court these days. A potential Second Amendment case from Hawaii could give the court’s conservative majority a chance to push back on some of those critics.
In Wilson v. Hawaii, the defendant is asking the Supreme Court to side with a petitioner who was charged with unlawful possession of a gun and criminal trespass. The Hawaii Supreme Court rejected his arguments on various grounds—and took the opportunity to rebuke its federal counterpart for its recent Second Amendment rulings in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen and others.
“The Supreme Court makes state and federal courts use a fuzzy ‘history and traditions’ test to evaluate laws designed to promote public safety,” Justice Todd Eddins wrote for the Hawaii court. “It scraps the traditional techniques used by federal and state courts to review laws passed by the People to protect people. And by turning the test into history and nothing else, it dismantles workable methods to interpret firearms laws. All to advance a chosen interpretive modality.”
Now, the quote is true, as far as it goes, but the Hawaii State Supreme Court didn't try to "rebuke" the Supreme Court. It basically denied that the Second Amendment even existed in Hawaii in the first place, even after acknowledging that their own state constitution also included protection of the right to keep and bear arms.
From our sister site, Bearing Arms:
You see, not only did they figure that their own text from their own state constitution with language identical to the Second Amendment means something completely different but also that their state's history and culture completely override people's rights anyway.
Instead of American history, the Hawaii court looked at the island’s pre-American history for guidance on the protections provided by its state constitution.
“We reject Wilson’s constitutional challenges,” the court wrote. “Conventional interpretive modalities and Hawaiʻi’s historical tradition of firearm regulation rule out an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Hawaiʻi Constitution.”
...
“The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities,” the Hawaiian Supreme Court wrote. “The history of the Hawaiian Islands does not include a society where armed people move about the community to possibly combat the deadly aims of others.”
Seriously?
Apparently, this is, in fact, a serious ruling by the Hawaii state supreme court. More accurately, it's intended to be a serious ruling, because nothing about this feels serious to me. These "arguments" look like this draft was meant as an internal joke and got released by accident.
The whole "spirit of Aloha" is essentially a claim that the Second Amendment doesn't actually apply to Hawaii simply because they're their own state.
That's not a "rebuke" of the Court's decision in Bruen. That's simply pretending you don't have to listen because you're special.
But if states were going to decide their own history trumps the rulings of the Supreme Court, then what's to stop a Southern state from bringing back segregation because the "spirit of Dixie" or some such nonsense supersedes the Court's authority to rule on the constitutional protections of individual rights?
No one is talking about that, of course, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is that The New Republic hides the middle finger with no judicial reasoning behind the word "rebuke."
Either the writer knows that this wasn't so much a rebuke as a claim that the rules don't apply to Hawaii if they don't want them to or they're literally too stupid to be opining on literally anything short of which boy band is the dreamiest. Either he's willfully twisting the word--a lie--to try to convince people the state's court offered up sound legal reasoning why Bruen was decided wrongly or he doesn't understand language enough to effectively communicate important ideas.
Or, you know, it's the New Republic. It's entirely possible for it to be both.