Gun-Free Zones. Anti-2A activists celebrate them as some kind of “win” in their fight to strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights under the false pretense that Gun-Free Zones save lives. Gun rights advocates know Gun-Free Zones for what they are: easy targets for the sick people who decide to become active shooters.
That, essentially, is what the fight over Gun-Free Zones is really about, and, finally, there is some good news on that front. José Niño writes,
In a ruling made by United States District Judge Leslie Kobayashi, the Hawaii government can’t prohibit individuals with permits from carrying firearms in most parts of the state.
On August 8, 2023, Kobayashi granted the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against a law passed as a response to the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision made by the Supreme Court in the summer of 2022. This decision deemed the state’s previous restrictions on firearms carry as excessively restrictive.
Similarly, Judge Kobayashi determined in Wolford v. Lopez that the state’s new “sensitive places” restrictions on carrying firearms had no basis in the historical tradition of gun control — a standard that Bruen requires from here on out. In turn, this law violated the Second Amendment.
“[T]his Court finds that the balance of the equities and the public interest weigh in favor of issuing a TRO,” she wrote in the decision. “The public has an interest in preventing constitutional violations, and the State has not established a factual basis for the public safety concerns regarding permit-carrying gun-owners who wish to exercise their Second Amendment right to carry a firearm in public.”
Good for Judge Kobayashi on making this ruling. It’s encouraging when we come across members of the judiciary who remember that their job is to be a judge and not to legislate from the bench.
Of course, having said that, anti-2A activists will continue to to try to shove their delusional views of the world and their bizarrely wrong views on what causes gun violence (they think that it’s the guns and not the shooters) on the rest of us. When that happens, we’ll be able to turn to decisions like this one by Judge Kobayashi to dismantle those attempts to steal Americans’ Second Amendment rights.
And that’s something that we’ll gladly continue to do.
