Hawaii A.G. Fights to Keep Barriers to Carry Permits in Place

There are multiple challenges to various gun laws in Hawaii that are floating around the federal court system, including one lawsuit taking on some of the nonsensical provisions that serve as roadblocks on the pathway towards exercising our right to keep and bear arms. 

In the Aloha state, anyone applying for a carry permit must first obtain a permit to acquire a pistol or revolver; a permit that’s only valid for 30 days. Once the firearm has been purchased from a local gun dealer, the new gun owner has to present that firearm to their local police department for inspection; forcing Hawaii residents to take time off of work or interrupt their busy day and tasking law enforcement with a time-wasting exercise in paper pushing instead of going after actual criminals. 

A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit struck down those provisions in Yukutake v. Lopez last month, but now Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez is asking for an en banc review of that decision in the hopes of restoring the red tape that was slashed by the panel. 

Hawaii filed an en banc petition with the Ninth Circuit today in the lawsuit that struck down the state’s short handgun permit validity and in-person firearm inspection requirements, saying that it would result in courts being able to do things like deciding “whether a particular… pic.twitter.com/2rtH5CuMMX

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) April 12, 2025

Lopez claims that the panel erred in concluding that the State of Hawaii bears “the burden to justifyt he individual components of its shall-issue permitting regime” because doing so “defies Supreme Court precedent holding that such laws are ‘presumptively lawful.'” 

The problem with that argument is, of course, that even if a statute is presumed to be lawful on its face, further investigation might very well reveal that the particulars have no basis in the national tradition of gun ownership and conflict with the plain text of the Second Amendment. And as it happens, that’s exactly what the three-judge panel concluded.

Throughout the lawsuit, Hawaii attempted to have the case tossed as moot by amending the challenged restrictions to make them less onerous. Hawaii’s law initially required an applicant to purchase a handgun within 10 days of receiving a valid purchase permit, but the state amended the requirement to 30 days shortly after the panel heard oral arguments in 2023. It also limited the in-person inspection requirement to firearms purchased from a private sale, brought in from out-of-state, or made at home.

The panel, however, rejected Hawaii’s attempt to avoid a ruling because it said the amended requirements were “sufficiently similar” to their original versions to warrant review. It first rebuffed the state’s argument that the restrictions in question do not implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment because they regulate purchasing instead of keeping or bearing arms.

“This peculiar view of the Second Amendment—as protecting the right to retain guns that you have no right to acquire—is not a fair reading of its text,” Judge Collins, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote. “No reasonable person at the time of the Second Amendment’s adoption would have thought that its text only protects the right to maintain the firearms that citizens then happened to possess at the moment of the Amendment’s adoption, nor would anyone have reasonably thought that the Amendment’s text protects only the possession of those guns that thereafter either suddenly and miraculously appear in one’s home or that the state allows you to acquire. ”

Lopez argues that if the panel’s decision is allowed to stand, courts will be micromanaging every aspect of a state’s gun laws; if 30 days isn’t long enough for a permit-to-aquire, for instance, what if Hawaii imposed a 40, 50, or 60 day standard instead? 

The panel itself was somewhat divided on that question, with Judge Daniel Collins suggesting that making the permit-to-acquire valid for a longer period of time would comport with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen. Judge Kenneth Lee, however, said his colleague’s approach amounts to an interest-balancing test; something SCOTUS has said is a no-no when looking at our Second Amendment rights. Instead, he argued that the court should compare “Hawaii’s temporal limit in its firearms permitting regime to relevantly similar historical analogues.” Given that there are no real historical analogues, Lee’s approach could conceivably bring down the permit-to-acquire statute completely. 

By requesting an en banc review of the case Lopez is not only trying to keep the lawsuit away from the Supreme Court for another year or more, but hoping that a broader panel of Ninth Circuit judges will be more receptive to keeping these barriers to bearing arms in place. As we reported last week, fewer than 2,500 carry permits have been issued in the state since the Bruen decision came down nearly three years ago, and that’s a pretty good indication that the state’s “shall issue” laws are written in a way that still chills the exercise of a fundamental civil right. Whether it’s an en banc panel of Ninth Circuit judges or the Supreme Court that gets ahold of Yukutake v Lopez, the lower court’s decision should remain in place, and the challenged statutes should be confined to the dustbin of history.