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It looks like the Hawaii Supreme Court is coming close to defying the United States Supreme Court.
A guy was arrested for carrying a gun on someone else’s property.
This guy claimed he had a right to carry that gun based on recent Supreme Court decisions such as “New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen” (2022), and “District of Columbia v. Heller” (2008).
Now, I want to emphasize here that I don’t believe either Heller or Bruen say anybody has the right to carry a gun on someone else’s property. You don’t actually have the right to be on someone else’s property at all.
I don’t think either Heller or Bruen say that there is a right to carry a gun in public without a permit, either.
Bruen seems to say explicitly that a state can require that people have a permit to carry a gun in public, it just requires that the criteria for getting the permit has to be “objective” and not “arbitrary.”
Whatever that means….
Given the above, I think the Hawaii Supreme Court could have just said there is no right in Hawaii to carry a gun in public without a permit, and there is nothing in Heller or Bruen to say otherwise, so this man’s conviction stands, and there would not be any problem.
The problem is that the Hawaii Supreme Court, with 3 Democratic appointees and 2 Republican appointees, agreed unanimously to say that the United States Supreme Court was wrong in Heller and Bruen and they seem to be implying that Hawaii does not have to obey the Supreme court’s decisions in these opinions.
If that is what the Hawaii Supreme Court is saying, they are wrong, wrong, wrong!
In the United States of America, you don’t get to decide which laws or court decisions you will obey and which you will not obey, unless you are ready to go to jail - not even if you are a state supreme court. In this country, if you don’t like laws or court decisions, then you go and you VOTE! And while you are voting, you obey the law or you go to jail.
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It looks like Texas Governor Greg Abott is coming close to defying the United States Supreme Court. Recently a lower court said that Federal officials could not remove razor wire placed along the border by Texas. The United States Supreme Court reversed that decision implying, without explanation, that Federal officials CAN remove razor wire to get to the border.
The Supreme Court did not explain, but it is not hard to understand this decision. After the American Revolution the states controlled their own borders with taxes and fees and rules about what could cross their borders and what could not. This caused so much trouble that it was disagreements about border rules that was the BIGGEST reason the Constitutional Convention was eventually called. I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say that the BIGGEST reason the United States of America was formed was to STOP states from controlling their own borders.
It is the Federal government that controls “interstate commerce” and it is the Federal government that controls all matters involving foreign countries. Any state that interferes in these issues is violating the United States Constitution. That is why people now who say that states have a right to control their own borders are completely, 180 degrees, upside-down, wrong.
So far it looks like Greg Abbott is not in DIRECT violation of a Supreme Court decision. But if he does violate a Supreme Court decision, he will be wrong, wrong, wrong.
In the United States of America, you don’t get to decide which laws or court decisions you will obey and which you will not obey unless you are ready to go to jail – not even if you are a state governor. In this country, if you don’t like laws or court decisions, then you go and you VOTE! And while you are voting, you obey the law or you go to jail.
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We need to come down hard on people who break the law or who advocate breaking the law. We have rights to speak and write and peacefully protest and VOTE about things we don’t like. (And if somebody says they want a revolution like we had in 1775 you remind them that what justified that revolution was that those Americans did NOT have the right to vote in their national government. We do!)
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died so we could have these rights. People who now want to throw these rights away by advocating lawlessness (like, maybe the Hawaii Supreme Court, or like, maybe Texas Governor Abbott) are betraying some of the most basic principles America stands for: like the rule of law, and the right of the people to make laws that everyone has to obey. People who oppose these principles need to be educated and corrected, or ridiculed and reviled, or arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, before they ruin this great country for those of us who are still responsible and sane.
If you don’t like what is happening in this country then you speak and you write and you VOTE! And if you don’t get the laws you want, then welcome to what it means to live in a free country where you don’t get to be the dictator.
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