CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS

There is something fundamentally wrong with today’s jurisprudence interpreting the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Just yesterday, in Wolford v. Lopez, U.S. Sup.Ct. Slip Op. of June 25, 2026, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a Hawaii statute that prohibited the carrying of a gun onto private property “open to the public” without the property owner’s express permission to do so (official law enforcement personnel excepted). Following its recent precedents, the Court held that the statute violated the Second Amendment right of the people of the United States to carry their guns in public for self-defense, as long as they had a license from the state to do so.

Perhaps unlike most of the states in the continental United States, Hawaii has never had a culture promoting the private ownership and private use of guns (at least according to the Court in The Wolford Case). Nevertheless, when Hawaii joined the United States, it subjected itself to the United States Constitution, including the Second Amendment. But there is absolutely no right to carry a gun in public for self-defense mentioned or implied anywhere in the Second Amendment, or the Constitution in its entirety.

The Second Amendment reads as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Amendment does not say anything about where guns may be carried. Nor does it say anything about the purposes for which guns may be carried, other than purposes related to service in the “militia.” The wider Constitution is preceded by a wider statement of general purposes. The only one relevant to firearms reads as follow:

[I]n Order to . . . provide for the common defence . . . .

U.S. Const., Preamble (emphasis added).

Under all of these those words, and in the broader context of an instrument establishing a republican form of government for the people of the United States, the clear purpose of the Second Amendment was to express a preference for a national defense based on an armed citizenry, i.e., the “militia,” instead of a professional standing army.[1]

Hawaii’s statute, which had the support and approval of the people of that state, did nothing to interfere with any citizen’s right, the state’s right, or the federal government’s right to prepare, join, establish, or maintain a vigorous “militia” force of armed citizens. Restricting or not restricting a citizen’s prerogatives to privately use a gun he or she may have obtained in one of those processes was, and is, a matter for the citizens themselves to decide, acting through their elected representatives seated in their respective legislatures. That was how the English Bill of Rights (enacted by Parliament in 1689) on gun rights worked prior to the drafting and ratification of the Second Amendment. The English Bill of Rights said,  “that the subjects . . . may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law . . . .” (emphasis added).

I do not share the views of some commentators that the current Supreme Court is corrupt. Nonetheless, I have to say that the Court’s recent Second Amendment precedents have made a Constitutional right, i.e., the so-called right to carry a handgun in public for personal self-defense, out of whole cloth. Such a “right” is nowhere to be found in either the text, or any of the purposes stated in the United States Constitution or its amendments.

/s/ Dan D. Rhea

[1] The Court’s recent Second Amendment precedents, finding otherwise, failed to take note of a key event in the founding generation’s recent past, when the British Army raided the villages of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in an effort to deprive the militias in those communities of the cache of arms that those bodies had collected. The British Army’s effort to confiscate firearms being kept by the residents of Lexington and Concord started the American Revolution. The Revolution culminated in the United States Constitution. For more on the Second Amendment’s purpose, see the twelfth, fifteenth and sixteenth clauses of Article I, Section 8, of the United States Constitution.