Hawaii’s “default no-carry” rule for private property is being defended with a familiar move in Second Amendment litigation: describing history and any underlying principles at such a high altitude that almost any modern restriction can be made to look “analogous.” In his amicus brief in Wolford v. Lopez, Professor Joel Alicea argues that this is nothing less than the fulcrum on which Bruen either stands as a real constraint on government power, or collapses into a Rorschach test where judges can always find a historical “tradition” of firearm regulation by choosing the right level of abstraction.

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