The Hawaii Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion on Wednesday declaring that its state constitution grants individuals absolutely no right to keep and bear arms outside the context of military service. Its decision rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, refusing to interpolate SCOTUS’ shoddy historical analysis into Hawaii law. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the ruling on this week’s Slate Plus segment of Amicus; their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Go look at the gun laws. It’s there in black and white. If a soldier has written orders then civilian police can’t do anything. (Of course, the military can and that officer better have a very good reason related to the military’s needs)
And police officers are largely exempted from any sort of gun control.
Would requiring written orders to vote violate a soldier’s right to vote?
That’s not what’s meant in there. Soldiers can carry on their own off base with a privately owned weapon, according to local laws. But when the military is doing something like transporting serious goods, (nuclear waste, etc) they need to be able to protect it. So they get written orders allowing them to mount belt fed machine guns on the convoy vehicles. Or in lesser cases, just carry a service pistol. Obviously that machine gun breaks literally gun control law we’ve ever made, so there needs to be an exception in that laws for it.
*- I have no clue if the military actually transports nuclear waste, it’s just a hypothetical example.
*- Due to federal laws there is no right to carry a private weapon on base or keep a private weapon stored outside the armory.