Dr. John Lott has a new piece at the Wall Street Journal.
.
Blue-state gun laws are back before the Supreme Court. The justices barred states in 2022 from requiring concealed-handgun permit applicants to demonstrate a need for the license. Rather than comply with the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in good faith, Hawaii and four other states sharply restricted where concealed carry is allowed. On Tuesday in Wolford v. Lopez, the court will hear oral arguments in a challenge to the Hawaii law.
.
Hawaii’s statute flips the traditional concealed-carry rule on private property open to the public, such as grocery stores, restaurants, malls and gasoline stations. Instead of allowing permit holders to carry unless a property owner objects, the law imposes a default ban on carrying unless the owner consents to firearms’ being brought on his property. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law, pointing to a “national tradition” of banning firearms on private property “without the owner’s oral or written consent.”
.
That approach has no historical foundation. Neither in 1791, when the Second Amendment was adopted, nor in 1868, when the 14th Amendment applied it to the states, were there laws broadly barring people who could legally carry firearms from ordinary businesses. Nevertheless, Hawaii’s attorney general argues the law preserves a historical tradition in which concealed weapons “were not commonly carried in public.”
.
Hawaii defends its law on public-safety grounds, but those claims collapse under scrutiny. Attorneys general for 17 states and the District of Columbia assert in a friend-of-the-court brief that many major retailers “generally prohibit” firearms in their stores. But some stores the brief mentions—such as Walmart, Walgreens and Kroger—reference open, not concealed, carry in their store policies.
.
The public-health research cited in briefs supporting Hawaii’s law is similarly flawed. A brief filed by two gun-control advocacy groups cites data from Philadelphia stating that people in possession of a gun are more than four times as likely to be shot in an assault. But the data lumped together law-abiding concealed-carry permit holders and criminals or gang members carrying illegally.
.
Americans use guns defensively roughly 1.7 million times each year. While less than 0.2% of adults in Hawaii hold concealed-carry permits, nationwide there are approximately 21 million permit holders. Outside California and New York, more than 9% of adults have a permit—and more carry concealed weapons in “constitutional carry” states, where no permit is required.
.
Permit holders are extremely law-abiding. Permit holders are extremely law-abiding. In Florida and Texas, for example, those with licenses lose their permits for firearm-related violations at rates of thousandths or tens of thousandths of 1%. Police rarely commit firearms crimes, but concealed-handgun permit holders are even more law-abiding. Those with permits in the same two states face a conviction rate for firearms offenses that is only 1/12th as likely as police officers to be convicted of firearms offenses.
.
Another CPRC analysis highlights how concealed-carry permits actually enhance public safety. We used the FBI’s active-shooter definition—incidents in which a gun is fired in public and not part of another crime—but included incidents from several sources outside the FBI’s own list of active shooting events and used ChatGPT to verify that these cases met the FBI’s criteria. According to this data, armed civilians stopped 199 of 562 attacks from 2014 to 2024, amounting to 35.4% of incidents. By comparison, police stopped 167 incidents, or 29.7%. Armed civilians consistently proved both safe and effective—arriving on the scene faster than police, resulting in fewer people killed.
.
In the 199 civilian interventions, bystanders were accidentally shot only once, and civilians never interfered with police. Civilians died in only two incidents and suffered injuries in 49 cases. In 58 incidents, civilians stopped attacks that otherwise would have become mass shootings.
.
Uniformed police, despite superior training, faced greater risks and higher error rates in the 167 incidents they stopped. Officers accidentally shot bystanders or fellow officers five times. Nineteen police officers were killed and 51 were wounded. While neither group stops every attack, the data shows that the presence of armed civilians improves outcomes.
.
Police play a critical role in stopping crime, but during active shootings their uniforms create a tactical disadvantage. Attackers can delay until police leave the area, pick another location, or target officers first. Because police are less likely than concealed-handgun permit holders to be immediately on the scene, six times the number of victims are shot in incidents stopped by police compared with civilians on average.
.
Hawaii’s law is a clear effort to nullify the right to carry, but a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could clearly define where guns can be banned and eliminate many gun-free zones across the country. If states can’t provide real protection with more than a “Gun Free Zone” sign, they must allow people to protect themselves.
.
Mr. Lott is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He is a co-author of a friend-of-the-court brief in Wolford v. Lopez with the Peace Officers Research Association of California and the California Association of Highway Patrolmen.
