ESSAY: The Second Amendment triumphs in Hawaii — the Supreme Court reshapes an armed America

Introduction: One ruling, 400 million guns, and a divided nation

June 25, 2026: the Supreme Court strikes down Hawaii's gun law

On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down Hawaii's strict gun law. The decision follows directly from the Bruen ruling of 2022, which fundamentally reoriented Second Amendment jurisprudence by requiring that firearms regulations be justified by a historical tradition rooted in American constitutional law. Since that landmark ruling, several states have seen their most restrictive gun laws invalidated by federal courts, and the Hawaii decision is the latest illustration of this structural trend.

Behind this ruling lies a reality that America confronts with increasing difficulty: there are today more than 400 million firearms in circulation on American territory. A figure that exceeds the country's population — approximately 335 million inhabitants. This density of firearms, without equivalent in Western democracies, is both the context in which the Court issues its decisions and the reality that those decisions contribute to perpetuating.

Four major decisions on a single day: June 25, 2026 as a turning point

The Hawaii decision must not be read in isolation. The Supreme Court issued four major decisions simultaneously on June 25, 2026: the invalidation of Hawaii's gun law, the decision authorizing the end of TPS for 330,000 Haitians and Syrians, the asylum ruling, and a ruling on commercial tariffs. This concentration of landmark decisions on a single day is not accidental — it reflects the determination of the Court's conservative supermajority to advance on multiple constitutional fronts simultaneously before the end of the judicial term.

These four decisions form a coherent directional package: they expand individual rights related to firearms, reduce protections granted to immigrants, and preserve presidential prerogatives in commercial policy. This is a coherent conservative vision of the role of the state and of individual rights — a vision that, validated by six justices including three appointed by Trump, is now American constitutional jurisprudence for years to come.

The Bruen ruling of 2022: the jurisprudential revolution that changed everything

The historical approach to the Second Amendment according to the Court

To understand the Hawaii decision, it is necessary to return to the Bruen ruling of 2022, which represented a fundamental break in the way the Supreme Court analyzes firearms regulations. Before Bruen, courts generally used a two-step test: first checking whether a regulation touched the "core" of the Second Amendment, then evaluating whether it was justified by a sufficiently important government interest.

The Bruen ruling eliminated this approach in favor of a purely historical test: a firearms regulation is constitutionally valid only if it is "consistent with the American historical tradition of firearms regulation." In other words, if a similar regulation did not exist in 1791 — at the time of the drafting of the Bill of Rights — or in the years that followed, it is presumed unconstitutional. This textual and historical approach radicalizes the constitutional test in favor of maximum protection of the right to bear arms.

Hawaii and the historical tradition: the argument that failed

The case of Hawaii's gun law perfectly illustrates the difficulties that progressive states encounter in justifying their firearms regulations under the post-Bruen framework. Hawaii, an island state whose historical tradition differs greatly from the continental United States — with fewer firearms in local culture, a geography unlike the border states of 1791, and a Polynesian communal culture that does not have the same relationship to individual armament — had adopted a strict law in the aftermath of the Uvalde massacre.

But the Bruen historical test does not account for the geographic or cultural specificities of individual states. It asks: can this regulation be justified by an American tradition from 1791? Hawaii — which was not even an American territory in 1791 — finds itself evaluated against a continental tradition to which it does not correspond. This is one of the most salient paradoxes of post-Bruen jurisprudence.

400 million firearms: an irreducible American reality

The number that says everything

There are approximately 400 million firearms in circulation in the United States. This figure — more than one gun per inhabitant in a country of 335 million people — has no equivalent in the world of liberal democracies. Yemen, a country in civil war, ranks second globally with approximately 15 firearms per 100 inhabitants. The United States stands at approximately 120 firearms per 100 inhabitants. The gap is staggering.

This sociological reality is the context in which every firearms decision is made in the United States. Even if all restrictive laws were immediately adopted and enforced, the reality of 400 million guns already in circulation would not disappear quickly. Studies suggest that the vast majority of these guns will never be used in a violent act. But the absolute number of violent incidents — approximately 45,000 gun deaths per year in the United States, of which half are suicides — is a reality that opponents of restrictions sometimes have difficulty looking squarely in the face.

The cultural argument: guns and American identity

For millions of Americans, firearms are not simply dangerous objects to be regulated — they are part of the American cultural identity, a link with the country's history (the American Revolution, the conquest of the West, the frontier), a subsistence tool for rural families who hunt, and a symbol of individual liberty that is at the heart of the Republican vision of the relationship between state and citizen.

This cultural dimension is often poorly understood by observers outside the United States, including in European democracies where firearms regulation is accepted as obvious. To understand American gun politics, it is necessary to understand that defenders of the Second Amendment do not see their opponents as reasonable people who are right on substance but who exaggerate somewhat — they see them as actors seeking to dismantle a fundamental constitutional right and an essential dimension of what it means to be American.

Trump and the Supreme Court: three nominations that reshape America

The nominations of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett: a decisive legacy

The conservative majority that invalidated Hawaii's gun law owes its existence in large part to the three nominations made by Donald Trump during his first term: Neil Gorsuch (2017), Brett Kavanaugh (2018), and Amy Coney Barrett (2020). These three justices joined the three conservative justices already in place — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts — to form a six-justice majority that the three liberal justices (Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson) systematically oppose on the most sensitive questions.

These three nominations constitute the most enduring legal legacy of Trump's first term. They are reshaping American jurisprudence in the areas of guns, abortion (with the 2022 Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade), immigration, civil rights, and presidential powers. The effects of these nominations will be felt for several decades — justices serve for life, and some were appointed at a relatively young age.

The democratic legitimacy of an appointed, not elected, Court

The question of the democratic legitimacy of the American Supreme Court is old but has been renewed with acute force by the 2026 decisions. Six unelected justices, appointed for life by presidents and confirmed by Senates whose political configurations reflect the past rather than the present, make decisions that commit the fundamental rights of hundreds of millions of Americans. This institutional structure is willed by the Constitution — it aims to protect fundamental rights from the caprices of the political majority of the moment. But it raises legitimate questions about the democratic accountability of justices who exercise such power.

Proposals to reform the Supreme Court — rotation of justices, adding seats (court-packing), fixed-term mandates — are regularly discussed in academic and political circles. They have never succeeded because the majority that would benefit from a reform at any given moment knows that this same reform could be used against it in the future. The Supreme Court therefore remains in its 1789 constitutional structure, with nine justices appointed for life, accumulating political power that far exceeds what the founders anticipated.

Post-Uvalde: the states that tried to respond to a tragedy

The Uvalde massacre and the laws that followed

The Uvalde, Texas massacre in May 2022 — in which a shooter armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle killed 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school — sent shockwaves through American society and triggered a wave of legislation at the state level. Democratic states like Hawaii, California, New York, and Illinois had adopted laws that sought to limit access to the most dangerous weapons, strengthen background checks, or establish exclusion zones around schools and other sensitive locations.

These laws were the direct democratic response of elected assemblies to a national tragedy. Their drafters knew they would be challenged in courts. They took the risk because their constituents — fathers and mothers, teachers, communities traumatized by recurring mass shootings — had sent them to Sacramento, Honolulu, or Albany precisely to do something. The Supreme Court's decision on Hawaii tells them that their legislative efforts are unconstitutional.

The paradox of representative democracy against the constitution

There is in this sequence a profound paradox of American democracy. Elected officials, chosen by voters to represent their security concerns after repeated tragedies, adopt laws. These laws are invalidated by unelected judges, in the name of an interpretation of the Constitution drafted in an 18th-century society where firearms were single-shot muskets. Representative democracy says: we must regulate. The Constitution interpreted by a conservative Court says: you cannot.

This conflict between contemporary legislative will and the original interpretation of the Constitution is not resolvable without a constitutional amendment — which requires a political supermajority practically impossible to assemble in current America. This is why gun policy remains one of the most deadlocked issues in American politics. The battle now plays out primarily at the Supreme Court, not in Congress or the states.

The arguments of Second Amendment defenders

A constitutional right that deserves to be defended

Presenting honestly the arguments of Second Amendment defenders is an intellectual requirement I want to honor. These defenders argue that the Second Amendment — "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" — is a constitutional right on the same level as freedom of speech or religious freedom. It cannot be suspended or limited by state legislatures reacting to understandable emotions that cannot erase a fundamental right.

They also note that restrictive gun laws in states like California and New York — which have among the strictest legislation in the country — have not eliminated gun violence in those states. The correlation between the rigor of laws and the level of armed violence is contested by researchers, and data shows that states with high levels of gun ownership but a culture of civic responsibility (certain rural states of the Midwest or the Rockies) have relatively low rates of armed violence.

Self-defense as a fundamental right in the Court's jurisprudence

The Supreme Court, in its rulings Heller (2008), McDonald (2010), and Bruen (2022), has progressively built a jurisprudence that recognizes the right to individual self-defense as the core of the Second Amendment. This jurisprudential construction proceeds from the premise that the right to defend oneself with a firearm — notably in one's home — is a natural right that predates the Constitution, which merely protects it.

In this view, restrictions on firearms do not protect citizens — they make them vulnerable to criminals who, by definition, do not obey laws. The "gun-free zones" created by the restrictive laws of Democratic states are, for Second Amendment defenders, targets for shooters who know they will meet no armed opposition. This argument — that gun restrictions disarm potential victims without disarming criminals — is empirically contested but very present in American public debate.

The international impact of American gun jurisprudence

What the world takes away from Supreme Court decisions

The Supreme Court's gun decisions are observed with consternation in most Western democracies. In Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, the proliferation of firearms in the United States and recurring mass shootings are perceived as a democratic anomaly — a serious dysfunction in an otherwise admired democracy. The decision to invalidate Hawaii's gun law reinforces this perception.

This international perception is not without consequences for American image and soft power. When the United States presents itself as the model of liberal democracy, the reality of 45,000 gun deaths per year and a constitutional jurisprudence that systematically expands the right to bear arms creates cognitive dissonance for foreign observers. America is simultaneously the country that defends freedom in the world and the only developed country where mass shootings are so frequent they no longer provoke lasting shock.

The international comparison: what other democracies do

The experiences of other democracies with firearms regulation are instructive. Australia adopted in 1996, after a mass shooting, a strict regulation that included a mandatory buyback program for firearms. Mass shootings have virtually disappeared since. Canada has strengthened its gun laws after several serious incidents and maintains a firearms registration system. Countries like Finland, Norway, and Switzerland, which have high rates of gun ownership but strict regulations on storage and use, have significantly lower levels of gun violence than the United States.

Second Amendment defenders respond that these international comparisons ignore the deep cultural, demographic, and institutional differences between the United States and these countries. This is partially true. But the correlation between firearms density, regulatory level, and gun mortality rates, observable in international comparative data, deserves serious reflection that current American jurisprudence tends to obscure.

Democratic states facing federal jurisprudence

California, New York, and legal resistance

The Democratic states — California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut — that had adopted restrictive firearms legislation find themselves in a difficult position after the Hawaii decision. Their laws are now all potentially vulnerable to legal challenges that will invoke Bruen's historical test. The question is no longer whether their strictest laws will survive — several will not — but how to find legislative formulations that can pass the constitutional test while maintaining effective protection.

Legal teams in these states are working intensively to find historical precedents that could justify certain regulations within the Bruen framework. Can bans on high-capacity magazines be justified by historical tradition? The Red Flag Laws that allow temporary confiscation of firearms from a person presenting a danger to themselves or others? Exclusion zones around schools? These questions will be decided by federal courts in the years ahead.

Forum shopping and the strategy of pro-gun litigants

A legal strategy that has emerged in the wake of Bruen is the forum shopping of pro-gun organizations like the NRA (National Rifle Association) and the NSSF (National Shooting Sports Foundation). These organizations carefully identify the federal circuits where judges are most favorable to their positions, file their appeals in those circuits, and wait for the decisions to work their way up to the Supreme Court to create favorable national precedents.

This long-term judicial strategy — similar in its logic to the one that pro-abortion rights organizations had used for decades — worked spectacularly. From Heller in 2008 to Bruen in 2022 and the 2026 decisions, Second Amendment jurisprudence has been progressively pushed in the direction desired by gun rights defenders. This is judicial politics in its purest form — legal, effective, and structurally difficult for the other side to counter.

Research on gun violence and policy solutions

What the scientific data shows

Research on gun violence in the United States was long impeded by a budget amendment in Congress — the Dickey Amendment (1996-2020) — which prevented the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from funding research that could be interpreted as promoting gun control. This restriction, partially lifted in 2020, had for 24 years deprived policymakers of robust scientific data to inform their policies.

Studies available since the partial lifting of the Dickey Amendment suggest nuanced conclusions: strengthened background checks reduce certain types of gun violence. Red Flag Laws reduce gun suicides. Restrictions on high-capacity magazines reduce the number of victims in mass shootings. These results — concerning targeted interventions rather than general bans — offer a more pragmatic path toward reducing gun violence than the sterile debates about total prohibition or total protection.

The economic cost of gun violence in the United States

Gun violence also has a massive economic cost that is rarely integrated into the political debate on firearms. Studies estimate the total cost of gun violence in the United States — including medical costs, productivity losses, criminal justice system costs, and quality of life impacts — at more than $300 billion per year. This figure far exceeds the costs of any imaginable firearms regulation.

This economic reality — which Second Amendment defenders rarely integrate into their analysis — underlines that the freedom to bear arms has a collective cost that exceeds the individual protection benefits its defenders invoke. A society that decides to allow 400 million guns to circulate in order to protect the individual right to self-defense collectively assumes an annual cost of $300 billion. This is a legitimate choice in a democracy. But it is a choice that deserves to be conscious and acknowledged.

The racial and social dimension of gun politics

Black communities and urban gun violence

Gun policy cannot be addressed without discussing its racial dimension. In the United States, African Americans are disproportionately affected by gun violence — both as homicide victims and, to a lesser extent, as victims of police shootings. Data shows that gun homicide rates in certain Black urban communities are several times higher than the national average.

This reality creates a paradox in the gun debate: the Black urban communities that suffer most from gun violence are often in states or cities whose political leaders seek to restrict access to firearms — restrictions that current jurisprudence invalidates. Meanwhile, Second Amendment defenders — a large proportion of whom are white and rural — invoke constitutional rights that American history has not always applied equally to all communities.

The right to self-defense and Black gun rights advocates

There exists, however, a less well-known tradition of Black American activists who defend the right to bear arms as an instrument of self-defense against racist violence. Organizations like the Black Panthers in the 1960s and contemporary defenders of Black communities' right to self-defense invoke the Second Amendment as a right belonging to all American communities. This dimension of gun politics — less visible in mainstream media — complicates the simple dichotomy between Second Amendment defenders (white, rural, conservative) and advocates of regulation (urban, minority, progressive).

Gun politics is, like most major American political questions, deeply shaped by race, class, and geography. Solutions that work in white rural areas do not necessarily work in Black urban neighborhoods. Regulations designed to protect affluent neighborhoods may disarm communities that need them for their security. This complexity deserves more space in the political debate than the entrenched positions of the NRA or gun control groups typically allow.

The future of gun jurisprudence: toward crystallization?

Has the Supreme Court reached its limits?

After Heller, McDonald, Bruen, and now Hawaii, a question arises: has the Supreme Court reached the limits of what it can invalidate in the firearms domain? Some constitutional experts believe that post-Bruen jurisprudence will create a degree of stability — once the parameters of the historical test are clearly established through successive decisions, states will know which regulations can survive. Others believe that Bruen's logic will lead to the progressive invalidation of virtually all significant firearms regulation.

The reality will probably fall between the two extremes. Some regulations will survive the historical test — bans on possession for convicted criminals, basic background checks, regulations on firearms for people with documented mental health disorders have historical precedents that can justify them. But the most ambitious laws of progressive states — bans on semi-automatic weapons, magazine restrictions, secure storage requirements — will probably be invalidated.

Federal legislative initiative: the only path to durable reform

If states cannot go as far as their voters would wish, the only path to a more substantial reform is the federal legislative route. A Congress law, if it enjoys sufficient bipartisan support to withstand legal challenges, could establish a national framework. In 2022, a bipartisan law — the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — strengthened background checks and funded Red Flag Laws at the state level. This is the model of possible reform: incremental, bipartisan, insufficient for the most ambitious but real in its effects.

In the political context of 2026 — a divided Congress, a conservative Supreme Court, midterm elections on the horizon — the chances of ambitious federal gun legislation are minimal. The debate will probably shift toward the 2028 elections and the future composition of the Supreme Court. This is the long time of American institutions, which progresses through crises, mobilizations, and political windows of opportunity rather than through planned reform. A rhythm that frustrates, but that is the reality of institutional change in a constitutional democracy.

The Hawaii decision and the Western world

What American gun jurisprudence says to its allies

Washington's allies in NATO and beyond observe American gun politics with a mixture of incomprehension and concern. Incomprehension because their own societies — including countries like Finland and Switzerland that have civilian armament traditions — have succeeded in regulating access to firearms in ways that maintain significantly lower levels of gun violence. Concern because American domestic decisions on firearms send a signal about the values and priorities of a democracy that presents itself as the global model.

The West, to remain relevant as a governance model, needs its members to coherently embody the values they claim to defend. A democracy that constitutionally protects the freedom to bear arms to the point of invalidating measures taken to protect children in their schools sends a message about the limits of that model. This is not a reason to reject the Western model — its virtues are immense and its superiority over authoritarianism remains evident. But it is an invitation to more humility in the way the West presents its model to the world.

Zelensky and the value of fundamental rights

There is a profound irony in the contemporaneity of the Hawaii decision and the war in Ukraine. Zelensky is fighting to defend a rule of law, democratic institutions, a freedom of governance that the West represents. Meanwhile, one of the most powerful members of this West adopts constitutional jurisprudence that invalidates protective measures for mass shooting victims. These two realities coexist in the real West — imperfect, contradictory, but always preferable to the alternatives.

What Zelensky defends is not a Western utopia without flaws. It is the right of a people to choose its own mistakes, its own contradictions, its own internal political debates — without a neighboring empire imposing its will by force of arms. The Hawaii decision is, in my view, a mistake. But it is a mistake that Ukraine has the right to make itself, one day, if it becomes sufficiently free and prosperous to afford that luxury. That is the freedom for which Zelensky is fighting.

Democratic states facing the federal legal wall

When federal jurisprudence neutralizes state legislatures

The Supreme Court's June 25, 2026 decision on Hawaii's gun law illustrates a fundamental constitutional phenomenon: in the American federal system, states can legislate in areas concurrent with the federal government, but when their laws conflict with the Court's constitutional interpretation, they are annulled. States like California, New York, Colorado, and Hawaii, which adopted strict gun laws after the Uvalde tragedy in 2022, find themselves facing this wall.

The frustration of progressive legislators is understandable and documented. They are responding to real demands from their voters — communities bereaved by mass shootings, parents who send their children to school with anxiety. Their laws were often well-designed, supported by data, validated by constitutional jurists. But the Supreme Court, with its six-justice conservative majority, interprets the Second Amendment in a way that systematically invalidates these measures.

The post-Bruen series: anatomy of a jurisprudential revolution

The 2022 Bruen ruling introduced a historical test that requires any firearms restriction to be anchored in an American historical tradition going back to the 18th and 19th centuries. This requirement has made it nearly impossible to defend modern gun laws, which respond to realities — high-capacity semi-automatic weapons, AR-15-style assault rifles — that simply did not exist in 1791 when the Second Amendment was adopted. The Hawaii decision fits into this coherent series.

The list of decisions in the post-Bruen series grows: New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), then a cascade of decisions that have invalidated restrictions on public carrying of weapons, on firearm modifications, on high-capacity magazines. Each decision reduces the space in which states can regulate firearms. For defenders of gun control, it is a series of accumulating legal defeats with no clear recourse on the horizon.

Gun violence as a public health problem: data against ideology

400 million firearms and the epidemiological realities

Public health researchers who study gun violence work with clear and repeatable data: the United States, with its 400 million firearms in circulation, has gun death rates without comparison to other industrialized democracies. Data from the WHO and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) shows that the gun mortality rate in the United States is approximately 25 times higher than the average of other high-income countries.

This data is not contested by serious researchers. It is contested on its political interpretation: Second Amendment defenders argue that firearms protect more than they kill, that crimes in self-defense count as much as homicides. These arguments have their own academic literature, their own database. The public debate on guns in the United States is partly a debate about which scientific literature one chooses to privilege.

After Uvalde, after Sandy Hook, after Supreme Court decisions: what future for gun control?

The Uvalde shooting in 2022 had created a breach in the American political consensus on guns. For the first time in decades, a bipartisan law — the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — had been adopted. States had followed with local legislation. Then the Supreme Court had rendered Bruen, and the series of decisions that followed had progressively hollowed out the legislative progress achieved.

The Hawaii decision of June 25, 2026 is not the end of the debate — it is the expression of a profound constitutional impasse. As long as the Supreme Court majority interprets the Second Amendment through the prism of Bruen's historical test, progressive states will not be able to adopt the measures they deem necessary to protect their citizens. Changing this reality requires either changing the composition of the Court — which takes decades — or amending the Second Amendment itself — which requires a constitutional majority that is nearly impossible to obtain.

Conclusion: One ruling, one nation, one unanswered question

The persistence of the gun debate in America of 2026

The Supreme Court's decision invalidating Hawaii's gun law will not resolve the American gun debate — it deepens and complicates it. It tells progressive states that their legislative aspirations on security have constitutional limits. It tells mass shooting victims that the protections they demand run up against a priority constitutional right. And it tells the world that America has chosen a particularly expansive interpretation of its Second Amendment that has no equivalent in other Western democracies.

These messages are difficult. They will find no easy resolution in the coming years, and probably not before the composition of the Supreme Court changes. In the meantime, the 400 million firearms continue to circulate, the 45,000 annual deaths continue to accumulate, and bereaved families continue to wait for a response from their institutions that is long in coming. This is the reality of America in 2026 — a powerful, indispensable democracy, deeply at odds with itself on some of its most fundamental questions.

The West must look at America with clear eyes

For the West that considers America one of its essential pillars, clarity is essential: the alliance does not rest on the perfection of the American model, but on the relative superiority of the democratic order over the authoritarian alternatives. Trump, the conservative Supreme Court, the 400 million firearms: all of this is part of an American reality that its allies accept because the alternative — a world without American leadership in security alliances — is worse. This is a form of moral pragmatism that deserves to be named clearly. The West supports America not because it is perfect, but because it is indispensable. And America, despite its contradictions, remains the guarantor of freedom for billions of people in the world.

It is to this contradictory America that Zelensky asks for continued support. And it is to this same America — with its 400 million firearms, its conservative Supreme Court, its 108,000manufacturing jobs lost, and its deep institutional divisions — that the West asks to remain the pillar of its security architecture. Both demands are legitimate. Responding to both simultaneously is the permanent challenge of American politics.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency box

Editorial positioning

This essay is based on factually documented data from identified and dated sources. Personal opinions are clearly marked by the editorial passages. The columnist is not American and observes from the outside, with the perspective and the limitations this implies. He has no ties to American pro-gun or anti-gun organizations. The data on 45,000 annual deaths and 400 million firearms in circulation are estimates published by American public health organizations.

Limits of the analysis

Information on the Supreme Court decision invalidating Hawaii's gun law comes from The Guardian and Politico dated June 25, 2026. The full text of the decision was not available in its entirety at the time of writing. Data on the economic cost of gun violence are estimates from academic studies that vary depending on the methodologies used.

Sources

Primary sources

The Guardian — Supreme Court invalidates Hawaii gun law, TPS, asylum — June 25, 2026

Politico — Major Supreme Court decisions of June 25, 2026 — June 25, 2026

Secondary sources

ArentFox Schiff — U.S. legal and constitutional context, June 2026 — June 25, 2026

CNBC — American political context under Trump 2.0 — June 23, 2026

Ground News — Republican congressional news, June 25, 2026 — June 25, 2026

Rize Recovery — Social and health context of the Big Beautiful Bill — June 21, 2026