WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday weighs a challenge to a Hawaii gun restriction dubbed the “vampire rule” because, as with the fictional creatures in folk tales and the novel “Dracula,” people carrying firearms are required to seek permission before entering private property.
The justices will weigh whether the requirement, enacted in 2023 as part of a broader gun law, violates the Constitution’s Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority regularly backs gun rights.
Although in most states the law assumes that people can enter private properties while armed if they have a concealed carry permit, several states have joined Hawaii in flipping that rule. The others are New York, New Jersey, Maryland and California.
The Hawaii measure concerns a host of private properties that are generally open to the public, such as gas stations, stores and restaurants. Lower courts have partly blocked other provisions of the law that impose different restrictions on where people can take guns.
People who violate the private property provision can face up to a year in prison.
The law was challenged by three gun owners with concealed carry licenses, Maui residents Jason Wolford, Alison Wolford and Atom Kasprzycki, as well as the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, a gun rights group. The Trump administration has filed a brief backing the challengers.
A federal judge earlier blocked the private property provision, but the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the state’s favor in a September 2024 ruling.
Gun rights advocates say the “vampire rule” effectively nullifies the right to carry a firearm in public, which the Supreme Court endorsed in a major 2022 ruling that found for the first time that the right to bear arms under the Constitution’s Second Amendment extends outside the home.
“Hawaii’s intent to eliminate the right to carry is both self-evident and illegitimate,” lawyers for the challengers said in court papers.
Hawaii and gun control advocates stress the state’s separate interest in protecting property rights, which are also enshrined in the Constitution.
“Since our founding as a nation, private property rights have been foundational to American identity and embedded throughout our system of government and our Constitution,” Douglas Letter, chief legal officer at the gun control group Brady, told reporters last week.
The 2022 Supreme Court ruling led both to a surge of new gun laws being passed and a wave of new challenges to long-standing firearms restrictions.
In its most recent Second Amendment case, the court in 2024 appeared to backtrack somewhat on that 2022 ruling, upholding a federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms.
The justices are hearing another gun case in March, on whether a federal law that bars users of illegal drugs from possessing firearms is unconstitutional. Hunter Biden, the former president’s son, was convicted under that law before his father pardoned him.
The concept of vampires not being able to enter properties without consent was popularized in Bram Stoker’s classic book “Dracula,” in which one of the characters, professor Van Helsing, states: “He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be someone of the household who bid him to come.”