Editor's Note: This article is from Gun Pulse, an email-only newsletter from The Sentinel published six days per week to cover the battle over the Second Amendment.
Attorneys with the Second Amendment Foundation submitted a lawsuit last week over a Hawaii statute which prohibits young adults from acquiring or purchasing firearms.
The gun rights group said that the statute, which bans citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty from buying firearms or ammunition, violates the Second Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment liberties of young adults. The plaintiffs include nineteen-year-old Elijah Pinales and seventeen-year-old Juda Roache, who will turn eighteen next month.
Second Amendment Foundation executive director Adam Kraut remarked in a statement about the lawsuit that the Hawaii statute “makes it impossible for these citizens to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” observing that in recent years “their rights have been assured by recent Supreme Court rulings, not to mention this nation’s history and tradition, and the Hawaii statutes clearly conflict with those decisions and the relevant history.”
The lawsuit requests that the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii allow the young plaintiffs “to defend themselves, their families, and their homes.”
Second Amendment Foundation executive vice president Adam Gottlieb added in the statement that “Hawaii has essentially decided the Second Amendment doesn’t apply in that state.”
“Under the Fourteenth Amendment, no state shall make or enforce any law which abridges the rights guaranteed to citizens,” he said. “These prohibitions simply cannot be allowed to stand.”
The lawsuit also comes months after members of the Hawaii Supreme Court claimed in a decision that “there is no state constitutional right” to publicly carry firearms. Justices ruled against a defendant charged after he was found in possession of a handgun without a permit, contending in their decision that “the spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities.”
“Never have Hawaii’s people felt that carrying deadly weapons during daily life is an acceptable or constitutionally protected activity,” the decision commented. “In Hawaii, a state constitutional right to keep and bear arms does not extend to non-militia purposes.”
