NRA-ILA | NRA-ILA Files Friend of the Court Brief in Ninth Circuit Case Challenging Hawaii’s Permit and Registration Laws

On Monday, NRA-ILA filed an amicus curiae (or friend of the court) brief in a case challenging Hawaii’s draconian permit-to-purchase and firearm-registration laws in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Aloha State does not make it easy for an individual to exercise their Second Amendment Rights. State law imposes many repetitive steps on tight deadlines. First, one needs to apply for a permit to purchase a handgun, which requires providing the Chief of Police with the handgun’s make, model, serial number, etc. If the permit is approved, the individual then has 10 days to complete the purchase. Then upon completion of the purchase, the seller inputs the handgun’s make, model, serial number etc., signs the permit, and has 48 hours to get it back to the Chief of Police. But that’s not the end of the process. The purchaser then has five days to bring the handgun into the police station for it to be inspected and registered, which is the third time that the handgun’s make, model, serial number, etc., get recorded.

These burdensome laws “were passed solely to ‘control’ how people exercise their Second Amendment rights,” the brief argues. “Even worse, Hawaii submitted no evidence supporting either of these [laws]. Instead, it argues that the [laws] should be upheld by ‘common sense’ alone. Common sense—not to mention Supreme Court precedent—says that when the people declared that the right to keep and bear arms ‘shall not be infringed,’ they gave the government a heavier burden.”

NRA-ILA remains dedicated to protecting the right to bear arms in Hawaii and throughout the country against these types of overbearing restrictions.

The case is captioned Yukutake v. Shikada.

Please stay tuned to www.nraila.org for future updates on NRA-ILA’s ongoing efforts to defend your constitutional rights.