Two Lower Courts Struck Hawaii’s Handgun Purchase Deadline and Police Inspection Rule. The Full Ninth Circuit Just Put Them Back.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

HONOLULU, HI — The full Ninth Circuit on September 22, 2026, reversed a district court injunction that had blocked two pieces of Hawaii’s handgun purchasing regime, sending Yukutake v. Lopez back to the lower court for further proceedings. Judge John B. Owens wrote the opinion. Judges Ryan D. Nelson, Danielle J. Forrest and Lawrence VanDyke each filed dissents.

En banc means the case was reheard by a large panel of the full court rather than the usual three judges, and that is the whole story here. Plaintiffs Todd Yukutake and David Kikukawa challenged Hawaii Revised Statutes § 134-2(e), which gives a buyer only a narrow window to acquire a handgun after receiving the required permit, and § 134-3, which requires the buyer to complete a form about the firearm and, in certain circumstances, physically bring the gun to a police station for inspection. District Judge J. Michael Seabright granted the plaintiffs summary judgment, found both provisions facially unconstitutional, meaning invalid in every application and not just as applied to these two men, and permanently enjoined them. According to the Second Amendment Foundation, the plaintiffs then won again before a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel before the full court voted to rehear it. SAF’s amicus brief, a friend-of-the-court filing, described the requirements as a 30-day purchase deadline and a police inspection within five days.

The injunction predated the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision. Bruen tells courts to run a two-step inquiry: does the Second Amendment’s text cover the conduct, and if so, can the government justify the law with historical tradition. The en banc court instead leaned on footnote 9 of Bruen, reading it as an apparent carve-out that treats objective, non-abusive shall-issue licensing regimes as presumptively constitutional. Hawaii, the court noted, is shall-issue for firearm permits, meaning an applicant who meets the requirements gets the permit. The court wrote that the circuits have converged on one principle since Bruen: non-abusive shall-issue laws comport with the Second Amendment. With that framing in place, the court held that Hawaii’s regime survives.

In plain terms, that flips who has to prove what. Under Bruen the state carries the burden of justifying a gun law with history. Under this reading, once a court labels a law part of a shall-issue system, the gun owner has to prove the system is being run abusively.

Kostas Moros, Director of Legal Research and Education at SAF, made exactly that point in a thread on X the afternoon the opinion dropped. “See how they reverse the burden? Bruen was emphatic that the burden is on the government. The Ninth Circuit uses one footnote to reverse that whenever they can characterize a law as ‘shall-issue,’” he wrote. He was blunter about the mechanism: “Based on the summary, the Ninth Circuit seems to be doing the thing where it just says any ‘shall issue’ system is fine, so long as it isn’t ‘abusive.’ And of course, the judges get to determine if it is abusive (interest balancing, yay!).” Interest balancing is the judge-weighs-the-tradeoffs test the Supreme Court threw out in Bruen.

Moros also argued the footnote is being stretched far past its text. At most, he wrote, the Supreme Court was talking about the concealed carry permit regimes it referenced in that footnote, and “the Hawaii laws at issue are unique in the country.” He says the ruling runs against what the Court “just said in Wolford,” a separate Hawaii carry case the Supreme Court agreed to hear last October, where in his reading the Court reaffirmed that the analysis does not work this way. He noted one more pattern: “As is often the case when it is sued by Alan Beck, Hawaii changed the law to make it a little less abusive, and that seems to have paid off.”

None of this changes the fact that a Hawaii buyer still faces a clock and a police station after the sale. SAF founder Alan Gottlieb called these restrictions unique and burdensome, with no parallel in other states. Part of a serious carry mindset is knowing those steps cold before you set foot in a gun shop, because in Hawaii the paperwork does not end when you walk out with the box.

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Moros reads the split as 6-5 while noting he had not yet read the dissents, and he took what he could from it: “Progress! We usually lose by more than that.” SAF’s amicus brief had already warned the court that its habit of granting en banc rehearing to overturn Second Amendment victories undermines public confidence in the judiciary. This opinion is that habit in action. A district judge and a three-judge panel both read Bruen and struck these laws. It took the full court and a footnote to put them back.

I will continue tracking Yukutake v. Lopez as it heads back to the district court.