Supreme Court Rules States Cannot Require Property Owner Permission for Guns on Land

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that states cannot require gun owners to get permission from property owners before bringing guns onto their land.

In a 6-3 ideologically divided decision, the high court said that requiring permission in advance is an undue burden on the right to possess and carry a firearm.

In most states, gun owners can bring firearms onto private property, unless the property owner tells them otherwise. But five states—Hawaii, California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey—have passed laws that require gun owners to get permission in advance.

These regulations are sometimes called "vampire laws," so named from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, where the Count "may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come."

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a conservative supermajority, drove a stake through the laws by deciding that they "hobble[s] what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives."

This is the latest in a series of cases stemming from the court's landmark 2022 decision creating a new test to determine if a gun regulation is constitutional. In that year, the court decided that in order for a gun regulation to be valid, the government must show that there existed "relevantly similar" regulations at the time of the founding.

The new rule has confused many lower court judges, leading to wildly different lower court judgments. At the same time, however, the 2022 decision has in many states greatly expanded the rights of gun owners. In the year after the decision, nearly 100 gun laws were successfully challenged, according to an analysis by scholars at SMU, the Brennan Center, and the RAND Corporation.

While most of those laws were challenged in lower court, the Supreme Court has heard its fair share of gun cases. Two years ago, the court upheld a law preventing domestic abusers from owning guns; a lower court had invalidated the law before the high court intervened. And earlier this term, the court unanimously limited the use of a gun law used to prosecute President Biden's son Hunter. The case, however, did not affect Biden, who was pardoned by his father.

Historical arguments were front-and-center in Thursday's decision. "At the time of the founding," supporters of the law argued in their brief, "numerous state laws prohibited entry onto private property without the owner's express consent." The law's opponents countered that most people do not care enough to put up signs authorizing firearm possession on their property, the vast majority of public places would become hostile to gun owners.

The Supreme Court sided with those challenging the laws barring guns on private property.