Honolulu agrees to 4
HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu has agreed to grant or deny applications to carry guns in public within four months of submission in response to a lawsuit by residents who complained of delays of up to a year, according to a stipulation signed by a federal judge Friday.
The March lawsuit alleged that the long delays were the city’s way of keeping the permitting process as restrictive as it was before a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, that upended gun laws nationwide. That included Hawaii, which has long had some of the nation’s strictest gun laws.
Before the Bruen decision, which held that people have a right to carry for self-defense, Hawaii’s county police chiefs rarely issued licenses for either open or concealed carry.
When chiefs “began to issue a trickle of concealed carry permits” after Bruen, the lawsuit said, Honolulu “merely switched gears from almost never issuing any concealed carry permits so that there was no one with a permit, to issuing permits so slowly that it has essentially kept the permitting system the same as it was prior to Bruen — completely discretionary.”