The Wolford decision has the usual suspects in the legal academy clutching their pearls because it finally applied Bruen’s history-and-tradition test to Hawaii’s century-old “vampire rule” that effectively banned open carry for ordinary citizens. Left-leaning professors are suddenly discovering a newfound reverence for 19th-century territorial laws they once dismissed as racist relics when those laws were used to disarm non-white populations, yet now treat them as sacred precedent simply because they disarm everyone. The irony is rich: the same scholars who spent years arguing that the Second Amendment was a collective relic suddenly insist that obscure Reconstruction-era carry restrictions are the definitive expression of our national tradition, all while ignoring the overwhelming historical evidence that law-abiding citizens could openly carry arms in the vast majority of American jurisdictions.

What makes the reaction especially telling is how quickly the institutional gun-control apparatus—Brady, Giffords, and their academic allies—resorted to apocalyptic framing rather than engaging the actual historical record the court relied upon. Their hysteria reveals the deeper strategic problem they face: once courts start demanding real analogues instead of policy preferences dressed up as tradition, the entire post-Heller regulatory superstructure begins to look constitutionally shaky. Meanwhile, the parallel developments in Virginia, where a judge just blocked enforcement of the state’s magazine and “assault weapon” restrictions, and Gavin Newsom’s tin-eared attack on the Wolford reasoning, show that the post-Bruen landscape is shifting faster than the gun-control legal strategy can adapt.

For the 2A community this moment is less about any single ruling and more about the normalization of meaningful scrutiny. When judges stop deferring to legislative assertions of “sensitive places” or “sensitive manner” and instead require actual historical evidence, the universe of viable restrictions shrinks dramatically. That shift forces gun-control advocates into increasingly strained historical arguments and public meltdowns that only highlight how little democratic or historical support many of their preferred policies ever had. The result is a slow but steady restoration of the presumptive right to bear arms that the Constitution’s text and our actual tradition always contemplated.