Honolulu agrees to 4-month window to grant or deny gun carrying licenses after lawsuit over delays
HONOLULU– Honolulu has agreed to grant or deny applications to publicly carry weapons within four months of filing in response to a lawsuit from residents who complained about delays of up to a year, according to a provision signed by a federal judge on 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, which turned gun laws upside down across the country. That included Hawaii, which long had some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
Before the Bruen decision, which ruled that people have the right to carry items in self-defense, Hawaii’s police chiefs rarely issued permits for open or concealed carry.
When the chiefs began issuing “a trickle of concealed carry permits” after Bruen, the lawsuit said, Honolulu “simply switched from issuing concealed carry permits almost never, so that there was no one with a permit, to issuing permits so slowly that it has kept the licensing system essentially the same as it was before Bruen – completely discretionary.”
“The inordinate delays my clients have experienced in obtaining their concealed carry permits are indicative of a lack of commitment on the part of the government to allow citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” said Alan Beck, one of the lawyers for the three residents. and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, which was also a plaintiff in the case.
Representatives of Honolulu and the city police did not immediately comment on the agreement Friday.
In addition to granting or denying applications within 120 days of submission, the City agreed to make reasonable efforts to acquire and implement an online application system by March 8, 2026.
“The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the exercise of the Second Amendment and the right to defend oneself cannot be compromised by bureaucratic laziness,” said Kevin O’Grady, another attorney representing the plaintiffs. “This is one small step toward ensuring that people have their God-given right to protect themselves.”
A similar lawsuit is underway in Los Angeles for allowing delays of more than a year.
Beck said Honolulu is not seeing the same number of applications as Los Angeles.
In 2023, Honolulu processed and approved 1,577 carry permits, according to firearms statistics from the attorney general’s office.