Severability was drafted in deliberately

The final sentence is doing defensive work, and it is worth noticing which direction it defends. A void provision “is severable and any remaining provisions that can be given effect are not thereby affected.”

Without it, an owner could argue that an offending clause pulls down the instrument around it — the argument that succeeded on entirely different grounds in Hood v. Straatmeyer. The Legislature foreclosed it here. A declaration with an unlawful firearms clause loses that clause and keeps everything else.

The comparison that makes this interesting

Many states carry a shelf of covenant-override statutes: solar access, flag display, political signs, satellite antennas, clotheslines, EV charging, assistance animals, xeriscaping. South Dakota carries one, and this is it.

That absence is not an oversight of a single session. A sweep of all 571 bills of the 2025 session and all 666 bills of the 2026 session found no bill proposing a solar-access, flag-display, political-sign, EV-charging or ADU override as applied to private covenants — and none proposing a general homeowners association act either.²

So on every subject other than firearms, a South Dakota covenant means what it says. Our pages on solar rights, flag display and political signs set out what governs in the absence of a statute, which is the declaration and general contract law.

What the section does not do

It does not create a right to discharge a firearm in a subdivision where local law forbids it. It does not address open carry in common areas as against a rule adopted by a board rather than a recorded covenant — the text reaches “a covenant running with the land,” not board-adopted rules, and a rule is a different instrument. Nor does it supply a remedy: there is no fee-shifting clause, no penalty, and no administrative complaint route. An owner whose covenant contains an offending clause has a defence and a declaratory-judgment theory, and that is the whole toolkit.

It also says nothing about ammunition storage quantities, about safety requirements, or about a covenant that regulates the structure housing a firearm — an architectural restriction on an outbuilding remains an architectural restriction.

What changes for a South Dakota declaration

Older declarations are the ones the question bites on. A subdivision covenant drafted in the 1970s or 1980s with a broad no-discharge or no-hunting clause was lawful when recorded. Whether it survives SDCL 43-12-7 is the open issue above, and nothing filed with a register of deeds will answer it.

The effect clause makes this a reading exercise, not a keyword search. Searching a declaration for “firearm” does not find the problem. The provisions most likely to be caught are the general nuisance and noise clauses, hunting restrictions, and prohibitions on “dangerous activities” — language that names nothing and reaches everything.

Whether it reaches covenants recorded before it passed is unresolved. The Act contains no retroactivity clause and no savings clause for previously recorded covenants, and no South Dakota decision has addressed the question. The section speaks to what a covenant “may not” do rather than to when it was recorded, which points one way; the ordinary presumption against retroactive application points the other. Anyone told the answer is settled is being told something the statute does not say.

What to watch next

No South Dakota decision has yet construed SDCL 43-12-7. The first case will have to decide how far “have the effect of” travels — whether it reaches a generally worded nuisance clause applied to target shooting, or only a clause aimed at firearms. Until then the breadth of the phrase is the open question, and it is a wide one.