Hawaii is generally considered one of the safest states in the nation.
Many tout the state’s tough gun control laws as the reason why, though I’ve long argued that there’s a lot more to anything than just that.
Even so, Hawaii does have some advantages most states don’t have. For example, you can’t just drive illegal guns across state lines. Even if you have a submarine car, there aren’t any gas stations along the route, as a buddy of mine from Honolulu pointed out to me recent.
But new questions are being raised. It seems that Hawaii’s status of being very low crime might not reflect reality very much.
Three years before [mass killer’s name redacted] opened fire on his Waianae neighbors in one of the worst shootings in Hawaii history, a newly formed gun violence commission met for the first time to discuss critical gaps in information about how to prevent such tragedies in the islands.
Legislators created the commission after a man with an unlicensed firearm shot and killed two Honolulu police officers. Their goal was better data to frame laws that could save lives.
The only legislation to come out of the commission was a proposal this year to sunset the group and merge it with another.
Hawaii proclaims that its strong gun laws have resulted in low gun violence, but there is sparse evidence to back that up. And cops also don’t have the data they need to craft strategies for dealing with rising violence in places like the Westside.
The Gun Violence and Violent Crimes Commission identified nearly half a dozen issues in need of urgent research — from untraceable ghost guns to a rise in juvenile crime — while also noting that statewide information is so unreliable that even the basic premise that shootings are not a big Hawaii problem is questionable.
“We just don’t have the data on it,” Commissioner Denise Konan, dean of the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii Manoa, said at a 2022 meeting.
County police departments all collect and report data differently, agencies struggle with how to clearly define violent crime, and even finding out how many crimes were committed with an unlicensed versus licensed firearm would require police departments to read through hundreds of records individually.
Without better data, “research into understanding and reducing violent crime and gun violence is virtually impossible,” the Attorney General’s Office wrote this year in a letter supporting a proposal to end the group and merge it with another commission.
So in other words, the numbers currently reported from the state could be much higher than what we’ve seen.
After all, if there’s one thing I’ve seen in this world, it’s that numbers like this are never double-counted. It’s always an undercount, and there’s no reason to believe this case will be any different.
Hawaii is a beautiful place, from what I’ve seen of it, and it’s a popular tourist destination for a very good reason, but their gun control laws are oppressive and there’s some downright idiocy at work in the state’s judicial branch that only makes it worse.
Now, I doubt better reporting would dissuade anti-gunners in the state from pretending the laws work as advertised, and even if the actual numbers were lower, they wouldn’t really change our position on the right to keep and bear arms. I’ve said before that even if they worked perfectly, I’d still oppose them.
But there are a lot of people in the middle politically that might rethink their position if they had accurate facts.
Which might explain why there’s really no one all that bothered by the fact in Hawaii. They mention it and they might talk about it, but is anyone seriously trying to fix it or is it all just smoke and mirrors?
