As bad as things are in Virginia, where I live, gun owners in Hawaii have it even worse than we do this legislative season. Part of that is because the gun laws in Hawaii are already atrocious. The right to bear arms is non-existent, with “may issue” licenses required to carry either openly or concealed, and the right to keep arms is curtailed as well, with every gun owner required to register their firearms with the police. In recent years we’ve seen the Honolulu police department use that list to try to seize guns from the state’s medical marijuana users, before backing down after an outcry and a lot of unwanted media attention.
“A lot of the firearms problems that we’re seeing are stemming from other, sort of, roll-on effects, and these laws don’t tackle that,” said Andrew Namiki Roberts, a director of the Hawaii Firearm Coalition. “These laws only tackle law-abiding people getting firearms. They don’t look at charging criminals that use firearms. They don’t look at where criminals are actually getting their firearms — which is theft.” Namiki Roberts says the loopholes that lawmakers are trying to close allow citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights.