Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Forget Australia’s Gun Laws. American Reform Advocates Have Their Own Island to Study.
How Hawaii manages to be home to both a rising number of firearms and rock-bottom rates of gun violence.
It’s not hard to come up with reasons why Hawaii ranks among the country’s happiest states. What you may not know is that it’s also the healthiest. While that status is largely attributable to public health phenomena like lower rates of smoking and depression, there’s another factor playing a small part: Its residents are at a significantly lower risk than mainland Americans of dying by gunshot.
According to a data calculator maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Hawaii’s rate of gun homicide clocks in at just 0.62 victims per 100,000 people. (The rate for the United States as a whole is 3.99, a nearly sevenfold difference.) Hawaii boasts one of the country’s lowest suicide rates, which have been shown to increase when a gun is kept in the home, and just 20 percent of the state’s suicides are committed with firearms — nationally, guns are responsible for a little over 50 percent. A study from earlier this year also assigned Hawaii the lowest prevalence of non-fatal firearm injuries in the 18 states it measured. Whether intentional, accidental, assault-related, self-inflicted, or indeterminate, these incidents consistently occur at far lesser frequency in the Aloha State.
-Snip-
State law, for starters, requires a universal background check for all firearm sales. Citizens are required to obtain a permit and sit through a two-week waiting period before making a purchase, and they must register any firearm they buy. Registration itself is a multi-step process that can lead prospective gun owners on as many as five separate trips to either a police station or gun retailer. Permits for concealed-carry, meanwhile, are issued at the discretion of the state’s county police chiefs, who set a high bar (a recent decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals looks poised to bulldoze that hurdle, though the state’s lawyers are fighting the ruling). In short: Background checks, waiting periods, elaborate registration guidelines, and strict limits on concealed-carry permits combine to seriously vet prospective gun owners, and limit impulse and illegal purchases.
-Snip-
Which brings us to the other thing setting Hawaii apart: The thousands of miles separating the island chain from the United States, which act as a natural obstacle to gun smuggling. That makes an important difference, since many other states find their gun laws easily thwarted by a steady flow of illegal guns from their neighbors with weaker gun laws. Here, Chicago becomes an example not of the ineffectiveness of gun regulations in general, but the patchwork of laws that exists from state-to-state: More than half of all recovered guns used to commit crimes in the city between 2009 and 2013 were originally purchased in other states with looser regulations (particularly Indiana, its laissez-faire next-door neighbor). On the East Coast, traffickers have brought thousands of illegal weapons, including several that have been infamously tied to police assassinations, into cities like New York. Those guns come from the “Iron Pipeline” states of Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas — but also from those scenic New England states with laid-back gun laws.
https://www.thetrace.org/2015/11/hawaii-gun-laws-australia/
It’s not hard to come up with reasons why Hawaii ranks among the country’s happiest states. What you may not know is that it’s also the healthiest. While that status is largely attributable to public health phenomena like lower rates of smoking and depression, there’s another factor playing a small part: Its residents are at a significantly lower risk than mainland Americans of dying by gunshot.
According to a data calculator maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Hawaii’s rate of gun homicide clocks in at just 0.62 victims per 100,000 people. (The rate for the United States as a whole is 3.99, a nearly sevenfold difference.) Hawaii boasts one of the country’s lowest suicide rates, which have been shown to increase when a gun is kept in the home, and just 20 percent of the state’s suicides are committed with firearms — nationally, guns are responsible for a little over 50 percent. A study from earlier this year also assigned Hawaii the lowest prevalence of non-fatal firearm injuries in the 18 states it measured. Whether intentional, accidental, assault-related, self-inflicted, or indeterminate, these incidents consistently occur at far lesser frequency in the Aloha State.
-Snip-
State law, for starters, requires a universal background check for all firearm sales. Citizens are required to obtain a permit and sit through a two-week waiting period before making a purchase, and they must register any firearm they buy. Registration itself is a multi-step process that can lead prospective gun owners on as many as five separate trips to either a police station or gun retailer. Permits for concealed-carry, meanwhile, are issued at the discretion of the state’s county police chiefs, who set a high bar (a recent decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals looks poised to bulldoze that hurdle, though the state’s lawyers are fighting the ruling). In short: Background checks, waiting periods, elaborate registration guidelines, and strict limits on concealed-carry permits combine to seriously vet prospective gun owners, and limit impulse and illegal purchases.
-Snip-
Which brings us to the other thing setting Hawaii apart: The thousands of miles separating the island chain from the United States, which act as a natural obstacle to gun smuggling. That makes an important difference, since many other states find their gun laws easily thwarted by a steady flow of illegal guns from their neighbors with weaker gun laws. Here, Chicago becomes an example not of the ineffectiveness of gun regulations in general, but the patchwork of laws that exists from state-to-state: More than half of all recovered guns used to commit crimes in the city between 2009 and 2013 were originally purchased in other states with looser regulations (particularly Indiana, its laissez-faire next-door neighbor). On the East Coast, traffickers have brought thousands of illegal weapons, including several that have been infamously tied to police assassinations, into cities like New York. Those guns come from the “Iron Pipeline” states of Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas — but also from those scenic New England states with laid-back gun laws.
https://www.thetrace.org/2015/11/hawaii-gun-laws-australia/
Hawaii's example puts the lie to almost all of the right-wing gun lobby's claims about stricter gun regulations leading to a "slippery slope" of eventual confiscation. ALL guns in Hawaii are registered, and all transfers of ownership are tracked. Hawaii's strict gun laws lead to more responsible and law-abiding gun owners.
Sensible gun regulation not only works, it keeps our communities safer. National gun legislation is required to reduce the amount of gun smuggling and straw purchases from rogue states with lax gun laws. A form of national registration and universal background checks will also help reduce the gun violence epidemic.
Incidentally, Hawaii is a predominately Democratic state. Go figure...
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
