Hawaii is not just anti-gun; it’s a state that has advantages that pretty much no one else has. You can’t just drive guns across the border and traffic them without going through some controlled point of entry.
That doesn’t mean guns can’t be trafficked into the state; it’s just a whole lot harder to do. That means officials can’t really blame lax gun laws elsewhere for their issues.
Sure, they could blame the Bruen decision if they wanted to, but since the courts there have largely ignored the decision by claiming the “Aloha Spirit” trumps the Second Amendment, it wouldn’t be a good argument to make.
Luckily for them, their gun control laws are working great.
Right?
Right?
Oh, wait a minute…
Hawaiʻi saw the steepest increase in gun fatalities of any state in the decade ending in 2023, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gun deaths in the islands are rare, but increasing. The state, which has relatively strong gun laws, consistently ranks in the bottom five states for gun fatality rates. The national average in 2023 was about 14 gun-related fatalities per 100,000 people; Hawaiʻi’s rate was just 4.9. That year, only Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts had lower rates.
On average, guns killed about 58 Hawaiʻi residents each year from 2014 to 2023, according to CDC data. That includes homicides and suicides.
But the death toll has been rising. In 2014, only 40 people were killed by guns in the entire state. 2023, the most recent year for which final data is available, saw 73 deaths — an 80% increase over 2014 and the highest number of fatalities in at least a decade.
In the same period, the death toll increased by about 40% nationwide.
Of course, this report goes on to note that while Hawaii has strong gun control laws, there were some measures that didn’t pass. Clearly, that made all the difference.
Except it didn’t.
First, let’s understand that many of these “gun fatalities” are suicides. I don’t like lumping suicides in with things like homicides on general principle. However, since anti-gunners routinely do it and claim gun control is necessary to prevent those suicides, I don’t have much of an issue doing it this time.
And again, they have all the laws we’re told are needed to reduce so-called gun fatalities, even if by suicide, and yet, they’re seeing an 80 percent increase since 11 years ago. That shouldn’t be possible, according to what every anti-gun voice has told us over the years. It shouldn’t be a thing that can remotely happen.
Yet here we are.
The truth is that there are a lot of factors that go into “gun fatalities” as a statistic, but focusing on gun control is an easy sell in some places. It allows lawmakers to look like they’re addressing the problem without actually addressing the problem. Hawaii has gone far down that road, and even their judges seem to think the “Aloha spirit” is a guiding legal principle that supersedes the Constitution, even as we see that it hasn’t worked as advertised.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but causation should equal correlation. If gun control is the reason so-called gun fatalities drop in some states at other times, then why isn’t it doing so here? Or maybe gun control had nothing to do with the benefits attributed to it?
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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