“There’s a reason that Hawaii has the lowest gun death rate in the country. They’d rather see guns destroyed than families.” – CSGV’s Ladd Everitt in Hawaii Police Destroy $575,000 Worth Of Guns To Keep Them Off The Street [at huffingtonpost.com]
“There’s a reason that Hawaii has the lowest gun death rate in the country. They’d rather see guns destroyed than families.” – CSGV’s Ladd Everitt in Hawaii Police Destroy $575,000 Worth Of Guns To Keep Them Off The Street [at huffingtonpost.com]
Uh-huh. So what is the reason?
I feel a great disturbance in the force as thousands of tiny voices cried out. These weren’t just any guns either. These were 3rd gen S&W semi automatics. The first article I read said they were not going to sell them because “Guns”(actually it was crying about liability) it was estimated that 200 of them were bnib and the other 1800+ were still in shooting condition. The department wanted something new and plastic. If I was a resident of Hawaii I would be ubber pissed that my tax dollars were being wasted, those guns are very collectable and would sell fairly quick.
3rd gen smiths?? that is a crime. well, at least my four 3rd gens lost last year in a boating accident are worth more now (3953, 5943, 4553, 4506), all had night sights and new springs too
Maybe next time your in the “D” you can use some scuba gear to dig up that 39? That is one firearm I have never had the privilege to fire, I’ll pay for the heated, or air conditioned square range and I’ll bring some ammo 🙂
Gangs and ghettos.
Remove those two things from any city and the violent crime rate isn’t that high. Hawaii doesn’t have much of that. Also being an island so people don’t go in or out without notice easily.
This ^^^
This ^^^
“There’s a reason that Hawaii has the lowest gun death rate in the country”
Yes … homogeneity of non-violent peoples, and no ghetto system.
Look up their Demographics. The population is either indigenous or from non-violent asian and western-european races at a rate over 92%.
Balkanization is where you get strife and a house divided against itself so it can fall.
Just ask President Barack Obalkanization ..
Yeah I was about to say, the crime rates in Hawaii have almost everything to do with the median income, cost of living, and demographic makeup and very little to do with a colossal public waste of money to make a statement. Oh and the fact that it’s an island helps
I would
Love to see john lott address this. A quick lol shows that while your chances of being a victimn of violent crime are much higher in houston 1:95 as opposed to Honolulu 1:339. Your chances of falling victimn to property crime are higher in Honolulu that of course is comparing city to city.
Hawaii is a series of islands thousands of miles away from anywhere else. It is expensive to get there and expensive to live there. And the only big city is not that big.
If we where to take Hawaii and compare only the demographicly similar areas to that of houston im sure we would get different results.
I wouldn’t expect anything “more” from Ladd.
If Ladd didn’t have emotional straw men to spin, he’d be a white Vester Flanagan.
This 2010 study has Idaho having the lowest murder rate of 1.3 per 100,000 while gun ownership is reported at over 55%. Hawaii was at 1.8 for that period.
Regardless, big cities infested with gangs skew gun violence. Chicago, LA, and NYC are both incredibly violent and heavily restrict gun ownership for taxpayers. And those cities are all run by statist democrats.
Fun fact, CA is seeing a statewide crime increase after letting thousands of “non-violent” offenders out of jail. I supervised 2 pursuits of felony suspects Saturday. All were caught, with 3 total in custody. The vehicles in the pursuits were both stolen, and we have a white SUV taken for evidence because it was reported that it was used in a murder.
So an anti-gun group seized upon a rare fact (which I wouldn’t trust until independently verified) that is convenient to their narrative. Meanwhile, the murder rate of government and their agents through history completely overshadows gang shooting and lone mass shooters.
Oh, come on now Accur81. Don’t you know that it isn’t murder if the Almighty State kills someone, anyone?
But I thought our prisons were filled up with non violent pit heads. If we leave them alone then crime will become a thing of the past. /sarc
Sigh. What is so hard to comprehend? The spike in gang land shootings trying to control Alcohol territory stopped after Prohibition ended.
Stop the War On Drugs. Stop making a huge profit motive giving gangs reason to kill each other over drug territory, extra money the gangs use to pay off the police to look the other way, and giving people reason to steal to support an expensive drug habit.
Will people stop being human predators if we stop the War on Drugs? Of course not. But they won’t make as much huge profit in doing so.
Just look at Portugal, and the end of Prohibition as the example of what we could expect if stop this futile attempt to control individuals choices.
There was no spike in gangland murders during Prohibition. The preceeding decade saw a much greater rise in murders by organized crime. The mob wars of the teens and twenties were caused by the Italian -Jewish mob displacing the Irish mafia. Murders rose during prohibition as an extension of this war. The final spike was a result of mob consolidation brokered by Arnold Rothstein, you know the guy who fixed 1919 World aseries. OBTW, gambling was legal. How could a crime like that happen?
The Black P-stone nation is not AL Capone’s mob. The Mafia was a business not a,way of life. The Mafia did not disappear when Prohibition ended, in fact it grew stronger with its power peaking in the 50 and 60s. The Mafia controlled the wholesale trade in alcohol for 50 year after the end of Prohibition and controlled legal gambling and prostitution in Nevada until the justice department finally won the war on the mob. The mob lost its power for the good old American shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations and not because of legal changes. The final generation of bosses lost got soft.
California has decriminalized possession and released “non violent” offenders. according to faux Libertarian theory crime should be dropping but it is spiking instead. Perhaps you need to revise the theory to match the data.
Faux Libertarians aren’t much different than CSGV. One says you reach utopia if you ban guns and other say no what you need to do is abolish law.
You can try to rewrite history tdiinva. Just look at the murder rate before Prohibition, then look at the murder rate after Prohibition.
The Mafia wan’t “defeated” by the Government, it started losing influence when it’s population of fresh poor Italian immigrants moved out of the slums and integrated into the middle class. The Mafia no longer had an environment to support it’s existence.
But the key point tdiinva is that you take on a power, with an arrogance, that even G-d chooses not to do.
He gives us freedom of choice. He tells us what the laws of the universe are, then he gives us the freedom to follow them, or not. Then he allows us to pay the price of the bad choices we make. It might take a generation, but he loves us so much, that he will allow us to learn from our mistakes. He is a good parent.
You, on the other hand, hate freedom so much, hate people’s freedom of choice so much, that you would deny them the opportunity of learning from their mistakes. You would deny your children the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.
You are a tyrant tdiinva. You are an enemy of freedom and free people everywhere.
But until enough people finally accept that they need to give others the same freedom of choice that G-d gives us all, there will always be the need of those of us that wish to be free, and armed, to stop a tyrant from enslaving us all.
Riddle me this Einstein.
Drugs and Prostitution were just as illegal in the 1950s as they are today plus outside of Nevada there was no legal gambling yet murder and violent crime were lower than today. Explain.
Most of Europe had the same draconian drug laws as the United States yet their murder rates were far lower.
Explain.
Gambling and Prostitution were legal in Nevada yet were controlled by organized crime.
Explain.
There is a big difference between knowing history and repeating conventional wisdom
Perhaps if you choose to do the research required to answer those question you might learn the difference..
tdiinva, “Riddle me this Einstein”? Fair is Fair. You can question my intelligence. I’ll call just call you what you are. Tyrant
You can spout all of the justifications for trying to control peoples free choices all you want. That has been the excuse of all tyrants through all of history. “It’s for their own good”.
It’s like I’ve said. The tyrants in government use the “useful” idiots”(per Stalin) to enforce the tyranny of the many, by the few, because it’s for their own good. You are a “useful idiot” ,tdiinva, supporting the attack on our civil liberties, for the purpose of controlling the free choices of individuals, “for their own good”.
Until enough people wake up to the fact that the only effect of the “War on Drugs’ is really a war on our civil liberties, the war of the useful idiots on all free people will continue.
No need to insult your intellugence. Your lack of intellectual curiosity is self identifying. Why go with data analysis when rhetoric is good enough.
Pro tip: When an identical condition is associated with radically different states then it is not an important factor. If drug prohibition is associated with both high and low murder rated then drug prohibition is not an importantant determinant of the murder rate. When the legalization of victimless crimes does not put organized crime out of business then the legal status of your favorite victimless crime s not an important determinant of the existence of organized crime. I suggest you try to identify the factors that are important.
OK, Tommy, I check historic murder rates and here are the numbers. In 1900 the rate was a little above 1 per 100k by 1919 the number was about 8 per 100k. During the two decades preceding Prohibition the murder rate went up 8 fold. Who is rewriting history now?
It figures tdiinva you would leave out the fact that during Prohibition the murder rate jumped to the highest of our countries history to that point at the end of prohibition, to 9.7 per hundred thousand and after Prohibition it dropped down to 5.6 per hundred thousand a few years later. And this was still during the Great Depression. Yet you still deny that the legalization of alcohol had any relation to the drop in the murder rate.
But of course you can not even acknowledge this correlation. It might show your whole premise to be simply another excuse to be a mini tyrant, another “useful idiot” in supporting the tyranny of the few over the many.
But let us say you are right. That whether a drug is legal or not legal has no relation to whether a crime syndicate can stay in business or whether murder rates go up or down.
So you are basically saying the War on Drugs is a total waste of money, effort and ultimately makes no difference in the end result of ending a crime syndicates existence or the effecting murder rates.
So by your own premise, the War on Drugs does not make one bit of difference as to the eradication of crime syndicates or the lowering of murder rates.
So let’s choose freedom instead of tyranny and end the (by your own acknowledgement) useless War on Drugs.
Oh wait aminute, that would mean you would have to give up the need to control others, yeah, tyrants need to tyrannize, or at least by proxy by you bowing down to your masters in government and letting them be tyrants over us all.
You are so right. The “pit heads” are well known for being some of the most violent criminals already. Putting them in a place with other violent criminals is a great idea since they are obviously as bad as murderers. Our overwhelming lead in incarceration of our people still doesn’t cut it. More prisons please and more people not hurting others in them ASAP!
ThomasR, this guy thinks soldiers in Nam smoked pot in order to get more violent for battle rather than to cope with it. There is a huge chasm between that belief and attempting to comprehend your point.
Irony fail.
Look sport, It isn’t Joe Jock and Sallie Sorority that are being put in the slammer for possession. It’s Boyz in the Hood. California is running a social experiment and it looks like it isn’t turning out as Tommy predicted.
Hmm GusMac, I always figured tdiinva was a woman.
Yeah, the idea that people should be free to make their own choices as to what they freely put in their bodies or what consenting adults choose to do between each other has always frightened control freaks. I never could understand this need. But that is the population, the “useful idiots”, that tyrants need to use to enforce tyranny over others.
And there always seems to be enough of those mini-tyrants to allow the monsters of history to soak the earth in blood.
Well of course stray homeless guns have to be destroyed like dogs, can’t have them running amok hurting people. Wish they could be placed with a good family or a law abiding individual, just can’t take that risk!
(sarc)
The Huffington Post article is laughable. They point us to a documented case where a man used a refurbished police handgun to murder two victims. Of course their implication is that the murder victims would still be with us if that man had not acquired that handgun. What they fail to mention is that a fit adult male doesn’t need a firearm to easily overpower two girls (ages 11 and 13) who were walking alone down a secluded road. They also fail to mention how the man could have just as easily driven his car over them and killed them.
Nevertheless, a mentally disturbed man could use a former police service handgun to murder two young girls walking alone down a secluded road. So gun grabbers are demanding that police departments destroy all handguns after police are finished using them! For the children!
you mean there is only a finite number of guns and he could not have bought another used gun that was not formerly police issued?
I think that the Honolulu Police Department should be commended. They clearly realized that those Smith & Wessons were “murder guns” and not the “protection guns” they ordered. Once they realized their mistake, they set about correcting it by doing the responsible thing, and destroying them.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2015/09/robert-farago/i-dont-want-a-murder-gun-i-want-a-protection-gun-video/#comments
Seriously though, Honolulu is a very expensive place to live. Just for grins, I punched in San Diego, CA for a comparison and got this:
http://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator/Hawaii-Honolulu/California-San-Diego Try it with your own city
Maybe the hardworking citizens of Honolulu should be asking their city leaders some hard questions about taxes, and other considerations when the next police budget is proposed.
Using Ladd Everitt’s logic, the police in Hawaii also should destroy their duty arms, or at least leave them at the station at the end of each shift. After all, don’t police officers’ families lives matter?
well mr. world expert news paper man I would hope that the $575k in guns that were issued to the police department would NOT find their way to the streets…if so we have an internal problem here …don’t you think?
They could always have a version of Fast and Furious.
Hawaii falls right in the middle of small states in terms of murder and violent crime rates. Both heavily armed Vermont and Wyoming do better. Hawaii is blessed with good demographics. Asian Americans have the lowest crime rate of any demographic group. Hawaii ‘s low murder rate has nothing to do with gun control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XstgfkXrqUs
Concealed carry permit holders have the lowest arrest rate of any American demographic.
Well, according to the FBI Hawaii does have a very low murder rate of 1.5 per 100,000, but then Iowa has a rate of 1.4 so I think I’ll keep my guns and Mr. Everitt can kiss my ass.
What’s the hell is your chin, Ladd?
Boats are being destroyed in Utah to keep kids safe and as a result ocean ship wrecks are extremely low in this state. Can I write for huffpo now? I would gladly take the leftist’s money to buy more toys.
OK. Enough! That was a perfectly good mouthful of coffee that just got wasted.
Well, we’ve had zero ocean shipwrecks in Colorado, ever since we became a state. Since Utah became a state twenty years after Colorado did, you’ll never catch up to our record. 😀
It’s not because of the the gun laws, Part of it is geography.
Being an island, transience is lower. Drugs and guns are harder to smuggle, therefor fewer gangs.
I also suspect that it has something to do with Black and Hispanic populations are 50-75% below the national average. Less minorities = fewer gangs.
Really? Sounds like HI is racist! They should be required to increase their allotment of gang-bangers!
Hey taxpayers… watch us make your money DISAPPEAR!
They better video record it, or else the destroyed weapons might wind up on the street.
Maybe the CSGV had them swatted.
Lowest gun death rate not the lowest murder rate.
Most HI murders are (obviosly) from mutual strangub_tion where one person takes it too far.
They can’t make $ for their island paradise and sell them far far away on the icky mainline?
MainLAND…have a swell Labor Day! What happened to edit-none at all now…
Don’t worry about the meth problem. That doesn’t destroy families, only guns do that.
Hawaii’s murder rate is low because of Steve McGarrett and Kono Kalakaua.
Pure piffle. Whether comparing nation-states or U.S. states, these antis can never present a clear connection between gun ownership rates and homicide rates. All they can do is cherry pick data and ignore contrary data. Take Hawaii, for example.
That the antis trumpet Hawaii’s low homicide rate, without delving more deeply into the data, is deceptive enough. However, they won’t even compare high level superficial data, and that’s just beyond insulting. They won’t look to states like Vermont and Iowa, states with higher gun ownership rates but lower criminal homicide rates, than Hawaii. Explain that, antis.
“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”
Bertrand Russell
Magical thinking is what this is!
We take something that plays a significant role in certain situations, we ritually destroy it, we chant slogans, and Presto! The situations we don’t like go away!
(Pay no attention to the [lying] man behind the curtain….)
Uhhh. Hawaii is in 3rd place for gun murders actually. Vermont and New Hampshire are in 1st and second respectively. Funny how vermont has no gun laws at all and also the lowest gun deaths. Maybe it’s something other than the guns…
Hawaii is also in 9th place for lowest murders total. The anti’s don’t even have to try because the supportive media never dare fact check them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state
A single State can not be compared to the whole, especially HI. Culture, surrounded by an Ocean, could these skew a comparison?
I recently spent two months on the big island of Hawaii for work (neener neener) and because of the isolated nature, there is a greater sense of cooperation. There is less that can be provided by government. For instance there is no municipal garbage collection, people take their garbage weekly or so to the dump and bluishness hire private services to do this for them.
There are a lot of laws that don’t get enforced very well and that go ignored frequently, the end result seemed to me to be very libertarian in certain regards (not all of course, in some ways it seemed restrictive). Like jumping off of cliffs into the ocean and no law enforcement showing up to put a stop to it for liability reasons or “public safety”.
There was a lot of barter and trade vs currency based transactions too. A lot of very friendly people, though I’m told there are some beaches that are ‘native only’, but I never tripped across one of those.
Also judging by the “Defend Hawaii” stickers with an ar-15 in the logo, I’m betting gun ownership is much higher than reported.
This was just the big island and I got to explore the western side much more than the eastern side and I wish I could remember more details that led to my opinions, but that’s the impression I got.
For a correlation you need more than one point and it helps to not have better alternative explanations.
There’s a reason violence rates don’t correlate to gun ownership.
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