Firearms registered statewide dropped nearly 24 percent last year and mirrored national statistics, the state Attorney General’s Office reported Tuesday.
The decrease to 40,635 from 53,400 in 2016 is “coming off the second-highest point on record for firearms registration,” said Paul Perrone, the AG’s research chief. Firearm registrations peaked at 60,757 in 2013.
Some firearm advocates attributed the drop to what has been dubbed the “Trump slump,” while a 2016 state gun registration law also was blamed.
“When Trump was elected, people felt he was more of a pro-Second Amendment (president), so everybody didn’t feel an urgent need to buy other guns,” gun shop owner Dwayne Lim said, adding they could buy their guns at their leisure.
If Hillary Clinton had been elected president, gun buyers feared she would ban certain weapons, he said.
A total of 16,443 personal/private firearm applications were processed in 2017, down 23.2 percent from 21,408 in 2016.
In 2017, 96 percent of applications were approved. Only 1.7 percent were denied due to applicants being disqualified, and 2.2 percent were voided for applicants’ failure to return permits.
Lim, Danger Close Tactical owner, said customers complained about Hawaii’s Rap Back law requiring people registering guns to be fingerprinted and entered in the FBI’s Rap Back service database.
The law allows authorized agencies to receive ongoing status notifications of any criminal history reported to the FBI, eliminating the need to issue repeated background checks for an individual.
Perrone, a criminologist, said despite the sharp decrease in 2017, the number of registrations is still high compared with the 13,617 in 2000. A notable rise began in 2008.
That happens to be the year President Barack Obama was first elected.
From 2012 to 2016, during Obama’s second term, firearm sales and registration boomed.
“There’s a direct relationship between a concern of scarcity and people buying more than they would have if scarcity was not an issue,” Hawaii Rifle Association President Harvey Gerwig said.
People felt “with a president like Obama, where he was trying to get rid of guns everywhere,” there would be a shortage, he said.
During Obama’s time in office, people were purchasing guns “at a greater speed than they are now,” Gerwig said. “With Trump as president, that’s not the case.”
Gerwig said during the 2008-2013 ammunition shortage, “people were buying up all the ammo they could get their hands on, and the same with firearms.”
