In recent years, several states have made it easier to carry or buy guns and electronic arms, such as stun guns. Hawaii, meanwhile, has maintained or tightened restrictions. And that has served us well, in that the Aloha State is ranked among states with the lowest levels of weapon-related violence nationwide.
An ongoing legal challenge aims to loosen Hawaii’s practice of issuing open-carry permits only in “exceptional” cases involving people “engaged in the protection of life and property,” which so far has been almost always restricted to security guards. Another challenge in the works is pushing the state to relax an outright ban on stun gun use for anyone other than law enforcement officers.
In this lawsuit, the plaintiff is an Oahu photographer who has been denied a permit to carry a Taser — a stun gun that shoots an electric current that can temporarily disrupt an attacker’s sensory and motor functions and inhibit muscular control.
In both cases, doing away with tough laws could result in making the islands a more dangerous place to live or visit. And in both cases, the challenges should be opposed by the state.
However, holding fast to current practices could be an uphill battle as recent court rulings are leaning toward allowing most citizens to own and carry firearms and electronic weapons for self-protection, openly in public places as well as in our homes.
Only three states — Hawaii, Rhode Island and New York — still ban stun guns. In most states no permit is required for consumers to purchase and possess a stun gun of any type. In the last decade, several bans have been lifted by way of constitutional challenges.
Among the latest: In April, Massachusetts’s top court struck down a state law that banned civilians from possessing stun guns, ruling that such “arms” are within protection of the Second Amendment’s right to self-defense. It tasked the Massachusetts Legislature with rewriting its law to regulate ownership of stun guns, without banning them entirely.
That state’s Supreme Judicial Court’s guidance specified that the right to carry an electronic weapon may be subject to requiring licenses for owners and should be tied to some restriction, such as a ban in schools and government buildings.
That guidance echoes a ruling in Hawaii’s open-carry litigation. In July, a three-judge panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Hilo man’s rights were violated when the former law enforcement officer was denied a permit to openly carry a gun in public for self-defense.
The state and Hawaii County are now rightly asking the full court to take a second look at the decision, based on the state’s stance that the Second Amendment rights in question should apply only to guns kept in homes.
A decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment grants individuals the right to keep firearms in their homes — although not without limits. Prior to that, courts held that the matter pertained largely to state militias, not personal protection.
There’s no denying that the open presence of guns and devices that inflict electric shock can escalate everyday brushes into confrontation resulting in senseless injury and deadly altercations.
Stun guns are typically described as less-than-lethal. But a Reuters news agency investigation, published last year, found that more than 1,000 people in the U.S. have died after police Taser-stunned them, and the device was ruled to be a cause or contributing factor in more than 150 of those deaths.
Hawaii’s tough laws are effective, in part, because of geographic isolation. Unlike mainland states, where laws can be undermined by driving across state lines, Hawaii-
bound transport of weapons is largely limited to regulated planes and cargo shipment.
If court rulings eventually compel Hawaii state lawmakers to re-craft our laws, they should be rewritten in terms as strict as possible, within legal boundaries.
