Hawaii’s ‘Red Flag’ Law Is Rarely Used. A New Bill Aims to Change That.

The life cycle of a “red flag” law generally looks something like this:

– The law is proposed, with supporters arguing that it will be rarely used and only in those circumstances where law enforcement (and perhaps family members) know that someone’s gun ownership poses a danger to themselves or others. 

– The law is implemented, and is, in fact rarely used.

– Those same supporters argue that the law isn’t being used enough, so the pool of eligible petitioners needs to be expanded to include teachers, employers, mental health professionals, prosecutors, dating partners, roommates, etc. 

When that still doesn’t generate enough petitions, the state steps in to require the use of petitions wherever possible (as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has done) and/or starts spending money to “raise awareness” of the law in the hopes that it will lead to more “red flag” petitions and orders. 

A new bill in Hawaii would take that second approach by spending several hundred thousand dollars to “educate” the public and law enforcement abut the “red flag” process because advocates are unhappy that the law has been rarely used since it took effect in 2020. 

House Bill 2062 would fund awareness campaigns about the orders and other gun violence prevention initiatives. The proposal would also allocate money to help courts across the state to efficiently process gun violence protective orders and temporary restraining orders. 

… HB 2062 says nothing about what the public awareness campaigns should look like or how much money will be allocated. Funds will go to the Department of Law Enforcement and the Judiciary, rather than the Department of Health, which leads suicide prevention, or the Attorney General’s office, which leads other gun violence initiatives. 

… It’s unclear how much money will go toward this effort, but the Department of Law Enforcement asked for $500,000 spread across two years, according to Ernie Robello, the department’s deputy director of administration. In the first year, the plan is to spend roughly $100,000 on public awareness campaigns targeting the public and law enforcement and $150,000 on gun buybacks.

“We want to educate the public, educate the law enforcement personnel, and then also remove some of these firearms that are unwanted or unneeded, to take them out of the hands of these people that might have access to it because they weren’t removed from the community,” he said. 

Plans for awareness campaigns are still preliminary, but Robello is interested in town halls with community groups that work with vulnerable populations, public service announcements on social media and television and potentially meetings with county police departments.

In addition to expanding the use of “red flag” petitions, there’s also a Senate bill under consideration that would elevate possession of a firearm or even a single round of ammunition while subject to a Gun Violence Protection Order from a misdemeanor to a Class A felony and a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 20 years.  

Many gun control advocates claim that “red flag” laws aren’t really gun control at all, but are instead about addressing “dangerous” people. Like the vast majority of “red flag statutes, though, Hawaii’s law has no mental health component whatsoever. If someone is deemed to be a danger to themselves or others based on a preponderance of the evidence (a very low legal standard), their forbidden from possessing guns or ammunition for a year and the state considers the problem solved. 

Also, like most “red flag” laws the process of obtaining a Gun Violence Protection Order takes place in civil court, and while the subject of a petition can hire an attorney to aid in their defense, a public defender is not available to those who can’t afford a lawyer on their own. 

The GVPO statute is already fundamentally flawed, but subjecting individuals who may have forgotten about a box of ammo or left an errant round in their range bag to decades behind bars is needlessly cruel, especially when we’re told that the main thrust of these laws is to prevent suicide. I can’t imagine that a 20-year sentence for possessing a round of .22LR is going to have any positive mental health benefit, but that’s what the bill would do. 

More “red flag” orders means the potential for more gun owners to be falsely flagged as a danger. And even the research that’s most supportive of these laws say that one suicide is prevented for every 17 to 23 orders that are granted, which suggests that the vast majority of these orders are either ineffective in preventing the loss of life or are unnecessary in the first place. 

Hawaii, like almost every other state in the Union, suffers from a critical shortage of mental health professionals, which translates to a critical lack of care for those in acute need of help. That’s what lawmakers need to address. Instead, they’re using that crisis as another way to make exercising your Second Amendment rights a legally dangerous proposition. 

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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