"Hawaii residents registered a record 21,784 personal firearms last year as gun permit applications reached an all-time high and fewer people were turned down than ever before, says a state report.
Gun registration, which went up 9 percent in 2007, has soared 60 percent since 2000, when the state Attorney General began tracking registrations.
The attorney general's office cautions that there is no link between higher gun ownership and concern about crime in the islands. But a University of Hawaii criminology expert is worried about the trend, given recent shootings at universities across the country.
Hawaii's four county police departments approved 94.2 percent of the 8,835 applications for gun permits they got last year. A record-low 83 applications, or 0.9 percent, were denied, compared with the national rejection rate of 2.4 percent, figures show.
Nearly half of firearms registered in 2007 came from outside the state."
Nothing but nuts and volts information so far...but then...
Oh No! NOT a Women's Studies Professor!!!!
While Hawaii is safe when compared with other states, criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind said she is troubled with the local gun influx, especially in the wake of shootings at college campuses across the country.
"Any time you increase the number of guns in the community, you increase the likelihood of higher suicide rates and higher homicide rates," said Chesney-Lind, a women's-studies professor at the University of Hawaii. "Teaching on a university campus these days, it's become a lot more immediate a concern for us in light of the mass killings that have been occurring."
That of course is the exact OPPOSITE of what goes on in the real world...BUT...loons such as Chesney-Lind include rightful shootings in the homicide ratio to bolster their contention that more guns means more trouble.
Someone ask this uneducated witch why it is that police stations and shooting ranges have particularly low incidents of criminals wrecking havoc with firearms.
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