A recent Hawaiʻi attorney general report on firearm registrations contained some puzzling numbers.
According to the report, the number of gun permit rejections in 2023 hovered at 1% or lower in Maui, Kauaʻi and Honolulu counties. But in Hawaiʻi County, 6.9% were denied.
To put it another way, Honolulu rejected 142 of the nearly 13,700 applications, while Big Island police denied 332 of just over 4,800 applications.
The Conversation spoke with Hawaiʻi County Police Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz, who was also surprised by the report. The former Honolulu Police Department major was sworn in as Big Island's police chief in January 2023.
"I got this report the same day that it was released out to the general public, and I immediately had kind of some of those same questions, like why are we denying so much more than the other counties? So in this particular set of circumstances, most of our application denials center around medical marijuana applicants," he said.
That's because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. Of the 332 denials in Hawaiʻi County, 191 were due primarily to medical marijuana — that's 57.5%. Moszkowicz said those people have or used to have medical marijuana permits.
He spoke with firearms registration counterparts in the other counties to dig deeper.
"The difference comes when the medical marijuana permit is expired. And this is a little bit where there is some federal guidance, not a lot, and there's absolutely no state guidance. And so I think this has led to a bit of a different interpretation by different counties as to what should or shouldn't qualify as a firearms registration denial condition," he told HPR.
He said that the other three counties do not consider a medical marijuana permit that has been expired for a year or more to be an automatic disqualifier, whereas Hawaiʻi County historically has considered that to be an automatic disqualifier.
But he said 75% of those who initially received medical marijuana denials were later approved after returning with documentation from a doctor or counselor saying they were no longer adversely affected.
"I don't think we were doing anything wrong by denying people's applications under that section and asking them to, you know, basically redeem that right by providing what the statute suggests. But at the same time, because such a large percentage of those people were able to get that documentation so quickly, actually, we changed our policy. So in the last day or two, we've changed our policy and our practice to align with the other counties. And that's a direct result of this report," Moszkowicz told HPR.
As of Monday, Hawaiʻi County is not automatically disqualifying people whose medical marijuana permits have been expired for more than a year.
Meanwhile, Moszkowicz said he's looking to legislators in the 2025 session to clarify the automatic disqualifiers.
This interview aired on The Conversation on May 20, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. Sophia McCullough adapted this story for the web.
