"...with more than 400,000 guns registered in Hawaii.”
Source: Are There More Guns Than People In Hawaii
Hawaii has an artificially high number of guns because currently there is no facility/process to unregister guns in the Hawaii gun database. Thousands of military come into Hawaii who are required to register their guns when they get stationed here. When they leave the islands the guns are still registered in the database. Same with all the Hawaii people who moved to the Mainland because of the high cost of living...their guns are still registered here even though they no longer live here. If you sell your gun thru gunbroker or similar site to someone on the Mainland, same thing...the gun stays registered to you even if you notify HPD that you sold it to someone on the Mainland. I used to send a letter to HPD with gun transfer information(which mainland FFL I sent it to) until one day I got a call from a lady at HPD telling me not to send gun transfer information for guns I sold to the Mainland. She told me they don't unregister guns that get sold to someone on the Mainland, they just shred these notifications if the gun goes to the Mainland. I asked if she could document this policy on HPD letterhead and send it to me, but she refused. So I have a bunch of guns I no longer own still registered to me.
This changes with this year's legislation that was passed that requires you to notify the gov't when a gun leaves Hawaii. The original bill criminalized not making the notification, however, the legislators got feedback from people(like me) who complained that we no longer have guns that were sold to mainland buyers that are still registered in the database. The legislators were nice enough to change the bill so it's not a criminal offense now, but instead they will fine me $200 per firearm(how nice of them!) for every gun I sold to a mainland buyer that I did not notify the govt about...of course, I did notify HPD, but they shredded those documents. I emailed my senator Brian Taniguchi about this and he couldn't believe it was HPD policy to shred those documents. He told me I needed to contact the legislators in the Judiciary committee since they are responsible for that bill...which I did...no one replied back to me. Taniguchi is not gun friendly, however, he's the only legislator who responded back personally, assigned an aide to do some research and confirmed that the bill was amended not to criminalize non-notification. I even told him that HPD doesn't allow you to update your gun registrations when you move. When I bought my first condo, I went down to HPD to change my address on my gun registrations. They refused to update my records and told me not to worry about it. WTF? This a government gun registry and they don't think it's important to document where the guns are actually located?
The state is going to get a huge financial windfall for fining the tens(if not hundreds) of thousands people $200 per firearm who left Hawaii with their guns and did not notify the govt. I think this is how they plan to tackle the state's current budget deficit.
But anyways...this is why we have an artificially high gun count in Hawaii...