this is the most meaningful response in this whole thread. I can accept this answer, and fully understand it. it isn't pretty, but its the truth. thanks HiCarry
The need to protect yourself and your loved ones isn't pretty, but it is, again IMHO, a necessity. As I have said at every single class I teach, "If your knowledge of guns and self defense comes from movies or television, you're wrong." Too many people who don't know the truth glamorize and/or romanticize these types of events, fueling fantasies of being the hero and such. But reality dictates that you look pragmatically at a potential threat and devise a workable solution. For some, the solution is to carry a gun. If you choose this path, you must be willing to take a life. Not in the sterile movie manner where a single, well placed shot to the knee incapacitates the bad guys, who conveniently drops their gun rather than attempting to shoot back at you. Nor the action/adventure model where a shotgun blasts the bad guy off his feet and 10 feet backwards while somehow magically not splattering his thoracic contents about the room. Taking a life, even justifiably, will be difficult (and in case where a gun was used, probably messy). It will cause psychological problems and most likely fuel endless debates with yourself about whether you did the right thing. Watching someone die, knowing you were the cause, will indelibly ink the event in your mind forever, and it won't be a pretty scene. But what's the alternative? Standing by, helplessly watching someone injure, rape, or kill your loved one(s)?
And, in the same vein, too many people who don't know, demonize and vilify anyone who chooses to prepare for the unthinkable. They fail to consider the truly evil and depraved mind of someone willing to injure, rape, or kill to achieve their goals. They insulate themselves from the stark reality that there really are very bad guys (and girls) out there that don't function on the same moral and ethical playing field "we" do. There are criminals that will kill kids for their new sneakers, men that will abduct and rape women and children solely for their own twisted pleasures, and some that would think nothing of killing you for the ATM withdrawal you just made. If you want to believe that the pistol under your robe is there to hold off, yet not kill, your attacker until the good lord arrives, go ahead. It just shows again how little you are willing to open your mind and stray from your preconceived notions.
If you accept that you may need to use your gun for self defense, believing you can do so without the possibility of killing someone, you're using, at best, misguided misinformation, and at worse, magical thinking.
You continue to believe that Hawaii doesn't need CCW because it isn't a particularly violent or crime ridden place. You try to claim that armed citizens mean innocent bystanders will get shoot with an alarming frequency, but in no other state has this occurred. You fear that the otherwise good people of Hawaii will, once legally armed, be unable to control themselves and initiate gunfights over trivial matters, but again experience in other states just doesn't substantiate these fears. You bring up these canards again and again, but they are baseless and just don't happen in other states so your concerns, based on all empirical evidence are unfounded.
Again, it is not the odds of something happening to me or my loved ones that matters, it is the significance if it does....