Less than 1% of Hawaii’s adults 20 and older are licensed to carry a concealed handgun in public.
That’s according to the Department of Attorney General, which reported Wednesday that in 2024, a statewide total of 2,207 private individuals were licensed to carry a concealed handgun in public, 0.2% of the estimated resident population of 1.1 million persons aged 20 or older.
In the two more urban counties, the City and County of Honolulu and Maui County, licensees were slightly underrepresented compared to the percentage of population, while the two more rural counties, Hawaii County and Kauai County, had a larger percentage of the population with concealed-carry licenses.
The City and County of Honolulu, with 766,955 of adults 20 or older, had 1,356 licensees as of Dec. 31, or 61.4% of the licensees.
Maui County, with 127,078 adults, had 183 licensees, or 8.3% of the state’s licensees.
Meanwhile, Hawaii County, with 160,701 adults — or 14.5% of the statewide demographic — had 425 licensees, which is 19.3% of the statewide total.
And Kauai County, with 56,846 adults, had 243 licensees, or 11% of the statewide licensees.
Hawaii Police Department Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz said Wednesday he thinks the larger percentage of licensees on the Big Island compared to the statewide average “has to do with the lifestyle on the Big Island.”
“There are more people here who are into hunting, and I guess there would be more registered firearms per capita than on the other islands,” Moszkowicz said. “And the number of licensed-to-carry firearm permit holders would also be higher.”
Moszkowicz added that he was “quite surprised” by the even higher percentage of concealed-carry licensees on Kauai, the least populous of the state’s four counties.
“They have only 5.1% of the state’s population, but 11% of the state’s licensees,” he noted.
“I am less worried about licensed-to-carry holders than I am about criminals who have obtained firearms through some sort of illegitimate means and are intending to use them to commit crimes,” Moszkowicz said. “We don’t see a large number of licensed-to-carry handguns used in crimes. In fact, I can’t think of any off the top of my head in the two or three years since we started issuing these licenses to carry on a regular basis.”
According to the attorney general, Hawaii’s licensees are most commonly men in their 30s through 50s of Caucasian, Filipino, Hawaiian or Japanese descent. And there are no meaningful distinctions in application submissions versus outcomes relative to age, sex, or race and ethnicity.
Statewide in 2024, 2,697 applications were received by the county police departments, and 2,456 licenses were issued. Some licensees hold multiple licenses in order to select between different handguns to carry. Last year, 119 applications were denied statewide, and six were revoked.
The top three reasons for the 119 denials were that the applicants failed to: sign a required affidavit (24.7% of all denials); complete application tasks within allowed time frames (23.4%); and/or complete a prescribed training program and be certified to use the specific firearm in question (22.0%).
Only 16 of the denials, or 5.8%, were due to the applicants being legally disqualified from possessing firearms and ammunition due to criminal records or a current medical marijuana license.
“We had only six denials for license-to-carry users … ,” Moszkowicz said, referring to the Big Island. “When I look at the difference between Honolulu, which had 283 of these denials, and Hawaii County had six — which is more than Maui, which had two, and Kauai had none — what that tells me is that we’re doing a fairly decent job of keeping people informed about the process. … We have the permit-to-carry application section with all kinds of information on our website, and when people come in, our firearms staff does a really great job of making sure that they have the forms filled out completely, that it’s signed in the right places and the affidavit is attached, where necessary.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
