A bill to outlaw the sale of "assault rifles" is on the verge of passage in the Hawai‘i Legislature, despite wide opposition by gun advocates.
Senate Bill 401 proposes to ban the purchase or sale of “assault rifles” and “assault shotguns” in the state after July 8. While such weapons purchased and registered before July 8 would remain legal, those guns could not be again sold within the state.
The bill has generated substantial opposition from gun owners statewide. Several have argued that the bill’s definition of an “assault rifle” would impact the vast majority of long guns in circulation.
An "assault rifle," as defined in the bill, is a semiautomatic rifle with an overall length of less than 30 inches, with a fixed magazine capable of accepting more than 10 rounds, can accept a detachable magazine and has features such as a pistol grip, flash suppressor, bayonet mount and others.
While some of these features would be prohibited because of their potential to expedite violent crimes — folding stocks, for example, can enhance “the concealability of the weapon,” according to the bill — gun advocates have said that many of them are standard features on most rifles.
“They’ve said the M1 carbine would be legal under the bill, but it wouldn’t,” said Wayne Asam, president of the Mid Pacific Pistol League, a nonprofit that promotes competitive sport shooting. Asam told Aloha State Daily the bill prohibits rifles with handguards that shroud the barrel and allow the shooter to hold the barrel without being burned, something that is standard to the M1 carbine.
Furthermore, Asam said, flash suppressors, also banned by the bill, are “stock on almost all rifles.” Such suppressors dampen a weapon’s muzzle flash, help limit muzzle rise and improve accuracy over multiple shots.
Gun clubs would largely be limited to pistol shooting under these restrictions, Asam said, while hunters would be seriously impacted. He said lawmakers had clearly taken restrictions drafted in other states and transposed them to Hawai‘i without understanding them.
Big Island Rep. David Tarnas, architect of the bill, acknowledged as much, telling Aloha State Daily that he specifically adapted language used in a 2023 Illinois weapons ban.
Tarnas said he sees the bill as simply finishing the work of a 1992 Hawai‘i measure that banned the sale of “assault pistols,” which were defined in similar terms as this year’s assault rifle bill.
“In my opinion, the legislature should have addressed the issue of semiautomatic rifles at the same time,” Tarnas said. “But over 33 years, people have become accustomed to these rifles with military characteristics.”
Tarnas said he wants to protect citizens’ Second Amendment rights, and emphasized that SB 401 does not criminalize current legal and registered owners of assault rifles.
However, Tarnas added that those guns currently in the state will eventually be decommissioned: they cannot be legally transferred between owners, nor can they be bequeathed to heirs. Anyone who inherits such a gun has 90 days to render the weapon permanently inoperable, sell or transfer it to a licensed dealer or a police chief of any of the state’s counties, or otherwise remove the weapon from the state.
At the same time, Tarnas said, there are “a vast amount” of Hawai‘i residents in support of assault weapon restrictions. The public submitted more than 420 pages of testimony — see that and the drafts of the bill here — including dozens of form letters emphasizing that such weapons “are military-grade weapons that have no place in civilian life,” alongside continued opposition.
But Asam questioned Tarnas' assessment. For example, he said, the bill also bans .50-caliber firearms, which laypeople may only associate with military sniper rifles, but also includes high-powered pistols like the Desert Eagle that most commonly only see use as sport guns.
Ultimately, Asam said that the process of getting a firearm in Hawai‘i is already restrictive and onerous, and so the only people impacted by the ban would be law-abiding gun owners.
Beyond the content of the bill, opponents have also questioned its context. SB 401 began life as a much shorter proposal to simply prohibit .50 caliber firearms, which passed through the Senate despite substantial public opposition.
But in March, the House Committee on Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs — of which Tarnas is a member — recommended the sweeping amendments that gave the bill its current form. Those amendments transferred to SB 401 the text of another Tarnas bill, House Bill 893, which passed through the House without incident but was not scheduled for any Senate committee hearings.
Tarnas said the language of the SB 401 has thereby already passed muster in the House. He added that, because the original form of the bill was related to firearms, the changes are still germane to the measure’s original subject matter and therefore do not constitute a “gut-and-replace.”
The State Supreme Court found gut-and-replace actions — the controversial practice of stripping the entire text of an existing bill after it has already been discussed in legislative readings and replacing it with unrelated text without allowing for adequate discussion — unconstitutional in 2021.
Nonetheless, Asam said he finds the bill shady.
“We fight off assault weapon bans every year,” Asam said. “And since we keep being successful, it seems they’re trying some new tricks.”
The bill now goes into conference committees over the coming weeks, following disagreements between the House and Senate over the amendments.
