On August 31, 2024, in the neighborhood of Waianae, about 30 miles west of Honolulu, Hiram Silva attacked a home with a large front loader, ramming cars into the house. The Silva had a rifle and a pistol. Silva then shot and killed three women in the carport and wounded another man and a woman.  Silva had four 55-gallon fuel drums on the front-end loader and was reportedly shooting at the fuel drums.

A resident of the home retrieved a pistol, rushed to the carport, and shot and killed Silva, stopping the deadly attack before it became an inferno of burning fuel.

This is clearly a case of a legally armed person stopping a mass murder. It remains to be seen if the FBI will count it as such. It is interesting to see how the heroic act was treated in the media. As reported in by the Associated Press, in kpua.net:

Police responded to a 911 call reporting their neighbor was operating a front-end loader and using it to ram multiple cars into the home where a family gathering was taking place, then opened fire at people gathered in the carport. The gunfire hit and killed the three women. A 42-year-old man living in the house shot and killed the man with a handgun, police said.

A man and another woman were injured in addition to the women killed.

Note the emphasis in the article. The defender “shot and killed a man.” Of the murderer, “The gunfire hit and killed three women.”  The defender is depersonalized as a killer. The attacker just happened to be involved in an incident where “gunfire hit and killed three women.”

John Lott and the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) have been tracking where mass murder has been stopped by armed defenders who are not police. The CPRC found the FBI was under-reporting defensive gun use from 2014 to 2022. The FBI only found 14 cases where an armed defender stopped an active shooting situation. The CPRC found 157.

The resident in Waianae, Hawaii, 42 years old, was one of those privileged few who had a license to own a handgun in his own home. Handguns are more difficult to obtain in Hawaii than in most of the rest of the United States. Handguns in Hawaii make up more than half of all gun registrations. If we assume the registration numbers for guns over the last 24 years is roughly equivalent to the number of legal guns in Hawaii, then there are about 858 thousand legal guns in Hawaii, and over half of them are handguns.

As with other small states, Hawaii has a low reported homicide rate. The latest comprehensive data is from 2020. If we look at the six states with populations just above and below the population of Hawaii, Nebraska has 3.6 homicides per 100K population. Idaho had 2.2. West Virginia had 3.9. Hawaii had 2.9. New Hampshire had .90. Maine had 1.6. and Montana had 5.0. There doesn’t appear to be any correlation. All six other states mentioned have Constitutional or permitless carry.

Consider another island under the jurisdiction of the United States. Both Hawaii and Puerto Rico are tropical islands. Puerto Rico is about a third the size of Hawaii and has twice the population. Puerto Rico had much stricter gun laws until 2020. In 2020, Puerto Rico switched from “may issue” carry permits to “shall issue” carry permits. The homicide rate for Puerto Rico in 2020 was 16.99, a considerable drop from 2019, when the homicide rate was 19.22.

Legal gun ownership increased significantly from 2019 to 2023 but is still far lower than that of Hawaii, with about .169 legal firearms per capita in Puerto Rico. Those numbers come from National Instant Background Check System figures for Puerto Rico.  There are about .6 firearms per capita in Hawaii.  The .6 figure comes from adding all the firearm registrations in Hawaii from 2000 to 2023. Some of those registrations are known to be duplicates.

Legal gun ownership rates have no correlation to criminal homicides, although they may deter some criminality.

About Dean Weingarten:

Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.