HPD wants gun owners in FBI database

A bill that would establish “continuous background checks” to alert police when Hawaii gun owners have been arrested in another county or state is advancing at the state Legislature.

People convicted of violent crimes or selling drugs are banned from owning firearms, but police in Hawaii have no system to alert them when a gun owner has been newly arrested or convicted in another county or state, said Honolulu Police Maj. Richard Robinson.

House Bill 2629 and Senate Bill 2960 would authorize police to enroll people who register a firearm in the FBI’s national “Rap Back” database, which will notify police when gun owners are arrested elsewhere, Robinson said.

Harvey Gerwig, president of the Hawaii Rifle Association, said the HRA strongly opposes the proposed new law because the organization maintains it would allow the authorities to enter “law abiding gun owners in a criminal data base.”

“It is simply one more hurdle for law abiding citizens to overcome to exercise their rights,” Gerwig said in written testimony to lawmakers.

The measure was also opposed by Daniel Reid of the National Rifle Association, who wrote that “positive hits in this system have not necessarily been adjudicated and could cause issues with an individual’s ability to exercise their constitutional rights.”

Robinson said the Rap Back system is not a criminal database. It will compile the fingerprints of people who have registered firearms, and if any of those people are arrested elsewhere in the country, the system will notify police here. Police in Hawaii will then have to track the cases to see whether they end in convictions, he said.

“All it really does is automatically do what we could do manually,” Robinson said. “If I had enough staffing, I could sit down and run all 350,000 gun owners on Oahu to see what their criminal history is, to see if they’ve been arrested.”

Each year, 10,000 to 11,000 people try to register firearms in Honolulu. Police do a national background check on each one but do not repeat or update that check unless the owner returns to register another gun, Robinson said.

When people do return to register additional weapons, police sometimes later discover criminal convictions. In 2014, 18 people who attempted to register additional guns were found to be ineligible because of criminal records, and two others were disqualified because of their involvement in domestic violence cases. (In the event of a conviction, the gun owner must also surrender the initial weapon.)

In 2015 another 22 gun owners who sought to register new weapons were found to be ineligible because of criminal records, and eight more were disqualified because of domestic violence cases, he said.

“The only reason we found those … people who shouldn’t have a firearm is because they happened to come in to register a subsequent firearm,” Robinson told lawmakers. “So, it is an ongoing and existing problem. We’re only finding the ones who come in to get another firearm, which is a tiny percentage of the total gun owners.”

State law prohibits anyone from owning a firearm if they have been charged or convicted of a felony, a crime of violence or the illegal sale of drugs.

Under the new system, people who seek to register a firearm would be charged a one-time fee of $62.75 to cover the cost of registering the weapon and enrolling in the Rap Back system, Robinson said.

Gerwig, the Hawaii Rifle Association president, also opposed any fees for enrolling gun owners in the system. “This is a core constitutional right, and fees charged to exercise those rights should not be allowed,” he wrote.

The measure was approved Thursday by both the House Public Safety Committee and the Senate Public Safety, Intergovernmental and Military Affairs Committee. It will now go to the House and Senate judiciary committees for further consideration.