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"Ridiculous gun laws won't stop violent crime" (Letters to the Editor, June 14) fails to recognize that, thanks to strict gun safety laws and the intervening Pacific Ocean, Hawaii has relatively little gun violence and has had only one mass shooting (in 1999) in the last several decades.
Yes, there's other kinds of violence, but due to our gun safety laws, there's far less killings or serious injuries than otherwise.
Has anyone wondered why, on the mainland, there's a dearth of machine-gun violence? It's because of a strict national machine gun control law passed in 1934.
Sure, in the few years after passage, law-abiding citizens couldn't access machine guns, while criminals continued to have them. But over time, machine guns became exceedingly rare in the hands of any civilians.
If national gun safety laws were like what we have here, there'd be far fewer national tragedies and far less gun violence in general. Civilians could still possess guns of "common usage" for hunting, target practice and self-defense.
Guns of "common use" are protected by the Second Amendment (so says the U.S. Supreme Court), while "military-style" weapons are not.
James Joseph Clarkson
Wailuku