2019-10-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – October 29, 2019 your questions until we get through most of them I’ll probably have covered your question throughout there and then we can wrap up at the end on that so... Ah, as this is a bit dated – this is from 2015 – so the numbers are probably a little higher as we go throughout but if you look at the number of firearms there are in the state – how many are purchased each year – a quarter million of those registered in Hawaii County – that’s a lot of firearms. We have about 6,000 a year being purchased and brought in here for people and over 30,000 in the last ten years and why this is important, um, well, we’ll get to it but there’s no legal place for the general public to shoot pistols and rifles and until the shotgun range gets back up – skeet and trap range gets up – not even for shotguns – but the vast majority of firearms purchased in Hawaii are long guns – rifles and handguns – pistols, OK? And if you were to go to the16 Mile Range public range there and you don’t have a hunting license you’ll have your firearms taken away – you’ll have a date in court and you’ll have a record, so, um, let’s see... Um, who goes shooting? We see a large portion of the public ranging in age, gender – our On Target shotgun safety program which we run in concert with the Parks and Rec Department here – we have had close to 200, Richard? Yeah, close to 200 students come through that program and these numbers are from there but it’s fairly typical of the shooting sports. Our oldest student was 79 years old – our youngest was 10 – a third of ‘em have been juniors. A quarter of ‘em been seniors and a third of them women and we’ve had a lot of families, you know, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters go through this so... It’s very, very open to it. Here some pictures of some of the classes we’ve had – some of the other things – the picture in the center middle – that’s actually two pictures so they’re not pointing shotguns at us – just so all you range safety guys know – now, when we say there’s been 12 years of shooting range research, planning and testing, um, that’s four years old information. We’ve been at this for 16 years now and it started in 2003, ah, we formed a working group in 2004. We identified what kind of funding was available for it in 2004. We had people from throughout the community. We had shooters, we had DLNR enforcement, engineering, Hunter Ed, DOFAW, we had representatives from the Police Department. I think we had Coast Guard, didn’t we? One time? One of the federal agencies I thought we had. We had the resort association involved in it, we had businesses, hunting clubs, gun clubs and this is what we started with in 2005 – just the conceptual layout of a range – what it would have. It’s probably a little small to see it but we had a large open archery area, we had trap and skeet sporting plays, pistol, rifle bays there – and we started looking at potential range sites, ah, we reviewed everything we had looked at over the past probably fifteen years with the information we’d had in 2005 we thought Puuanahulu was gonna be the best one – we did a sound test first time out so... And the criteria for picking a range was it has to have enough land size. We have to be able to have ownership of it – in some way or fashion – we have biological, cultural use restrictions – we needed to be able to control access to it. We don’t want people wandering in from the back side while there’s live fire going on – those kinds of things. Being able to get 16