The City and County of Honolulu has more than twice as many museums and libraries as it has gun retailers.
By contrast, Kauai County has slightly more gun retailers than museums and libraries.
That’s according to a Washington Post blogger who crunched the available data and made an interactive map.
WaPo was inspired to do the piece after reading a recent Pew Research Center study that found liberals “are much more attached to their museums” than conservatives are: 73 percent of “consistently liberal” Americans say that being near museums and theaters “is an important factor in choosing where to live.”
“Only 23 percent of consistently conservative Americans say the same,” the article notes.
The article adds that there is no reason that people can’t be fans of both guns and museums.
“But viewed in relation to each other guns and museums give some sense of a community’s values,” said the blogger, Christopher Ingraham. “As my colleague Emily Badger wrote the other day, we live in places that reflect our values, and many of us are sorting ourselves into communities that share our political views.”
Indeed. In some respects, the guns-and-culture map resembles the red-and-blue maps of recent presidential elections.
Maui County, by the way, had the largest proportion of museums and libraries to gun stores among our four island counties.
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About the Author
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Chad Blair is the politics editor for Civil Beat. You can reach him by email at cblair@civilbeat.org or follow him on X at @chadblairCB.