When I arrived on the island of Oahu in 1982 to become an assistant machine gunner in the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry “Wolfhounds” (25th Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks), we were warned at the Replacement Detachment not to venture to downtown Honolulu alone: always travel in pairs.

Britain just seceded from the EU. Secession from the U.S. is a power possessed by each of the 50 states. But is there a mechanism for 49 of the 50 states to reject one and boot it from the Union?

It seems the locals had a distaste for GIs (especially Marines), and if they caught you alone, you were likely to get pummeled, hospitalized, and possibly killed.

At my first opportunity to leave post, I took the bus with two other “newbies” to Pearl Harbor to tour the USS Arizona Memorial. To my surprise, there were more Japanese tourists there to photograph their accomplishment than Americans (at the time, the Japanese auto industry was overtaking Detroit, their economy was booming, they were buying up U.S. real estate, and there was murmuring that they would soon own the U.S.).

Now it appears that Hawaii’s not real fond of our Constitution, either. According to Reuters :

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hawaii's governor signed a bill making it the first U.S. state to place its residents who own firearms in a federal criminal record database and monitor them for possible wrongdoing anywhere in the country, his office said. [snip] Hawaii Governor David Ige, a Democrat, on Thursday signed into law a bill to have police in the state enroll people into an FBI criminal monitoring service after they register their firearms as already required, his office said in a statement.

As elucidated in the article, the FBI’s database is intended to scrutinize criminal suspects.

So much for the presumption of innocence. You’re now treated as a suspected criminal in Hawaii for exercising your fundamental 2nd Amendment rights as Americans.

Since they don’t like our GIs, and they don’t like our Constitution, at what point do the rest of us get to say, “Enough! Get out!”?

I don’t actually wish that upon my Hawaiian friends. But it occurred to me in reading this news item that while there is a mechanism for states to voluntarily withdraw from the Union, I’m unaware of a mechanism for the Union proper to expel a state that displays contempt for what the country stands for.

Perhaps if that mechanism existed, it could be used as motivation for states to adhere to constitutional principles to continue receiving federal funding and military protection or reaping any of the other myriad benefits of being associated with the most prosperous nation in the history of humanity.

Maybe not. Don’t walk downtown alone at night in Honolulu, and avoid Hotel Street.