Put together, the numbers point to a conundrum. Research shows that higher rates of gun ownership correlate with higher rates of violent crime. How has the Aloha State avoided that correlation?

The answer begins with one way in which Hawaii differs from many of its continental cohorts: As the number of guns in the state has increased, Hawaii’s legislators have enacted some of the strictest gun-safety measures in the country.

State law, for starters, requires a universal background check for all firearm sales. Citizens are required to obtain a permit and sit through a two-week waiting period before making a purchase, and they must register any firearm they buy. Registration itself is a multi-step process that can lead prospective gun owners on as many as five separate trips to either a police station or gun retailer. Permits for concealed-carry, meanwhile, are issued at the discretion of the state’s county police chiefs, who set a high bar (a recent decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals looks poised to bulldoze that hurdle, though the state’s lawyers are fighting the ruling). In short: Background checks, waiting periods, elaborate registration guidelines, and strict limits on concealed-carry permits combine to seriously vet prospective gun owners, and limit impulse and illegal purchases.

These policies are of particular relevance now, given the ongoing national debate about stringent gun regulations and whether they actually keep people safe. Hoping to stoke demands for change, President Obama observed after the mass shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College that “states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths.” Second Amendment advocates unsurprisingly chafe at such claims. Subscribing to the thesis that more guns bring less crime, they argue that it was the expansion of America’s privately held arsenal that led to the drastic drop in violent crime the country experienced in the early 1990s. They also point to states like New Hampshire and Vermont, both of which regulate guns very leniently, as firearm-friendly, violence-free counterexamples to data showing a link between rates of gun ownership and gun violence. On the other side of the coin, the travails of Chicago—home to both relatively tough gun laws and terrible (if also overblown) gun violence—are frequently cited on the right.

But there’s something else quite literally setting Hawaii apart: The thousands of miles separating the island chain from the United States, which act as a natural obstacle to gun smuggling. That makes an important difference. Many other states find their gun laws easily thwarted by a steady flow of illegal guns from their neighbors with weaker gun laws. Here, Chicago becomes an example not of the ineffectiveness of gun regulations in general, but of the patchwork of laws that exists from state-to-state: More than half of all recovered guns used to commit crimes in the city between 2009 and 2013 were originally purchased in other states with looser regulations (particularly Indiana, its laissez-faire next door neighbor). On the East Coast, traffickers have brought thousands of illegal weapons, including several that have been infamously tied to police assassinations, into cities like New York. Those guns come from the “Iron Pipeline” states of Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas—but also from New England states with less stringent gun laws.