BELLEVUE, WA – A Wednesday report in the Seattle Times offers more proof that restrictions placed on law-abiding Washington State gun owners, plus a tax on gun and ammunition sales in Seattle, have dramatically failed to reduce violent crime as promised, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said.
In 2014, the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a gun prohibition lobbying group largely funded by wealthy Seattle-area elitists pushed through Initiative 594, a so-called “universal background check” measure that was supposed to keep guns out of the wrong hands. In 2015, the Seattle City Council pushed through the gun tax that has never come close to its revenue forecast. In 2018, the gun ban lobby rammed through Initiative 1639, which prohibits young adults from purchasing any kind of semiautomatic rifle and requires an “enhanced” background check and 10-day waiting period, plus proof of training.
“All of these restrictive gun control measures have only penalized law-abiding citizens,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “All three have failed miserably, and the time has come for the gun ban lobby to admit it and allow each of these bogus crime fighting tools to be repealed. Indeed, gun prohibitionists should fold their tents and go home in shame, because their anti-violence ‘remedies’ have proven to be nothing more than snake oil.”
This week, Seattle reportedly matched its 2019 homicide total. With four months remaining in the year, the body count for the city, and likely the rest of the state, will only go up. Law-abiding gun owners are not the problem, and restrictive gun control laws are not the solution, CCRKBA said.
“The gun prohibition lobby should apologize to Washington gun owners,” Gottlieb said. “Not only has the Alliance for Gun Responsibility pushed to disarm honest citizens, it also sides with violent protesters who want to defund police, and whose occupation of a Seattle neighborhood earlier this summer resulted in four non-fatal shootings and two homicides where the victims were both Black teens.
“When all of these laws were proposed,” he recalled, “we predicted they wouldn’t work, an we’ve been proven right. Homicides have crept upwards over all of Washington state during the past few years. The billionaire-backed crusade against gun owners and their rights has been an unmitigated disaster. They’ve given people a false sense of security while trampling on their rights. How many more must die before the anti-gun right extremists admit they’ve been wrong?”