Gun Control’s Latest Miserable Failure: Seattle

Seems punishing law-abiding citizens and rewarding looters doesn’t crime…who’da thunk it?

Seattle’s anti-gunners have secured a “victory” in turning their fair city into another San Francisco–complete with a sky-high homicide rate while the rest of the country rejoices in record low crime. A Wednesday report in the Seattle Times highlights the remarkably swift way that the gun-banners’ much-touted “common-sense gun control” is turning their city into a third-world hellhole. In a mere six years, the anti-gunners of Washington State have gotten every single thing on their wish list…and every time they score a “win,” Seattle’s crime rate goes up.

You’ve heard this tale of fail so many times you can probably recite it from heart, but here’s what happened. According to the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), it started with a Seattle-based gun prohibition lobbying group largely funded by wealthy Seattle-area elitists Alliance for Gun Responsibility. They 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 a gun tax–which, of course, has never come close to its revenue forecast. Then, just for good measure, 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.

What was the result of all this? Well, let’s turn it over to that Seattle Times article I referenced earlier, shall we?

“Through the end of July this year, Seattle had seen eight more homicides than during the same period last year (an increase of 44 percent, though that’s off a low base). In the past decade, when Seattle was enjoying one of its most peaceful stretches in our history, it had lows of just 19 homicides multiple times. This year, we passed that in June,” reads the plaintive story.

Let’s all take a moment to remember that these record-high homicide rates happened over a period of months that included a long quarantine driven by COVID-19. As one of the hardest-hit cities in the pandemic, most people were inside their homes and not coming unless they absolutely had to for three of those seven months.

“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?”

Sadly, Mr. Gottlieb, as a long-time observer of gun banners, the answer to that question is that they will never admit that they’ve been wrong. That’s because as far as the gun banners are concerned, that mounting body count is a feature, not a bug.