By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
On the one-year anniversary of the effective date of Washington State’s onerous Initiative 594, the so-called “universal background check” measure passed by voters in 2014, the Citizens
Alan M. Gottlieb
Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms ripped the measure for not keeping guns out of the wrong hands, or preventing a single crime.
In a blistering news release, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb – who helped spearhead the opposition to I-594—noted, “Despite public records requests to agencies around the state, we can find no record of any enforcement of this new law in the year since it took effect. The only discernible impact of the law has been to inconvenience honest gun owners and add more red tape to gun shows.”
He said the measure had been an absolute failure, which is essentially what he and other Second Amendment advocates had predicted before the election.
“The law didn’t prevent a 15-year-old in Snohomish County from buying what may have been a stolen gun that he mishandled last weekend to accidentally shoot his younger brother,” Gottlieb said. “It didn’t prevent the July murder of Donnie Chin in Seattle’s International District. It didn’t keep a gun out of the hands of a known teenage gang member who is now facing charges relating to an August shooting in which the victim was walking with his son in Seattle.”
Chin was a member of the Washington Arms Collectors, which conducts monthly gun shows in Puyallup, where he was a regular table holder. Despite a reward offer posted by CCRKBA and WAC, his killer has yet to be arrested and charged.
There have been a slew of other cases in which criminals or underage teens were found in possession of guns they could not possibly have purchased legally, all obtained without going through any kind of a background check. Some of the guns were stolen, while in other cases it was not immediately clear where the guns came from.
In February, KIRO, the CBS affiliate in Seattle, reported the burglary of a Tacoma residence in which nine guns were removed from a locked safe that had been broken into by a determined thief.
Back in April, Seattle police arrested a 16-year-old who allegedly pulled a gun on his family. That teen was also under investigation for a series of drive-by shootings in the neighborhood. When police got the gun, it was the same caliber as shell casings found at several of the shooting sites.
According to the Seattle Police Blotter on Aug. 19, officers arrested a 19-year-old convicted felon during a traffic stop. He was carrying a loaded handgun that had been stolen in Everett, a city north of Seattle in neighboring Snohomish County.
On Sept. 9, the Seattle Police Blotter reported the arrest of a convicted felon for drug dealing in the Central District. They recovered a stolen handgun as a result.
In Bellingham, near the Canadian border earlier this fall, police arrested a man with an extensive misdemeanor record and one felony conviction, after he allegedly discharged a handgun in the vicinity of a Lummi police officer. Police recovered a loaded .357 Magnum revolver. The felony, according to the Bellingham Herald, “makes it illegal for (the suspect) to possess a gun.”
In late October, the Seattle Times and KCPQ reported about a 13-year-old Pierce County youth who was arrested for allegedly aiming a rifle at a bus stop. The rifle had been stolen from a gun safe belonging to the boy’s grandfather. Two other guns were also missing.
The gun prohibition lobby spent a small fortune to pass I-594, after claiming repeatedly that background checks are supported by 80-90 percent of the public. In retrospect Gottlieb observed, “When you do some math, the numbers don’t add up and never did. The initiative campaign cost more than $10 million, when it theoretically should not have cost a dime…If you have overwhelming public support for any issue you shouldn’t have to spend a fortune to convince people to actually vote for it.”
He also noted that despite all this claimed support for what the measure represented, “the measure passed by less than 60 percent of the popular vote, in which only about half of the state’s voters actually returned ballots.”
“It is particularly disappointing that the media, which supported I-594, has failed to ask these questions,” Gottlieb said. “I-594 is a trophy, a flimsy sham that has allowed anti-gunners to claim they did something about violent crime when in fact they haven’t accomplished anything.”
