SAF founder and CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said both groups are supporting one of several challenges to a Washington state gun control initiative’s ballot title. (Dave Workman)
By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
The ballot title of a Washington State gun control initiative is facing at least three challenges, including one supported by the Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and another filed by the National Rifle Association.
Initiative 1639 seeks to raise the minimum age for purchasing a semi-automatic rifle to 21, while also mandating so-called “safe storage” requirements, instituting a 10-day waiting period, setting a “purchase fee” of up to $25 for modern sporting rifles and requiring warnings about the dangers of firearms with each gun purchase.
The challenge supported by SAF and CCRKBA was filed by a Puget Sound resident, Glen Morgan, who provided TGM with a copy of his complaint. It takes issue with the initiative’s prohibition on the purchase of firearms by 18-21 year old residents, calling it “a radical change in Washington State firearm laws.”
Alan Gottlieb, CCRKBA chairman and SAF founder said the challenges raise important issues.
“The initiative intent language,” Morgan says in his challenge, “presents a dangerous argument that 18-21 year old citizens of Washington State shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms because, ‘…the brain does not fully mature until a later age.’ This argument can be made to deny the right to vote at these ages as well. This is still considered the typical age Washingtonian citizens are accepted into military service and provided with control over weaponry with destructive potential far in excess of any firearms possessed by non-military citizens in Washington State. This is a major legal and practical impact on the rights of a whole class of citizens in Washington State who will lose their historic and Constitutionally guaranteed rights of firearm ownership. It should be reflected as such in the Statement of Subject due to the significance of this radical change to existing law.”
Attached as an exhibit to the Morgan complaint is a story from Northwest Public Broadcasting that shows Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson endorsed I-1639, noting that the liberal Democrat was “breaking with tradition.”
“The Democrat told public radio exclusively…that he backs the proposed initiative from the Alliance for Gun Responsibility that would raise the purchase age for semi-automatic rifles to 21 and require enhanced background checks—among other provisions,” the story said.
Morgan noted in his challenge, “The Attorney General’s Concise Description is not a true and impartial description of the measure’s essential content because it uses the term ‘enhanced’ before background checks when in-fact there is no such thing as an ‘enhanced’ background check.”
The term “enhanced background check” has actually become part of the gun prohibition lobby’s lexicon over the past couple of years, without a clear definition of what that might entail. But Morgan does that in his complaint.
“The initiative,” he explains, “simply is requiring the local law enforcement check the same databases as the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) which is a United States system for determining if prospective firearms or explosives buyers’ name and birth year match those of a person who is not eligible to buy. There is nothing ‘enhanced’ by this requirement in the initiative, and this is once-again a poll-tested term of art that refers to nothing new with the current background system.”
Alluding to Ferguson’s endorsement of the anti-gun initiative, Morgan asserts, “The Attorney General’s office has created a substantial reasonable suspicion in the eyes of the general public that the language used in this Concise Description has been drafted for maximum bias and support of the sponsors of the initiative by his unprecedented and very public statement of support for this initiative.”
With this and other challenges facing the initiative, the courts in Thurston County – where the complaints have been filed – will have to work fast. Meanwhile, in an email fundraiser, the Alliance gun control lobbying group said it must collect more than 259,000 signatures before July to get its measure on the fall ballot. It has “set a $75,000 launch goal” – which amounts to pocket change for wealthy elitists who bankroll the organization – “and we’re pulling out all the stops to get there.”
The Alliance pushed through Initiative 594 in 2014, the so-called “universal background check” measure that was supposed to prevent guns falling into the wrong hands, and thus prevent violent crimes including mass shootings.
But that initiative has hardly lived up to its advertising, say Second Amendment activists. For example, a 19-year-old who passed a background check killed three teens at a party in Mukilteo in 2016. A few months later, another teen took a rifle from his stepfather’s home and killed five people at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, so there was no background check.
More recently, a high-profile 2016 killing spree investigation in suburban Federal Way has resulted in the arrest of a teen who is now charged with fatally shooting four people on different occasions because “he’d recently acquired a new .22 caliber handgun and ‘wanted to see the effects of shooting someone with it,’ court documents say,” the Seattle P-I.com reported.
At age 17, suspect Justice Harrison, could not have legally purchased a handgun in Washington or any other state. However he “acquired” that pistol, it was an illegal transaction that was not prevented by I-594.
All of the challenges were filed in Thurston County Superior Court.
