By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
The Walmart store in Tumwater, WA, where armed citizens confronted a rampant gunman. (KING5 News video)
Two incidents at opposite ends of the country on June 17 show the wide disparity of gun laws and how they help citizens in one state while hampering them in another.
In Washington State, a crazed gunman who had carjacked one vehicle and shot a motorist while trying to take another car in the parking lot of a Walmart near the state capitol of Olympia ended when an armed citizen fatally shot the suspect. This was after he had opened fire inside the store, and then returned outside where he was confronted by at least two armed citizens, according to several reports.
The incident made national news, and even was reported by the BBC. The dead man was identified by local media as 44-year-old Tim Day, who had a criminal history that should have precluded him from possessing a firearm.
The other incident happened in Trenton, NJ, when a recently-released felon opened fire at an arts festival, leaving 22 injured, including 17 who were wounded. That man was fatally shot by police, and the incident gave anti-gun Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy an opportunity to launch more rhetoric about the necessity of tighter gun control laws.
But out in Washington, the situation was markedly different. The suspect sent one man to the hospital in critical condition, but the gunman was the only one killed, thanks to the armed bystander. While it is extremely difficult to get a carry permit in the Garden State, there are now more than 584,000 legally-licensed citizens in the Evergreen State who can carry defensive sidearms, according to that state’s Department of Licensing.
The Washington shooting occurred in Tumwater, a community immediately to the south of Olympia, which is the state capitol city. Both the Washington State Patrol and Thurston County Sheriff’s Department investigated.
Under Washington’s state constitution, adopted in November 1889, “The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain or employ an armed body of men.”
Washington also has a well-defined self-defense/use-of-force statute that justifies homicide “(1) In the lawful defense of the slayer, or his or her husband, wife, parent, child, brother, or sister, or of any other person in his or her presence or company, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person, and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished; or (2) In the actual resistance of an attempt to commit a felony upon the slayer, in his or her presence, or upon or in a dwelling, or other place of abode, in which he or she is.”
That’s a far different scenario in New Jersey, where one needs to get a permit from the police to simply purchase a firearm. In one high-profile case from 2015, a woman named Carol Bowne was brutally murdered in her driveway by a man against whom she had a restraining order. Bowne had been waiting for weeks to get approval from the Berlin Township police chief to buy a gun for protection. She died while that application sat on the chief’s desk.
In the Washington case, the suspect initially was driving erratically in the wrong direction near a Tumwater-area high school, reports said. He apparently took a car from a teenage girl, then went to the Walmart, ran inside and opened fire at a retail counter.
As customers fled and took cover, the suspect went back outside, tried to hijack another car and when the driver refused, he was shot twice. That’s when at least two and possibly three armed citizens drew guns and took action. One of those citizens fatally shot the suspect.
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2016 – the most recent year for which data is available – armed citizens justifiably shot and killed 276 people, which was a slight uptick from the 272 killed in 2015.
