By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
City officials in Seattle, WA are in trouble in the wake of a downtown rush hour shooting melee that left one woman dead and several others wounded, and even the traditionally anti-gun Seattle Times editorial page took them to task for trying to blame it all on guns.
Downtown business people are furious about what they see as a tolerance for lawlessness that includes open drug dealing and other crime. The shooting Jan. 22 was the proverbial last straw.
In an editorial, the newspaper stated, “Seattle’s political establishment shares some responsibility for allowing criminal activity along Third Avenue to fester and become a magnet for troublemakers.”
The newspaper acknowledged, “but there are already strict laws against felons having guns.”
‘In this case,” the newspaper stated, “blaming guns sidesteps hard questions about why the city isn’t better protecting people from known dangers of the drug epidemic and related crimes. Mayor Jenny Durkan said gangs are involved, but gangs are primary traffickers of illegal drugs.”
The problem among Seattle’s ruling liberals, and that has to include the Times editorial board, was best summed up by a post on Facebook from a fellow named Sam Wilson.
“Gun control,” Wilson wrote, “is the flat earth theory of politics – while soundly debunked with every honest statistical analysis and logical construct, the true believers still cling to it and argue for it fiercely.”
Anti-gun politicians reacted predictably to the shooting by calling for more gun control.
As reported by KCPQ, the Seattle affiliate to Fox, “Politicians are pushing for more gun control after Wednesday night’s deadly shooting downtown where bullets hit eight people, killing one woman in the crossfire.”
Likewise, as John Carlson, morning drive time talk host at Seattle’s KVI, observed when referring to the pols, “They know what to do but it would mean admitting they were wrong and going in the opposite direction and they are not going to do that.”
Anti-gun Democrat State Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon tweeted: “Gun violence is not something that we have to live with. It is something that public policy can prevent. Once we know the facts of this case, the Legislature can and should pass laws to make gun violence less of a fact of life in our state.”
Police were still searching for two recidivist outlaws identified as Marquise Latrelle Tolbert and William Ray Tolliver as the prime suspects. Between them they’ve been arrested at least 65 times and convicted at least 35 times, making them career criminals who were on the street thanks to histories of incredible leniency from the courts and prosecutors.
Seattle Councilwoman Teresa Mosqueda tweeted: “We must get these guns out of our community and end the epidemic of gun violence – now. Heartbreaking third shooting in just two days.”
Notice, Mosqueda didn’t say anything about getting thugs out of the community to end an “epidemic of gang violence.”
Anti-gun Seattle Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, another Democrat, also chimed in with a statement: “We know not every incident of gun violence can be prevented, but it is our moral imperative to do all we can to keep our children and families safe. I pledge to continue doing everything I can to fight the gun lobby and its Congressional allies who stand in the way of commonsense gun safety and gun violence prevention measures.”
The downtown shooting made national headlines because it was so unusual an incident in the Jet City. Almost five years ago, the city hastily adopted a “gun violence tax” on the sale of firearms and ammunition. Since then, the homicide numbers have crept upward, especially those involving firearms.
Likewise, since Washington’s billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobby started pushing gun control initiatives in 2014, the statewide homicide number has also risen. The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms—headquartered in nearby Bellevue—weighed in with a scathing reaction to the shooting in which CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb pointed to the failure of the justice system to allow the suspects to run free.
“One of these guys reportedly has at least 44 arrests and 20 convictions,” Gottlieb said, “and the other has at least 21 arrests and 15 convictions. That’s just outrageous!”
Both are still at large and considered armed and dangerous.
“More than 25 years ago,” Gottlieb recalled, “Washington gun owners got behind ‘Three Strikes’ and ‘Hard Time for Armed Crime’ initiatives because those laws focused on bad guys while leaving good guys alone. What happened in Seattle might be a wake-up call to the gun control crowd to try it our way again, instead of continuing this campaign to erode our rights while violent criminals run loose.”
The Times editorial quoted Scott Lindsay, a “former mayoral police adviser,” who candidly stated “the gun isn’t the principal issue.” Indeed, there was more than one gun involved, both of them obviously carried illegally by the suspects whose criminal histories precluded them from legally possessing firearms.
By no small coincidence, the shooting occurred as Seattle-area state lawmakers are pushing a series of new gun control measures in Olympia, the state capitol. Proponents are pedaling all of these measures as necessary to reduce so-called “gun violence,” but as Sam Wilson intimated in his Facebook note, none of the proposals will have any impact at all on violent crime. Criminals do not obey gun laws, a fact that the downtown shooting in far left Seattle underscored graphically.