By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The chairman of a Washington State-based gun rights organization has thrown a challenge to the gun control crowd after a Yakima news agency reported the upwards climb of traffic fatalities, yet nobody is calling for a ban on cars.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, saw a report from KIMA which said this year’s traffic fatalities may be the highest since the 1990s. Yet nobody is on a crusade to restrict access to motor vehicles.
“This reflects a glaring hypocrisy on the part of people advocating for stricter gun control laws and bans on certain firearms,” said Gottlieb. “The gun prohibition lobby and their allies in Olympia (the state capital) have promoted gun bans and restrictions on gun owners, but all we hear are crickets when it comes to traffic deaths. Evidently, lives lost on the highway are somehow less important.”
New data from the Washington Traffic Safety Commission suggests Evergreen State drivers are getting careless. They’re also getting drunk, stoned and/or heavy on the gas pedal more often.
“Media reports acknowledge 30 percent of crashes involved alcohol-impaired drivers, 37 percent of the people involved test positive for drugs, and another 28 percent were speeding (in Yakima County),” Gottlieb said in a news release. “People do those things, not the cars they drive, just like guns don’t have a finger to pull their own trigger.”
The KIMA report said another contributing factor is not wearing seatbelts, although this is the law in Washington state.
Last year, according to data from the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, the Evergreen State logged 750 traffic fatalities. That’s far more than people who are murdered with firearms. The numbers pick up for gun-related deaths when suicide data is added to the equation.
Another complaint from the gun ban lobby is that Washington “has the 40th highest rate of gun violence in the United States,” the CCRKBA noted.
“That translates to being tenth from the bottom,” Gottlieb said. “Apparently the gun prohibition crowd is hoping nobody does the math but is only impressed by dramatic rhetoric. But if you look at the most recent data from the CDC, the leading cause of death in Washington is cancer, and the drug overdose death rate—28.1 per 100,000—is more than twice as high as the firearm injury death rate of 11.2 per 100,000, and the homicide rate is 4.5 per 100,000, which is lower than the rate in Maryland, New Jersey, New York or California, all states with stricter gun laws. The gun ban lobby is deceitful at best.”
“Let’s remember one very important thing,” he observed. “Driving is not a right protected by the Constitution, but keeping and bearing arms is. The Citizens Committee is vigorously defending that right.”
