By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Two anti-gun Washington State senators from Seattle, who are now under fire for having included a provision for the annual warrantless search by police officers of homes belonging to owners of so-called “assault weapons,” tried twice before to push legislation with the same provision, TGM has learned.
State Sens. Adam Kline and Jeanne Kohl-Welles, both Democrats, have been trying since at least 2005 to push through a bill banning semiautomatic sporting rifles. On both previous occasions, their bills failed to gain traction. This year, with the help of a third anti-gun Seattle Democrat, Sen. Ed Murray – currently running to become Seattle’s next mayor – they tried to capitalize on the Sandy Hook tragedy.
The legislation became the subject of national news thanks to an article in the Seattle Times by columnist Danny Westneat. He revealed that the bill’s language, which was quickly removed after it was exposed, had even alarmed some Seattle liberals.
Senate Bill 5737, aimed primarily at banning so-called “assault weapons,” originally contained a provision that said this: “The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.” TGM found that the offending sentence has been removed from the bill, but not before gun owners across the country learned about it and expressed their anger.
Westneat interviewed both Murray and Kline, and they insisted that the search language was “a mistake” that they hadn’t caught when they read the bill.
But that assertion falls flat, at least for Kline, who twice before – in 2005 and again in 2010 – sponsored identical gun ban measures containing the exact same provision. TGM researched back through Kline’s legislative history and found Senate Bills 6396 in the 2010 agenda, and SB 5475 that Kline and Kohl-Welles submitted in 2005.
A January 2010 hearing on SB 6396 brought about 200 armed citizens to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, including a contingent of open carry activists that got an alarmed reaction at the time from Washington Ceasefire’s Ralph Fascitelli. He complained about the armed citizens to State Troopers who were providing security at the time, only to learn that carrying firearms on the capitol campus is legal, and even protected by the state constitution.
Veteran lobbyist Joe Waldron, former executive director of the Washington-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, told TGM via e-mail, “We objected to that language when we opposed the previous versions, but the sponsor, Senator Kline again, stood by the bills as written. This was somewhat surprising, as Senator Kline had an admirable history as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in the bad old days and doing pro bono legal work for the ACLU.”
“Above and beyond the fundamental violation of banning exactly the style of firearm the founding fathers intended the Second Amendment to protect,” Waldron said about the current legislation, “the bill is also a direct attack on the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Replace the words ‘assault weapon’ with any other item in common use, and ask how reasonable it would be to allow a law enforcement agent to go fishing through your private property in search of some imagined violation. On several occasions, the Supreme Court has taken a dim view of ‘fishing expeditions’.”
John Carlson, Seattle’s leading conservative talk host on KVI-AM, insisted that this clearly exposes a pattern that could not be an oversight.
Evergreen State gun rights activists concurred. They flooded the Seattle Times’ reader response section with more than 1,100 comments, nearly all of them opposed to the gun ban legislation.
SB 5737 appears to have raised an embarrassing question about the ultimate motives of gun prohibitionists.
Kline’s insistence to the Times that “I made a mistake” and that “I frankly should have vetted this more closely” immediately lost credibility when gun owners learned about his two previous attempts to push the same provision.
TGM tried to contact both Kline and Westneat, but they did not immediately return calls.
