By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
Washington State anti-gunners will push for background checks on ammunition purchases in 2020. (Dave Workman photo)
Background checks on ammunition purchases, “restricting access to high-capacity magazines,” and “protecting our children from gun violence.”
It’s all on the 2020 legislative agenda for the billionaire-backed Washington State gun prohibition lobby. The Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility revealed its plans in an email blast to supporters declaring, “We’re gearing up for the next legislative session.”
According to Second Amendment activists in Washington State, background checks on ammunition translates to backdoor gun registration. It has already been adopted in California, and since Washington appears to have become a political petri dish for trying all sorts of gun control experiments, the idea may be coming to other states.
The process will add to the cost of ammunition, critics argue. Couple that with the “gun violence tax” schemes adopted by Seattle and Tacoma, and it amounts to discouraging firearms ownership and use by making it too expensive.
The Alliance is responsible for Initiative 594, the “universal background check” measure passed in 2014 that has evidently not prevented a single crime, including the tragic shootings in 2016 in Mukilteo and Burlington.
The Mukilteo case was used to launch Initiative 1639, passed in 2018, which prohibits young adults from purchasing and possessing so-called “semiautomatic assault rifles.” There are several other provisions in the initiative, which is now being challenged in federal court by the Second Amendment Foundation and National Rifle Association.
There is also a grassroots effort to repeal I-1639 with a new initiative to the legislature, I-1094. This one is being pushed by gun rights activists across the state, and it appears to have considerable momentum. Petitions are available in more than 250 gun shops and other locations, and volunteers have been gathering signatures at sporting goods stores and many other locations. They need at least 300,000 signatures by Dec. 28, and one of the organizers recently estimated they may be better than a third of the way to success.
But that effort has no funding, and some veterans of initiative campaigns believe only paid signature gatherers can make the difference in such an endeavor. Major signature gathering efforts are planned for the annual Apple Cup football face-off between the University of Washington and Washington State University, along with the monthly gatherings of the Washington Arms Collectors and other large-crowd events.
Meanwhile, to press their restrictive gun control agenda, the Alliance says on its website that in Washington state, “a person is killed with a gun every 14 hours” and “more people are killed with guns than die in car accidents.”
What isn’t said is that a majority of firearms fatalities in the state are suicides. When it comes to criminal homicides, far more people die in car accidents.
According to the Washington State Transportation Safety Commission, in 2017—the most recent year for which data is available—there were 565 traffic fatalities.
Compare that to data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2017, which says there were 134 firearm-related murders that year.
The Forefront suicide prevention program shows there were 637 firearm-related suicides in 2017.
What is revealed here is that the gun control crowd combines suicides with homicides and calls it “gun violence.” This creates the impression of a terrible crime problem when that’s not really the case.
One of the champions of suicide prevention efforts in Washington State is Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the grassroots Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. He even co-chairs a legislative subcommittee on suicide prevention.
According to rights activists, homicide is a crime while suicide is an act of emotional despair, and lumping the two together is deceptive.
The anti-rights gun control movement will try to convince people that background checks on ammunition will reduce violent crime. California has such a requirement and it did not prevent last week’s tragic school shooting in Santa Clarita, nor did it prevent the murders of four men at a football watch party over the weekend in Fresno. Both of those incidents are now being exploited to push for even more gun control.
