By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
Evergreen State gun owners will gather Friday at the state capitol in Olympia to rally against several gun control measures including one requested by anti-gun Attorney General Bob Ferguson, that seeks to require background checks for ammunition purchases.
The measure is being pressed by five Democrat lawmakers. A similar requirement in California turned into a legislative nightmare for thousands of honest gun owners. As noted in an Op-Ed published in the Sacramento Bee the fiasco that prevented 101 ammunition purchases by prohibited persons also reportedly blocked 62,000 purchases by people who were not prohibited, including some law enforcement officers.
House Bill 2519 is sponsored by Democrats Amy Walen, Javier Valdez, Tina Orwall, Christine Kilduff and My-Linh Thai, all from districts in the central Puget Sound region. It’s part of a legislative frontal assault on gun owners, who are expected to gather in Olympia this Friday, starting on the Capitol steps and then splitting up to meet with their representatives.
Over in the Senate, several more pieces of gun control legislation are also in the works, including one that will require training to qualify for a concealed pistol license, something never before required by the Evergreen State, where the state constitution protects the “right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state…”
Veteran gun rights lobbyist Joe Waldron suggested via email that one motive behind this legislation is “ammo registration,” which is a backdoor way for the state to know who has what firearms. He indicated this bill set off alarms.
Washington may have as many as 2 million gun owners, including hunters, shooting competitors, recreational shooters and those interested in self-defense and home protection. As reported recently, Washington now has more than 646,000 active CPLs in circulation. All of those citizens presumably purchase ammunition, and the contention is that background checks on ammunition purchases treats them like criminals, or at the very least, like second-class citizens.
Meanwhile, Senate Bill 6294 mandates training for CPL holders and applicants (both first time and renewals) to show they have taken training sometime during the past five years. That measure appears to critics to be some effort to discourage applications and renewals. It might also be portrayed as an unconstitutional “impairment” of the right to bear arms in the form of a “literacy test,” which is also unconstitutional.
A hearing is scheduled Monday, Jan. 20 at 10 a.m. before the Senate Law & Justice Committee on SB 6294 and on SB 6077, to ban magazines that hold more than ten rounds of ammunition. It will be in Senate Hearing Room 4.
