By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
While the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility appears to have received public funding from the Washington state Department of Commerce for “grants, benefits & client services,” the Alliance’s Victory Fund political action arm has donated tens of thousands of dollars to political candidates, many of whom consistently show up as sponsors of gun control legislation at the Capitol in Olympia.
The Alliance is a billionaire-backed gun control lobby which has managed to get much of its anti-rights agenda put into law over the past decade, either via legislation sponsored by Democrat legislators or via a couple of multi-million-dollar citizen initiative campaigns. But a TGM investigation with Ammoland News discovered that over the past two bienniums, more than $365,000 in public funding has apparently been paid to the organization for the aforementioned grants, benefits and client services, along with “goods and services” and in July 2024, “personal service contracts.”
The probe was launched after the state Commerce Department opened a solicitation for proposals “to provide event planning, coordination, logistics, and reporting” for the 2025 Together We End Gun Violence (TWEGV) event.” This event is slated for early June 2025. The award amount “will be up to $100,000,” the document said.
A check of records with the state Public Disclosure Commission reveals that last year, the Alliance for Gun Responsibility Victory Fund made contributions to Democrat political candidates, including a June contribution of $2,800 to then-Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s gubernatorial campaign. Contributions of at least $600 apiece went to other prominent Democrats, including Reps. Amy Walen, David Hackney, Laurie Jinkins, Strom Peterson and Timm Ormsby. According to PDC records, the Alliance Victory Fund has also financially supported other Democrat politicians.
The Alliance Victory Fund also contributed $2,400 to the unsuccessful campaign by Patti Jackson to become sheriff in Pierce County. Although she lost that race, Jackson last month was named interim Tacoma police chief, as reported by KOMO News.
TGM reached out to the Alliance via email but did not receive a response. An attempt to contact the group by telephone was unsuccessful.
But Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, based in Bellevue, Wash., did react.
“It is appalling that the billionaire funded Alliance is getting public funding,” Gottlieb said via email. “I am calling for a federal investigation into this fleecing of Washington taxpayers to fund this political organization. Governor Bob Ferguson and his cronies can’t be trusted to investigate themselves as they are a main beneficiary of this scheme.”
Many special interest groups have some type of “victory fund.” The National Rifle Association has a “political victory fund” (PVF). There is nothing unusual about this. What does appear unusual is that this organization has received public funds, where gun rights groups haven’t.
In a recent video, attorney William Kirk, president of Washington Gun Law, described the Alliance as “perhaps the most well-funded gun control group in America.” In 2014, the Alliance spent more than $10 million to push through Initiative 594, requiring so-called “universal background checks.” They outspent opponents an estimated 20-to-1, which seemed unusual to observers at the time because they claimed during the campaign that 80-to-90 percent of the voters supported their issue. The actual vote came in at just under 60 percent, according to the Alliance.
At the time, the Alliance posted this message on its website: “Cheryl Stumbo, citizen sponsor of the initiative and a survivor of the 2006 Jewish Federation shooting in Seattle, said the I-594 campaign “has shown Americans that a citizen movement can act to reduce gun violence if our elected leaders won’t.”
But what are the actual facts?
In 2014, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for that year, Washington posted 172 homicides, including 94 which involved firearms.
By 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs reported 376 homicides in the state, of which 168 involved handguns, 85 involved unknown firearms, 6 involved rifles of any kind and another 6 involved shotguns, for a total of 265 slayings involving firearms, according to WASPC annual crime report.
Based on the data, it appears the Alliance and Stumbo were dramatically wrong.
In a June 2023 report by the Center Square, it was revealed that since I-594 was passed, “only one person in the state’s three largest counties has been charged and convicted of violating the law, and no one at the state level has been charged or convicted.”
In 2018, the Alliance raised more than $5 million to pass Initiative 1639, which a report in the Seattle Times described as “the most ambitious gun-regulations ballot measure in Washington history.”
That year, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, Washington suffered 232 homicides, of which 138 involved firearms.
Once again, based on the data, the Alliance’s gun control measure has failed to accomplish what voters were led to expect.
