This event will feature prominent gun control supporter and former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Presumably the march is to drum up support for Initiative 1491, the so-called “emergency protection order” measure. It’s being pandered as a tool to curb violence.
AGR said the same thing about Initiative 594 in 2014, tossing in the caveat that it won’t stop all violent crime. Indeed, I-594, which is apparently not being enforced anywhere in the state, doesn’t appear to have stopped any violent crime. Witness Monday morning’s homicide in downtown Seattle, and the Cascade Mall shooting ten days ago in Burlington; what the state needs is not more gun control but criminal control, say critics.
When compared to other venues, Washington is a rather safe place. If one looks at the recently-released FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2015, the City of Chicago has posted more than double the number of homicides this year (568) than the entire Evergreen State recorded last year (209), according to statistics from this morning’s Chicago Tribune.
Why aren’t Giffords and the AGR anti-gunners marching through Chicago’s South Side? It’s a legitimate question.
On Saturday, WGN News reported that last month saw 59 murders in the Windy City. According to the Seattle Police Blotter’s SeaStat, the Jet City is nowhere near that number, less than one-third, for the entire year.
Here’s something else from the FBI crime stats: While anti-gun Democrat Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Washington Ceasefire have announced they will push for a ban on so-called “assault weapons” next year, in 2015, only three of the 141 firearms-related slayings in the Evergreen State are known to have involved a rifle of any kind and five more involved shotguns. In 49 of the murders, the firearm type was “unknown.” Eighteen people were stabbed or slashed to death, three times the number shot with rifles. Last month’s Burlington mall victims were killed with a rifle, but it was a .22-caliber semi-auto, not a so-called “assault weapon.”
The Oct. 22 march will begin at the Space Needle at 10 a.m. and go to the First United Methodist Church, followed by an 11 o’clock rally.
