The Seattle P-I.com is reporting that a teenager charged with assault in connection with a May shooting at Gas Works Park on the north shore of Lake Union in Seattle is now in custody.
The suspect, identified as 17-year-old Deshawn Wild, allegedly shot two people.
So, what’s wrong with this picture? At 17, the suspect could not possibly have been legally carrying a handgun in Seattle or anyplace else. The minimum age requirement for a concealed pistol license in Washington is 21.
The on-line newspaper added this: “Wild’s criminal history includes several gun crimes. He appears to have lost his firearms rights in 2014.” He would have only been 14 years old.
Another problem – one that might be addressed to Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess, who championed the city’s so-called “gun violence tax” in 2015 – is that the tax, and the so-called “universal background check” law passed in 2014, have so far not prevented a single violent crime. Neither law has prevented any of the recent slayings in and around Seattle, including one near Rainier Playfield. Tuesday night saw a shooting at Golden Gardens Park.
Wild is reportedly being held at the King County Regional Justice Center in Kent on $500,000 bail. But out there in the tall grass are other people with guns they shouldn’t have, because the ignore a law that seemed from the outset to be aimed at law-abiding citizens and establishing what critics have called a de facto gun registry in the state.
A few days ago, a freshman Michigan state representative from an Upper Peninsula district introduced four pieces of legislation aimed at reforming the Great Lakes State’s concealed carry laws. His proposals would make it easier, not more difficult, for law-abiding gun owners to carry sidearms in more places, including so-called “gun free zones.”
State Rep. Beau LaFave (R-108th District), who was first elected last November, offered a bit of wisdom that seems to escape other lawmakers in Lansing, the state’s capitol city. For that matter, his common sense logic escapes lawmakers in Olympia, Washington state’s capitol city, and Seattle.
“As it turns out, criminals are ignoring pistol-free zones,” he said. “I wish that were not the case, but we do not live in a Utopia. If the bad guys are going to carry guns into gun-free zones, I want to give the good guys the legal ability to protect themselves and their families.”
Meanwhile, a double homicide in Vancouver demonstrates once again that one doesn’t need a firearm to commit mayhem. Two people were fatally stabbed there and police have a man in custody. There are no background checks for knives, and nobody has proposed a “knife violence tax.” Nobody has called the suspect a “knifeman,” either.
But the victims in that crime are just as dead as if they had been shot.
