Perhaps revealing just how seriously in trouble Seattle city officials happen to be in the wake of a downtown rush hour shooting melee that left one woman dead and several others wounded, the traditionally anti-gun Seattle Times editorial page took them to task for trying to blame it all on guns.
In its editorial, the newspaper stated, “Seattle’s political establishment shares some responsibility for allowing criminal activity along Third Avenue to fester and become a magnet for troublemakers.”
The newspaper acknowledged, “there are already strict laws against felons having guns.”
‘In this case,” the newspaper stated, “blaming guns sidesteps hard questions about why the city isn’t better protecting people from known dangers of the drug epidemic and related crimes. Mayor Jenny Durkan said gangs are involved, but gangs are primary traffickers of illegal drugs.”
The problem among Seattle’s ruling liberals, and that has to include the Times editorial board, was best summed up by a post on Facebook from a fellow named Sam Wilson.
“Gun control,” Wilson wrote, “is the flat earth theory of politics – while soundly debunked with every honest statistical analysis and logical construct, the true believers still cling to it and argue for it fiercely.”
The downtown shooting made national headlines because it was so unusual an incident in the Jet City. Almost five years ago, the city hastily adopted a “gun violence tax” on the sale of firearms and ammunition. Since then, the homicide numbers have crept upward, especially those involving firearms.
Likewise, since Washington’s billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobby started pushing gun control initiatives in 2014, the statewide homicide number has also risen. The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms—headquartered in nearby Bellevue—weighed in with a scathing reaction to the shooting in which CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb pointed to the failure of the justice system to allow the suspects to run free.
“Gun control is the flat earth theory of politics.”—Sam Wilson
“One of these guys reportedly has at least 44 arrests and 20 convictions,” Gottlieb said, “and the other has at least 21 arrests and 15 convictions. That’s just outrageous!”
Both are still at large and considered armed and dangerous.
“More than 25 years ago,” Gottlieb recalled, “Washington gun owners got behind ‘Three Strikes’ and ‘Hard Time for Armed Crime’ initiatives because those laws focused on bad guys while leaving good guys alone. What happened in Seattle might be a wake-up call to the gun control crowd to try it our way again, instead of continuing this campaign to erode our rights while violent criminals run loose.”
The Times editorial quoted Scott Lindsay, a “former mayoral police adviser,” who candidly stated “the gun isn’t the principal issue.” Indeed, there was more than one gun involved, both of them obviously carried illegally by the suspects whose criminal histories precluded them from legally possessing firearms.
By no small coincidence, the shooting occurred as Seattle-area state lawmakers are pushing a series of new gun control measures in Olympia, the state capitol. Proponents are pedaling all of these measures as necessary to reduce so-called “gun violence,” but as Sam Wilson intimated in his Facebook note, none of the proposals will have any impact at all on violent crime. Criminals do not obey gun laws, a fact that last week’s downtown shooting in far left Seattle underscored brutally.
