Fox News is reporting that violent crime “continued to rise across the U.S. last year, according to an annual estimate the FBI released Wednesday,” including in Washington State, where a major national grassroots gun rights organization is reacting to news that concealed carry has taken a huge leap in the past month.
According to the Fox report, murders in the U.S. increased from approximately 22,000 in 2020 to 22,900 last year, and that number may be conservative because some published reports say nearly 40 percent of American law enforcement agencies did not submit data to the FBI for the 2021 report.
That said, every state that reported appears to have experienced an upward tick in homicides, including Washington, where there were an estimated 300 “homicide incidents” resulting in 325 “offenses.” This could be one explanation for the previously-reported spike of more than 21,000 active concealed pistol licenses during the month of September.
The sharp increase brought an equally sharp reaction from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which is based in Bellevue, a city just east of Seattle.
“This is a staggering increase in the number of carry licenses,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb Wednesday, “and we wholeheartedly support every citizen who has made the important decision to take responsibility for his or her personal and family safety.
“This has happened,” he added, “despite repeated Draconian efforts by lawmakers to discourage private gun ownership. It should send a message to politicians and bureaucrats who support defund-the-police efforts and promote lenient policies toward repeat offenders who commit an inordinate number of crimes without serious consequences that the public is fed up.”
Since 2014, Seattle-based gun prohibitionists—supported by wealthy elitists—have pushed through two gun control initiatives while the city administration adopted a so-called “gun violence tax” on firearms and ammunition. Ostensibly, revenue from this program would be used to reduce gun-related violent crime, same as the two gun control measures. But the number of murders has steadily increased, bringing a stinging reaction from CCRKBA’s Gottlieb. He called the gun control efforts “unmitigated failures.”
“Instead of reducing violent crime as promised,” he observed, “these measures have only penalized law-abiding citizens while criminals have ignored the laws, just as we predicted.”
Gottlieb was a high-profile opponent of both initiatives, in 2014 and 2018, and the Seattle gun tax.
“At a time when liberal Evergreen State legislators are demonizing gun owners and trying to erode their rights,” Gottlieb said, “it will be interesting to see whether this stunning increase in concealed carry translates to activism at the polls Nov. 8. It suggests people have had enough of the social policies which have resulted in rising violent crime, and maybe they’re ready to make a dramatic political shift.”
Washington has been under Democrat control for decades. There has not been a Republican in the governor’s office since the mid-1980s. Seattle is controlled by the far left and is the Northwest hub of gun control extremism.
According to reports on Wednesday, the city has already had 47 homicides this year, and that points to a year-end number which might surpass the 52 slayings posted in 2020. The Twitter site “Seattle Homicide” says there have been 48 murders in the city.
https://twitter.com/HomicideSeattle/status/1577046549728616448?s=20&t=fhwY2iLvM-34tPgmEY5rag
