Seattle news agencies are reporting that “a convicted felon was arrested and a handgun was seized following an earlier Wednesday traffic stop in Seattle’s Beacon Hill area,” according to Seattle police.
Why this should surprise anybody baffles Evergreen State gun rights activists, because they warned about this as long ago as 2014, the year a billionaire-backed Seattle-based gun prohibition lobbying group spent more than $10 million to push through a citizen initiative requiring so-called “universal background checks.” At the time Initiative 594 was on the ballot, and wealthy elitists including anti-gun New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg were contributing millions of dollars to get it passed, Second Amendment activists including the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) told reporters and the public the measure was only going to penalize law-abiding citizens. It would not, they said, keep guns out of criminal hands.
SPD officers, and any other police officer of sheriff’s deputy are doing their jobs arresting bad guys with guns. But that’s not the point within the gun rights community.
According to KOMO News, the ABC affiliate in Seattle, the 49-year-old suspect had the gun strapped to his ankle. He also was carrying “a small amount of suspected heroin.”
“The only thing the gun control crowd in Seattle has accomplished is to make it harder for honest citizens to exercise their constitutional rights, and they know it,” observed CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb in a statement.
He was one of the chief opponents of I-594, and even ran a competing measure, Initiative 591, which was designed to provide voters with an alternative to the restrictions contained in the gun control package. That one failed because anti-gunners simply out-spent him.
This isn’t the only gun control failure in the state, or the city.
Two years ago, the same wealthy elitist-supported organization—the Alliance for Gun Responsibility—spent millions more to pass Initiative 1639, which is now being challenged in federal court on constitutional grounds. That measure added restrictions on the ownership of semiautomatic modern sporting rifles, stripped young adults of their right to purchase and possess such firearms, invented a definition for “semiautomatic assault rifles” and required proof of training to buy one. Law enforcement organizations lined up against the measure, but their opposition was downplayed by the Seattle news media.
In 2015, the Seattle City Council hastily adopted a “gun violence tax” on the sale of firearms and ammunition. Revenue was projected to be between $300,000 and $500,000 and the money was supposed to finance “gun violence prevention” measures. The revenue figure has never materialized, and this year homicides in Seattle exceed those in recent memory, and there are still two months remaining in the year.
In the midst of this, far left Seattle City Councilwoman Lisa Herbold has floated a proposal to change the law in the city to allow misdemeanor defendants to use “poverty, mental illness and substance abuse as defenses.”
According to KCPQ News, the local Fox affiliate, “Judges would be allowed to use those categories to dismiss a case.”
Wednesday’s arrest was not the first time local cops cuffed a convicted felon with a gun. Back in April, officers stopped a vehicle driven by a 26-year-old man with a suspended driver’s license. A convicted robber, the man had a handgun on the floorboard under the driver’s seat.
In August 2019, Seattle police arrested a convicted felon in a case that began as a car prowl, escalated into a fight with a security officer and ended up when the suspect dropped a gun. Police determined it was a stolen handgun, which the suspect couldn’t legally possess regardless.
A month earlier, federal authorities indicted a Seattle man after police found four handguns and eight rifles in his possession. He was also a convicted felon.
“You don’t disarm bad people by penalizing good people with regressive feel-good laws,” Gottlieb observed. “You don’t make honest citizens safer by making it harder for them to fight back while police budgets are being threatened and good men and women in law enforcement are literally being pushed out of their jobs. And now the Seattle City Council is reportedly considering ways to de-criminalize some crimes, which will only encourage, rather than discourage, people who break the law.
“This latest arrest of an armed felon is symptomatic of a much bigger problem,” he added. “Utopian wishful thinking is no substitute for genuine common sense, and living in a state of denial doesn’t change that. We challenge the gun prohibition lobby to admit it was wrong so we can all work together on real solutions that focus on bad guys committing crimes instead of good guys exercising their rights.”
