Noted in the third paragraph of a KOMO News story about the shooting death of a Seattle woman last Friday in the Beacon Hill neighborhood is the fact that the suspect “has nine prior felony convictions,” which disqualified him from legal gun ownership or possession.
It is not a unique problem to the Jet City. Other cities are homes to people who shouldn’t have guns, and one thing those cities all seem to have in common is that “solutions” to the problem of so-called “gun violence” typically impact only the law-abiding citizens who didn’t commit any crimes.
KOMO is the ABC affiliate owned by Sinclair that earlier this year produced a gripping commercial-free documentary titled “Seattle Is Dying.” It addressed the growing homelessness and related drug and crime problems.
Seattle has gone the extra mile to make gun owners unwelcome. Aside from the fact that it is the headquarters city for the billionaire-backed Alliance for Gun Responsibility and Washington Ceasefire gun prohibition lobbying groups, four years ago the city hastily adopted a “gun violence tax” on the sale of firearms and ammunition.
As Liberty Park Press earlier reported, instead of a projected $300,000-to-$500,000 revenue boost for the program, the city has collected much less. In 2016, the actual revenue was $103,766.22 and it dropped to $93,220.74 in 2017. Last year, according to the city, the tax revenue declined again, to a comparatively paltry $77,518.
Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation in nearby Bellevue, reacted at the news with the understandable “I-told-you-so” attitude. He issued a statement observing, “The failure of this gun tax to accomplish anything good was as predictable as November rain in Seattle.”
In the three years (2016-2018) during which the gun tax revenue has been collected so far, murders in the city have nearly doubled, from 18 in 2016 to 32 last year.
The victim in Friday’s shooting has been identified as 21-year-old Taylor Ester. She was, according to KOMO, “hit five times in the chest and torso.” Rushed to Harborview Medical Center, she succumbed there to her wounds. The shots were allegedly fired by Miller, who reportedly “heard Ester in the bathroom and fired multiple shots through the closed door because he thought someone was in the bathroom with her,” according to the case file as reported by KOMO.
The incident is yet another failure of gun control, and perhaps the stubborn refusal of the city’s elitist anti-gunners to acknowledge that all of their schemes, including two multi-million-dollar initiative campaigns, have not prevented such tragedies. Initiative 594, the so-called “universal background check” measure in 2014, was supposed to keep guns out of the wrong hands. Initiative 1639, passed last November, deprives young adults of their Second Amendment right to buy and possess so-called “semiautomatic assault rifles.” I-1639 is being challenged in federal district court by SAF, the National Rifle Association, two gun dealers and four young adults in the 18-20-year age group who can no longer purchase self-loading rifles, including .22-caliber hunting and target rifles.
A related article in AmmoLand reminds city leaders that Seattle isn’t becoming more violent because good guys have guns, but because bad guys ignore gun laws.
If the city has a “gun problem,” it’s not just that bad guys ignore the law, but because city officials and gated-community elitists are simply wrong about how to solve it.
