Barb and I visited the election watch party at CCRKBA last night. Here are some pictures:

Anette Wachter, CCRKBA staff (?), Boyd, Barron, and Janelle via the Seattle Times.

My version of nearly the same thing as above. We are not happy with what we see.

Mr. Completely, Anette, Alan Gottlieb, Janelle, Barron, via the Seattle Times.

More than anything I was struck by the event was in the offices of CCKBA which could only hold a few dozen people. At a similar event for I-676 in 1997 they rented a event hall and hundreds of people showed up. This time we probably had almost as many media people as we did supporters. This time I knew nearly all the non-media people attending.

In many ways I-594 was identical to I-676. They both required paperwork and state involvement for simple, innocent, ordinary transfers of firearms. Both had deceptive and innocent sounding titles (“Mandatory background checks” versus “Mandatory safety training”). In both cases law enforcement were opposed. Yet we didn’t get the traction to come even close to defeating it.

I had lunch with Ry today and discussed why this might have happened. Our conclusions were twofold:

1. In 1997 we were outraged with the 1994 “assault weapon” ban and the follow-on attempts in congress to push us into extinction as well as similar efforts in the states. Today we have a lot more confidence the courts will protect us. We didn’t have our backs to the wall and in a win or die fight.
2. This time most people, at some level, recognized it was a loosing battle and it wasn’t worth the effort. I know this was a significant component of my mindset. I had a lot of other things going on in my mind that took a higher priority. I was finishing up my divorce (and follow-on skirmishes), I had time sensitive Boomershoot 2015 details to attend to, and I had a relatively new relationship with Barb that was a lot more pleasant to focus on than something I knew was almost a certain loss.

But how, beyond a simple gut feel, did I know it was certain loss?

A year or two after I-676 went down in defeat I had lunch with Alan Gottlieb. He told me our opponents were planning a new initiative. This was an initiative mandating universal background checks. CCRKBA had done their homework and tried many different concepts in presenting our opposition to such a thing. They did focus group studies with various sound bites and slogans. Nothing worked. It appeared inevitable we would lose such a battle. He didn’t signal this to anyone but close insiders. Publically he pointed out how we had bloodied their noses in the I-676 battle and how the people were on our side and claimed we could do it again if we needed to. But behind the scenes we were scared. Very scared. We had no hope of winning the battle if they attacked again.

I don’t know for certain why our opponents didn’t come back at us then but I’m glad they didn’t. As terrible as the passage of I-594 was yesterday it would have been much worse 10 or 15 years ago, before D.C. v. Heller. Today we have a decent hope of court protection. Then it would have been “a good first step” toward the massive restrictions they are so eager to inflict upon our specific enumerated rights that we could have today been in a situation like California or even Chicago is now.

I can imagine an alternate universe where a different history exists. In this alternate history our opponents were not quite so demoralized and/or timid and attacked us again a few years before the 2008 Heller decision and changed the course of gun rights in this country with a win in Washington state. With a model playbook for our opponents to impose their tyranny in most states, chill the exercise of our rights, we then lost mindshare, and we lost Heller. And then we lost it all.

We still have a lot territory to recover but with the Heller and other decisions behind us we are in a much stronger position to win it back. Let’s work toward making sure we still win the long battle even with this setback today. We must choose the fights and not let our opponents choose them for us. When we attack at their weak spots they must expend resources they could better use attacking our weak spots. For us I-594 was a defensive battle against our weakest point. We lost. We need to keep attacking their weak spots even if every attempt does not result in a win.

In Washington State we had been winning the defensive battle against background checks in the legislature and occasionally making successful offensive plays for many years. That sort of avoiding defeat, one year at at time, is incrementally less costly than winning an initiative measure but it is far less influential. Winning the initiative would have been more permanent. It probably would have silenced that issue for a dozen years in Washington State and perhaps have discouraged the billionaires from spending money in other states. But it also is an opportunity for us.

But some our most dramatic and long lasting wins have been in the courts. Shutting down the “collective rights” argument in the Heller decision resonates today and probably will continue for decades. If we can win this issue in the courts it will be more permanent and have greater benefit to people in other states being attacked. And because of the 10 to 15 year delay in taking this issue to court we have a lot stronger hand to play than we did then.

Support SAF and their “goal of winning firearms freedom, one lawsuit at a time.” If not them then some other pro-rights group with a history of accomplishment.

Although there are still lots of votes to count no one I know has any realistic hope the outcome is going to change on I-591 or I-594 in Washington state. Washington State gun owners got stomped on pretty hard last night.

What our opponents don’t seem to realize is that both the Second Amendment and the Washington State Constitution protect the very right they are intent upon infringing. If it were a law infringing upon the right to free speech or freedom of religion nearly everyone would get it. Requiring a background check before someone can loan you their religious book and another when you give it back is ridiculous and would clearly be unconstitutional. It would create an incredible chilling effect upon the legitimate exercise of a natural and legal right by the threat of a legal sanction.

Somehow our opponents don’t or can’t understand this. I’ve had people tell me, “It’s not the same.” “Books don’t kill people!”, they say.

Wrong.

Ideas are far more dangerous than tools. The Communist Manifesto, Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, and many religious books enabled the murders of over 100 million in the 20th century and millions more in the previous centuries. And I’m betting many millions more in this century will be murdered because the exercise of these rights propagates and enables very dangerous ideas. Yet we still recognize that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are more important that the dark side of infringing upon these natural rights.

Books, speech, and firearms are all the tools of ideas. Those ideas can be evil or they can be good. The tool is amoral and can be used for good or evil. Restrictions on a tool used for good enables evil. It doesn’t matter which of these tools you restrict. You enable evil because you disable the expression of the good more than the expression of evil.

This concept is very clear in the context of the First Amendment. But somehow the general population has a delusion that the right to keep and bear arms is different. The correction of their delusion can’t be accomplished in a sentence or two on a ballot initiative so now we have to attempt correcting it in the courts. The courts aren’t as influenced by sound bites as the general public but delusions can be deadly in their persistence even in courts of law.

Update: As I was reminded of in the comments by Windy Wilson there is a somewhat famous U.S. Supreme Court case that says:

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

Which, as Windy points out:

This is tremendously close to the concept articulated by the head of the NRA, that the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

The connections between the First and Second Amendment are easy to make and very strong.