Here is the Washington State Alliance for Gun Responsibility agenda for 2019:
RESTRICT ACCESS TO HIGH-CAPACITY MAGAZINES: High-capacity magazines make shootings more deadly and allow shooters to fire more rounds, faster. Recent reviews of mass shootings showed that 50% involved high-capacity magazines and, in shootings where high-capacity magazines are used, more people are shot overall and more people die. Keeping high-capacity magazines away from people looking to cause harm would reduce risks and help limit the scope of mass shooting tragedies in Washington.
“Keeping high-capacity magazines away from people looking to cause harm”? If you know someone is looking to cause harm why are they not in a cell or getting psychological help? And how do they think they can determine this? What are the details of a law they think will accomplish this? Reviewing your social media history? Interviewing your friends and neighbors every time you want to buy a spare magazine?
If they were serious about wanting to “limit the scope of mass shootings tragedies” they would encourage the one thing known to work over 90% of the time. Since they will never suggest that you know they are lying when they say they want to “limit the scope of mass shooting tragedies”.
Joining the 27 states and the Distict [sic] of Columbia who require safety training for a
concealed pistol license;
This isn’t because there is a problem with people with CPLs being a hazard to public safety. We are already much less likely to shoot an innocent person than a police officer when confronted with a deadly force situation. This is about making it more expensive and difficult to get a CPL.
Updating our list of people prohibited from possession firearms to include additional
crimes that are indicators of future violence and individuals found incompetent to stand trial.
It isn’t good enough that convicted felons and domestic abusers are prohibited persons. They want to expand it to those convicted of “additional crimes that are indicators of future violence”. Misdemeanors which happened 40 years ago? Public intoxication 20 years ago?
For over 30 years, our local towns, cities, and counties
have been blocked from taking action to prevent gun violence own [sic] their own because
of the statewide preemption law. Local leaders are best positioned to know how best
to protect their communities.
They want to remove preemption. The crazy patchwork of laws that will be impossible to remember will make it a high risk adventure to travel across the county with a gun let alone across the state.
Today, we take steps to keep
our kids safe by making schools gun-free zones. It just makes sense to extend these
gun-free zones to child care and early learning centers.
They want more “gun-free zones”! It is the existing “gun-free zones” where something like 90% of the mass shooting occur. And they want to create more of them. This cannot be for any other reason than they want to make it more and more risky to own and carry a firearm. This is not about keeping “kids safe”.
Crime guns are a major problem and a
contributor to gun violence across our state. There are common-sense steps we can
take to keep crime guns off our streets and make our communities safer.
Allow the State Patrol to destroy confiscated crime guns, rather than require them
to auction or trade them.
This is almost baffling. One way to interpret this is that they believe that once a gun has been involved in a crime they think it is more likely to be used to commit a crime in the future. Don’t laugh! This is what some people believe (see also here).
Another way to interpret this is that they believe this is, in essence, a zero sum game. They may actually believe that every time a gun is destroyed that is one less gun in existence. This is, of course, not true. It just increases the market size for new guns. Is this what they really want?
Considering the usual lack of sophistication I don’t think this is the most likely thought process but they may think that raising the price, by decreasing the supply, of guns can be achieved this way. Increasing the price means that fewer people can afford them making it more unlikely people will exercise their rights. The problem with this line of thinking is that the number of “crime guns” is so small compared to the total new gun sales, less than 1%, that any change is in the noise.
Ensuring we are able to respond to new technology by closing loopholes that
currently allow sharing and downloading designs for untraceable weapons that can
be printed or manufactured anywhere.
They want to infringe on the First Amendment as well as the Second. Got it. That’s not going to work any better than the war on drugs. When law enforcement can’t keep high school dropout from getting illegal drugs from South America 24×7 via boats and airplanes there is no chance of keeping encrypted files from sneaking in from anywhere in the world at the speed of light.
Their goal is clear. In the short term they want to make gun ownership difficult, risky, and expensive. Long term they want to eliminate it.
We can’t out vote them. We have to stop them in the courts. They won’t stop unless we stop them. Help stop them.
