CCRKBA Takes Shot at Washington State Gun Laws After Shooting

Anti-gunners maintain that gun control works. Whether they actually believe it or not may be up for debate, but I think most actually buy it. They legitimately think they’re doing a good thing, and they’re adamant in their belief.

The problem is that they have to ignore the many failures of gun control to do so.

It’s funny because they will trot out people to provide anecdotes to justify their assault on the right to keep and bear arms, but then pretend that stories that run counter to that narrative either don’t count or simply don’t exist.

But the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms isn’t going to just let them ignore it. Instead, they take a shot at gun control laws in Washington state following two people being killed by a convicted felon.

From their press release:

While Washington state Democrats appear ready to adopt another restrictive gun control scheme affecting only law-abiding citizens, a double-homicide in Seattle over the weekend provides more evidence why the anti-gun ideology is strategically wrong and morally bankrupt, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has declared.

The man now charged with two counts of first-degree murder in connection to the Capri Hookah Lounge incident is a convicted felon who was on federal probation stemming from a previous gun law conviction. Yet, he is now in jail for allegedly shooting one man at point-blank range, and fatally wounding another in an exchange of gunfire. In a bizarre twist, the suspect is described by his public defender as apparently having worked with a community organization “aimed at preventing youth gun violence,” according to the Seattle Times.

“Democrat lawmakers are pushing a Draconian permit-to-purchase bill right now at the state capitol in Olympia, “ said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “which only penalizes honest citizens by impairing their ability to purchase firearms. It would not prevent a criminal from illegally obtaining or carrying a firearm, and they know it, which makes this gun control scheme so morally reprehensible.

“As a strategy for keeping guns out of the wrong hands,” he continued, “House Bill 1163 is, at best, misguided, and at its worst it will be an unmitigated constitutional disaster. While Democrats evidently think gun ownership is a government-regulated privilege, the federal and state constitutions say it is a protected fundamental right. 

“In order to implement the outrageous legislation now before the state Senate Ways and Means Committee,” Gottlieb said, “the state will have to spend millions of taxpayer dollars, which it doesn’t have with a multi-billion-dollar deficit, and then spend even more money fighting the inevitable lawsuits which will come from this gun control boondoggle. 

“That two men are now dead, and a convicted felon—who reportedly worked with an organization to prevent youth gun violence—is now in jail simply underscores how bereft of common sense the gun control crusade in Washington state has become,” Gottlieb observed. “Existing gun restrictions didn’t stop the suspect from being armed and didn’t prevent two violent murders. And now, anti-gun-rights lawmakers in Olympia can only throw more impairments in the way of law-abiding citizens as their ‘solution’ to such cold-blooded crimes. New restrictions on good people will not prevent bad people from committing crimes, and to believe otherwise borders on insanity.”

And let’s understand, Gottlieb is just using this as an example. This isn’t an isolated case by any stretch of the imagination. It might be a bit more of a sensational one since the accused killer was also apparently someone involved in “gun violence” prevention efforts, but that doesn’t change the fact that once again, a convicted felon had a firearm.

I routinely write about similar cases, each one a failure of gun control, and taken in isolation, probably easy to dismiss. They don’t make national headlines like a mass shooting might or even a defensive gun use that can be spun into something more, like the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Those cases are easy to make a big deal out of, and the mainstream media loves to perpetuate those stories because it fits their preferred narrative.

But what happened in Seattle gets missed.

Oh, they might report it on their websites, and it might even get a mention in the news cycle on television. What it doesn’t get, though, is the wall-to-wall coverage that something that can be twisted to support gun control might. That’s because, in their mind, this isn’t really an issue.

But it is.

See, I write about similar cases all the time, but there’s absolutely no way I could keep up with the volume of them even if I wanted to. Even a daily or weekly round-up of these cases would be more than any one person could manage, at least with any amount of success. That’s because it’s so common that it sort of clogs the news. Many arrests of felons in possession of a firearm don’t even make the news, they’re just that common.

Yet when someone says they want to address violent crime, what we get are laws that won’t have any impact on the people who are causing the problems, just the law-abiding folks who want a gun to protect themselves from these people.

This is the problem.

What people like Washington state legislators are doing, though, is no solution.