By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Gun control proponents have been living in something of a fantasy world by thinking their gun control schemes would prevent criminals from getting guns, but a glance at “police blotter” reports shows they are all wrong, according to the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
The group examined entries at the Seattle Police Department’s “Blotter” during May and found cases that demonstrate the fallacy of gun control.
“At least three times in May,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “Seattle officers encountered convicted felons who were carrying guns.”
Seattle is known for its far left politics, the attempts to defund the police department and reduce the number of commissioned officers, and for the spike in violent crime over the past year. The city’s so-called “gun violence” tax on the sale of firearms and ammunition has been a failure.
“We…predicted the gun and ammunition tax adopted by Seattle in 2015 would fail,” Gottlieb noted, “and we were right. From 2016 through 2020, the number of murders in the city has gradually climbed, according to Seattle police data. And the tax has never come close to producing the predicted revenue of $300,000 to $500,000.”
But it is the police blotter reports that prompted Gottlieb’s critique of the gun control mentality, not just in Seattle but around the country. CCRKBA looked at police reports just for the month of May and found three instances where officers encountered felons in possession of firearms. The bottom line is that gun control laws don’t keep guns away from criminals and vice versa.
“None of these suspects were deterred by the gun control laws promoted by the Seattle-based gun prohibition lobby,” he observed. “It’s time for these billionaire-backed social do-gooders to accept the fact that criminals don’t obey gun control laws. Criminals don’t bother with background checks or waiting periods. They don’t fill out a single piece of paper, nor do they worry about carrying guns without a concealed pistol license.
“What’s happening in Seattle is a microcosm of what’s going on across the country,” Gottlieb continued. “Check any big city and you’ll find reports of criminals with firearms because they ignore the laws that only penalize honest citizens, yet the gun control crowd refuses to learn anything from this pattern.”
In Seattle, one armed suspect was wanted on a federal warrant. Another man ran from police but was quickly apprehended in a separate incident. A third man, also a convicted felon, was arrested in a different incident after officers spotted him receiving a pistol from another man, and putting the gun in his pocket. This would be in direct violation of Washington state’s “universal background check” law adopted by voters in 2014.
According to CCRKBA, since 2014, two restrictive gun control initiatives bankrolled by the Seattle gun prohibition lobby have made it more difficult for law-abiding Evergreen State citizens to purchase legal firearms. Neither of these measures – Initiatives 594 and 1639 – have reduced homicides in Washington, as sold to the public. Actually, last year saw the number of slayings nearly double over 2019.
“When laws don’t work,” Gottlieb suggested, “they should be scrapped. Adding even more laws, and expecting them to work better isn’t just dumb, it’s delusional. The public has been gulled by the siren song of gun control and the time has come to turn off the music. Gun control is like snake oil. It comes with a great sales pitch, but it doesn’t prevent anything and it cures nothing. In the end, the problem remains and the ingredients leave you worse off than you were before.”
