By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Seattle, Washington went 25 days without a homicide in the New Year, but now criminals are apparently playing “catch-up” with two fatal shootings in two days over the final weekend in January, once again illustrating the failure of restrictive gun control laws.
According to KOMO News—the local ABC affiliate—one man was killed and a woman wounded in a shooting in the city’s Pioneer Square neighborhood early Saturday. Investigators reportedly found 45 spent shell casings of mixed calibers at the crime scene, in the parking lot of a local lounge.
Seattle had a record number of homicides in 2023—74 in all—but in 2024, the number fell to 58. KOMO reported Seattle Police are saying there is a “downward trend in homicides the last few years,” but the data doesn’t suggest anything other than the fact that 2024 saw 16 fewer murders than 2023. According to Seattle Homicide, which is not affiliated with the Seattle police, the city saw 61 slayings last year.
In the second slaying, according to KIRO News—the local CBS affiliate—another person was fatally shot in the city’s Ballard neighborhood early Sunday morning. Details were sketchy, but the slayings could become political fodder for Democrats now in control in the state capitol at Olympia, where they have already introduced several gun control measures, ranging from a safe storage requirement to a liability insurance requirement on every firearm each gun owners possesses.
In 2016, Seattle adopted a special tax on the sale of firearms and ammunition. The tax forced one major gun shop to relocated to another county to the north, and another to move all of its firearms business, also to a neighboring county to the south. But the number of murders in the city actually tripled over the ensuing years.
One person responding to the KOMO report observed, “Yep all those wonderful democrats and their gun laws are working great.”
According to My Northwest, the 23-yer-old woman who was wounded was taken to Swedish Medical Center with a gunshot wound to the leg. The dead man was reported to be 40 years of age.
