By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
If you’re looking for a gun control “success” story in Washington State, good luck with that, because crime data heading into the final hours of 2022 is rather bleak.
According to the Twitter site for Seattle Homicides (not connected to the Seattle Police Department), the body count stood at 57 on Friday, up from the 42 recorded in 2021 and well above the 10-year average of 28.8. The record high 69 slayings were logged in 1994.
According to Axios, “Seattle appears to be bucking a national trend” of declining murders.
Tacoma has logged more than 40 homicides this year, according to KCPQ News, the local Fox News affiliate.
Why is this important? Because it essentially puts the lie to the promises/predictions from gun control lobbyists who passed two restrictive statewide gun control measures—Initiative 594 in 2014 and Initiative 1639 in 2018—and Seattle officials who adopted a gun and ammunition tax to raise revenue for an effort to reduce so-called “gun violence” in 2015.
That year (2015) saw 141 gun-related murders in Washington, significant because it was the first full year following passage of I-594, which required so-called “universal background checks” on firearms transfers.
In 2019, the first full year after passage of I-1639, which prohibits young adults from buying so-called “semiautomatic assault rifles,” and requires proof of training and an “enhanced” background check on all sales to adults over age 21, the state reported 135 gun-related homicides (out of a total of 194), according to data in the FBI Uniform Crime Report.
In 2021, however, murders spiked way up, with more than 300 reported by the FBI, including 209 involving firearms.
In 2016, Seattle police data shows there were 19 slayings. This was the first full year following adoption of the gun and ammunition tax. Last year’s number, shown above, shows a leap of more than 100 percent in the number of murders in the Jet City.
By any standards, the raw numbers make a compelling argument that stricter gun controls in Washington have been an abject failure. That much was made clear by Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms following a fatal shooting at Seattle’s Ingraham High School in November.
“Seattle is headquarters to a billionaire-supported gun prohibition lobbying group whose initiatives were passed on promises of reduced gun-related crime,” Gottlieb said at the time. “Those restrictive laws have also miserably failed. The number of murders in Seattle and the entire state have gone up, not down, and the gun control crowd refuses to admit their strategies have accomplished nothing, while providing false hopes to the public.
“Keep in mind,” he continued, “the suspect in the Ingraham High School shooting could not legally carry a gun. He violated existing state and federal laws by bringing a gun into the school. He fatally shot someone. How many laws does someone have to violate before (Seattle officials) figure out that the problem isn’t guns, it’s people who commit crimes, and it is leadership that defunds law enforcement, pursues soft-on-crime social policies and then tries to shift the blame to guns because they can’t, or won’t, punish the perpetrators?”
