Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s immediate reaction to Sunday’s triple homicide at a hookah lounge in the city’s Mount Baker area “was a predictable launch pad for an attack on Washington State’s model firearms preemption law,” the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
“Instead of encouraging people to help police solve this terrible crime and bring the perpetrators to justice,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “Mayor Harrell reminds us he is ‘partnering’ with state lawmakers to ‘end state preemption over firearms’ so the city can adopt policies which, experience tells us, will only impact law-abiding citizens and not prevent a single tragedy.
“Bruce Harrell was on the city council in 2015 when they hastily adopted the city’s notorious tax on gun and ammunition sales,” Gottlieb recalled.
“In the years since, homicides have more than doubled in Seattle, the gun tax revenue has never come close to the forecast and the mayor and his allies continue blaming guns when they should be blaming the people misusing those guns.
“Mayor Harrell seems to forget that Seattle did adopt a policy—the gun tax—on the promise it would help prevent gun-related violence and the past eight years have shown it to be a total failure,” he added. “Instead of talking about getting guns off the street, how about focusing on getting criminals off the street?
NEW: After yet another mass shooting in Seattle, don’t assume Mayor Bruce Harrell will show an ounce of leadership. He continues to blame “gun violence”, rather than addressing the actual crisis Democrats created. And residents don’t seem to mind. https://t.co/Be2ebz6DJI
— Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) August 21, 2023
In a statement posted on his official website, Harrell says Seattle police are “investigating with haste to hold the perpetrators responsible.” He says the city is taking a “holistic approach” to dealing with the challenge of violent crime in the city.
“The mayor and city council can take any approach they desire,” Gottlieb observed, “but when they promote and adopt social policies which the public, especially the criminal element, see as soft on crime, at the end of the day all they are doing is pontificating. Preemption has provided uniformity in state gun laws for nearly 40 years, and what seems to escape Mayor Harrell and other gun control advocates is that you cannot prevent violent crime by penalizing people who don’t commit crime, or by repealing a law which protects the rights of law-abiding gun owners from one state border to the other.”
Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.
Where the Demoncratic Party rules, deterioration of liberty, freedom, rights, and future are all gambled away for them to achieve more power and control over the people.Oh yes, they promise them liberty, all the while as they undermine the principles that foster liberty. Servants of corruption at their best. There is no tax they won’t embrace, there is no law they won’t enact, there is no lie they won’t tell, in order to achieve their goals. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, just to name a few, are deteriorating so rapidly that most companies that know anything about them won’t hold conventions… Read more »
seems like the good mayor doesn’t realize that in the past 8 years the policies he and his cohorts forced upon the free people of the state of washington didn’t work and that demanding more of the same will get him more of the same.
where is the common sense the progs/leftists always call for in this instance?
I can see the mayors wheels turning right now saying if only this was a state law we could solve the “gun violence” problem. We always need more laws and more money. The proof that this kind of thinking and action works is shown in all the years of doing this and the end result is always the same. They make more laws and get more money. It’s the perfect nonresolution and money grabbing vote getting machine for them because they always only need one more to fix it. Its’ the Alber Einstein syndrome at its best. Oregoneistan just like… Read more »
The mayor is not working for the people. He is working for reelection. Thus he must “do something” – purely for show. No matter whether “something” makes things better or worse – only whether it gains him funding and/or votes.