BELLEVUE, WA – The revelation that Washington State, for the first time in history, has more than 700,000 active concealed pistol licenses is proof the public is concerned about personal and community safety and will be an issue in this year’s statewide elections, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is predicting.
Last week, the State Department of Licensing reported 701,020 active Concealed Pistol Licenses (CPL).
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said the number reflects “a growing concern about Washington’s crime rates, and the fact that the state is dead last in the number of commissioned police and sheriffs’ deputies per 1,000 residents, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC).”
“While reported homicides were down slightly last year from the record 399 posted in 2023,” Gottlieb noted, “violent crime continues at an alarming pace while there are fewer lawmen and women to deal with it. The data suggests two things. With fewer police officers and more gun control laws restricting honest citizens, criminals are more brazen. Obviously those laws adopted since 2014, promising less violent crime, have been total failures. The public is fed up, and it appears they are arming up.”
While a new report from Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs shows murder declined last year by 5.8 percent from 399 in 2022 to 276 in 2023, it is still up 87 percent from 2019 on a five-year comparison. There were 207 slayings in 2019.
“Washington has reached a milestone,” Gottlieb said, “and the gun prohibition lobby should take note that these are not the people committing crimes with firearms. They are honest citizens, working or retired, who want to keep their families safe. They have seen the failure of anti-gun-rights policies firsthand in the Evergreen State, and they want things to change.
“By no coincidence, violent crime has gone up on Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s watch,” he added. “Ferguson has promoted and lobbied for increasing restrictions on law-abiding gun owners which have had no impact on criminals. He has allied himself with elitist gun grabbers whose agenda of public disarmament has proven itself to be a deadly social experiment. It’s time to take a different approach, and 700,000 Washington citizens agree.”
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.
I live in Oregon but have a Washington CCP out of Cowlitz Co. You should see the book they give you on the gun laws in their state. It is a 104 pages long. You’d need a team of attorney’s with split second answers, not to go to jail in that state.
Text book definition of an tyrannical democrat voter and government.
Democrats Government motto: “Disposing of unneeded Constitutional Rights, as we see fit”
It just doesn’t feel like the summer of love.. it feels like someone is trying to butt rape me.
Another very interesting statistic to watch is the relative manning levels of metro police departments from 2020, the Summer of Love and today. I read a report where Minneapolis PD has gone from over 860 sworn personnel in 2020 to fewer than 550 today. Seattle PD has taken a massive decline in sworn personnel (real police officers) during the same period. When you defund, vilify and then prosecute your own public safety personnel for doing public safety work you can expect good people to react by leaving. I watched the same thing happen to our military when I returned from… Read more »
Well, most of those concealed carriers will not take the time to fill out a mail-in ballot so no sympathy here.
Go ahead and elect Ferguson. He has all the concealed carrier names and all of the registrations for guns in the state since like 2001. He will relieve you of your firearms.
Ferguson’s montra is they will do it and it is legal until the courts say it isn’t. When his laws finally get to court and ruled against he can just say too late, we destroyed all the guns.
Now if those 700,000 would only get off their collective bums and vote Washington could improve their (adjective deleted) situation.
Are they scared, or just getting ready?
2A attacking politicians are worse threat than the street thugs. Patriots are shooting the wrong thugs…..