Dems tried passing anti-gun laws knowing WA couldn’t handle it

The Washington state firearm database — used, in part, by law enforcement to find out if someone has a gun illegally — is lagging way behind in adding pistol transfers to their records, creating significant safety concerns.

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Democrats knew this. But instead of fixing the current system, they tried to push a bevy of anti-gun policies, knowing that it would put unsustainable pressure on an already-strained system.

In other words: Washington Democrats tried to pass bills they knew wouldn’t be implemented or tracked effectively.

The Department of Licensing handles this database. According to Jerry Cornfield in the Everett Herald, the backlog of guns to be entered into the database has reached an astonishing 478,006. The agency has complained about being understaffed for years, requesting funds to help tackle the backlog.

Suddenly, the agency received funding. And, with that money, we find out that the Democrats knew — if they passed their anti-gun legislation — the state wouldn’t have been able to handle them.

According to the Herald:

This year the agency didn’t ask and, ironically, lawmakers did allot $382,000 in the supplemental state budget to tackle the problem.

It happened after Democratic senators learned a suite of gun-related bills they were pushing would, if enacted, put further strain on the department’s ability to ensure all the data is up to date.

“We thought let’s take care of the backlog and clear the way” for the bills, said Sen. Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island, chairwoman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee and the chamber’s chief budget writer.

Only the funding they offered wouldn’t, in fact, take care of the backlog and adding the new duties to the agency could take years to get under control.

The Democrat’s anti-gun efforts were never meant to legitimately tackle gun violence. Raising the age to buy rifles to 21? That would have a negligible effect on gun crime in this state. You know what would be incredibly helpful? Working with the agency over the past several years in giving it the staffing necessary to address this backlog, not throwing some money at the agency at the last minute under the false pretense of helping address the new issues the bills would create.

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Democrats could have chosen to fix the current problem. But they didn’t. And this plays into a central criticism from gun rights advocates who argue the Left is more interesting in curbing gun use and creating new onerous laws, rather than enforcing the current laws, which could actually stop some instances of gun violence.

And while Democrats sprinted to exploit the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas with new anti-gun laws, they could have focused their efforts on pre-existing issues that were in desperate need of attention. Let’s be clear: when Democrats say they care about tackling gun violence, they just want to demonize gun ownership and signal to their base that they hate guns.

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