SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: Keep an eye on scores of anti-gun bills in Olympia
Jan 18, 2022, 4:09 PM | Updated: Jan 19, 2022, 7:15 am
Washington National Guard and State Patrol members surround the Washington State Capitol in Olympia. (File photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
(File photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
It’s déjà vu all over again. Like last year’s state legislative session, lawmakers are considering a myriad of gun-related proposals. Nearly 30 anti-gun bills are winding their way through Olympia.
Not surprisingly, some Seattle city leaders are trying again to get Washington state lawmakers to sidestep the state’s “preemption statute.”
This constitutional provision – upheld twice in the courts – “puts all authority for firearms in the hands of the state Legislature. Period. The cities all know this,” explains Bellevue-based Dave Workman, communications director for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
“It means that what’s good in Aberdeen is good in Spokane, and from Vancouver to Blaine — the law is equal. Everybody follows the same law,” Workman told Dori Monson Show listeners.
Before the statute, Workman says, “we had a checkerboard of confusing gun laws.”
He added that citizens should not “have to worry about breaking an ordinance by crossing the invisible city and county lines that run throughout Washington.”
Dori cited Seattle Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell’s push for a preemption law as a means of making guns illegal in parks.
“So the idea now is that it’s OK for Seattle lefties to have a park full of drug addicts, heroin addicts, and drunks – but won’t allow a private citizen to be legally armed?” Workman said. “That just drives them nuts.”
Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from noon – 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.
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