The past four years have seen a sea change in Washington’s gun laws, such that we are now ranked as one of the Top 10 states for responsible gun control. That’s a stunning change from the days — not long ago — when the mere idea of asking adults to keep their firearms locked away from children was seen as a nonstarter.
The momentum shift is so significant that gun control advocates believe 2023 will be the year the state Legislature finally restricts private access to military-style assault weapons.
Much of the reason for their optimism is the electorate. In 2018, the most comprehensive suite of gun laws ever put forth by the people, Initiative 1639, passed with nearly 60% of the vote. It does three things that experts see as core to stemming gun violence: prohibits the sale of assault rifles to anyone under 21; beefs up background checks and waiting periods; and encourages safe gun storage.
“The stigma has been broken,” said Dylan O’Connor, director of government affairs at the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “There has been a real psychological shift. It’s no longer taboo” for legislators to get behind these bills, he added, pointing to a raft of gun-responsibility laws passed during the last four years.
O’Connor’s optimism is understandable, considering that the 2018 public will furthered the direction set by voters in 2014 and 2016, with initiatives that closed background-check loopholes and allowed judges to temporarily bar access to firearms for people who have been deemed a danger to themselves or others.
Yet the rate of gun deaths in Washington has increased sharply, according to the Alliance, which reports a 24% increase in gun deaths between 2011 and 2020. Against those numbers, responsible gun owners are right to ask whether our laws are getting the job done.
It’s tough to prove a negative. But a national analysis of mass shootings going back to 1999 found that a third of them might have been thwarted if laws like those recently enacted in Washington had been in effect — including the ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines, passed just last year.
Under the spotlight currently is the state’s safe storage law, which says that gun owners may be held criminally liable if their firearms are unsecured and used by children to harm themselves or others. Snohomish County Prosecutor Adam Cornell is already putting that to the test. In August, he charged a mom for failing to secure her 9 mm pistol after her 12-year-old son used it to kill himself.
Safe storage came under question again this month, when 17-year-old Ebenezer Haile was murdered at Ingraham High School by a gun that its owner had reported missing. Washington has exceptionally high rates of gun theft, and only 36% of gun owners here say they keep their firearms locked up and unloaded. But the owner of the gun used to kill Haile is unlikely to be prosecuted because the law shields those who promptly report lost firearms. The difficulty is verifying how quickly that was done in this case.
Which brings us to the next chapter in Washington’s journey toward common-sense gun control. While mass shootings are comparatively rare, the military-style weapons used in these assaults cause outsize damage. Gun responsibility advocates are making a calculated guess that proposing restrictions on dealers and distributors, rather than private owners, will enable legislators to carry the law across the goal line, as they did with the high-capacity magazine ban.
No law can guarantee public safety against criminals. But that’s no reason to sit on our hands. The Legislature must do everything possible to ensure that the next horrific headline does not have a Washington dateline.
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