That 6396 is half-baked is beyond question to me; this bill is full of conflicts, unfundable mandates and constitutional violations, any of which would almost ensure failure.

So why is it here?

What's the matter with it:

-Having included the violation of the 4th Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure (as if we didn't get enough of that through the US H.R. 2975 in 2001) -by having the police search our homes looking to see if the guns they think are there are stored properly.
- The unfunded appropriation of law enforcement personnel it would take to go search everyone's houses to make sure their guns were "properly stored". How many homes in Metro Seattle would that be? How do they know we'll be there to let 'em in? Could we reschedule for next week or just break the door down? (As you'll see in the video, Senator Kline commented that this section was included "by mistake" and would be "taken out".)

-Not defining what that proper storage would be, nor addressing how much it would cost people -out of their own pockets.

-A definition of "assault weapons" that is so overly broad that it would seem to include all self-loading pistols (due to the "grip being below the trigger") which either are loaded with more than 10 rounds or could hold more than 10 rounds, even that seemed to be indefinite.

-Inclusion of the laughably ridiculous idea that a barrel shroud would make anything more 'lethal', the rationale of which Bellevue Chief Pillo could not explain, for obvious reasons.

If you haven't done so already, you may review the hearing in the PNAI post here.

What's the real intent of this bill? Who benefits? Cui bono?

These flaws in an obviously half-baked and ill-conceived slap-dash amalgam of other failed attempts at legislating mental health and morality have made me think they never intended for this to get anywhere.

Perhaps I have become too cynical here in my middle years. It is obvious that the good Senators are not dumb people. So if we go by the Maxim of ,"judge a tree by its fruit" maybe we are looking at a tree that is deliberately producing sterile fruit in order to provide a different purpose?

Remember a couple of weeks ago, Governor Gregoire was on camera vowing to "do something about this", following the shooting of the four police officers in Lakewood at Forza coffee and then the other two in Eatonville?

I wonder if this isn't the "something" she was talking about. But weren't all those police shot with handguns? It's nearly impossible to tell by reading the news stories. Seems like a safe bet that if any of those incidents had involved the dreaded pistol grip, barrel shroud or bayonet lug in deadly combination, we sure would have heard about it.

I am frankly conflicted in my reaction to this legislation. Senator Kline was a friend to PI's as a group last year when we were trying to amend some other poorly conceived PI-related legislation.

...and now this. A bill which, if passed as written, would probably disarm most of the PI's, security professionals and Bail Recovery agents in the state. It's hard to get your head around it.

We are now in the national spotlight as an example of the long anticipated attack on the 2nd Amendment which has made gun sales soar since November of last year.

At risk of making this post impossibly long, I did want to add a couple more thoughts:

The unchallenged testimony of the witness who asserted that we "already protect our kids against cigarettes". Really? How's that working out? And how does this compare to the issue at hand?

Cigarettes are legal to buy and sell. They are prohibited to be possessed by those under 18, but still legally sold. A trip by any High School after class will demonstrate how effectively this law 'protects our children' from them.

Murder is not legal to anyone in the USA. Felons possessing guns is already prohibited. Yet these laws do not stop the lawless.

No one was allowed to counter this assertion at the hearing. Neither was anyone afforded the time to question the blanket statement which conclusion was intended to be that all gun violence in the last 10 years must have been committed with assault weapons. The Bellevue Chief said, "We are talking about assault weapons here so..." well, not so fast.
This testimony uses broken logic. All police shootings were not done using assault weapons. A fraction of them were.

This was illustrated in the claim that 1/4 of the murders against police involving assault weapons. Even if true, this would mean that 3/4 of the police shootings did not involve assault weapons.

So why are these people so hot after the guns used less often? If 75% of my chickens are being eaten by coyotes and 25% being taken by bobcats, I'm going after the coyotes.

The unspeakable truth.

Obviously we are dealing with a complex issue, a real hot-button topic that has a long history of being used as a political football to divide us and to provide traction for both opponents and proponents of the idea.

In my view the whole topic of banning assault weapons or baseball bats or automatic knives or rope is a wild goose-chase similar to worrying about the trombone's tuning in the Titanic's band after the ship struck the iceberg. It isn't the intonation of the brass, it's the hole in the side of the ship.

The real issues being ignored when you have incidents of seemingly senseless violence could be found deep within the nature of a society, parenting responsibilities unmet, the disfunctional state of mental health treatment and a benevolent love-hate relationship toward violence. Is murder on TV really healthy entertainment? Murder, she wrote. It's on the Hallmark Family channel! Swell.

What kind of laws can be expected to replace or correct years of poor parenting and lack of guidance? How can police and teachers undo the faulty programming in the heads of some of our fellow citizens? 

Think about the effectiveness of the "Psychiatric Profession" in treating mental illness. Warehousing people like cord wood and pouring mostly untested and zombie-inducing drugs down the throats of the mentally ill seems to be the current state of the art. "How do you feel about that?" Some doctors think this question is the magic answer in transactional analysis.

What about the environment created by living in a nation that seems to be in the business of full-time war, and whose foremost exports are weapons? As ye reap so shall ye sow, says one popular book.

These are hard issues, highly charged with baggage, not easily solved, and just as difficult to even discuss. But I put it to you: as with any "assault weapons ban", are the proponents trying to correct the end-product of other problems by addressing a side issue? Worse: what if they actually realize this won't help anything, but are making hay off the tragedies of recent events to pander to a marginally-engaged base?

SB 3696- Washington State's new poster token to demonstrate how "we're doing something about this". Something- the easy thing, the wrong thing -about the symptom, instead of dealing with the real underlying causes.

Be safe out there,
Dave
 
David Liston Investigative Services Inc.
Washington P.I. #2908