Examiner – by Dave WorkmanA proposed gun control measure backed by big money Seattle venture capitalist Nick Hanauer will reportedly be submitted to the Washington legislature in Olympia today, according to KING 5 News.
Gun rights activists on at least three popular Northwest forums – Northwest Firearms, Seattle Guns and Shooters Northwest – have been paying attention to this effort. Reader comments piling up on the KING 5 website below the story suggest the idea is not too popular even though the story reports that Mr. Hanauer “owns four guns of his own, which he keeps locked up.”
The effort is being mounted by the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility, which held a big money fund raiser recently to build a campaign war chest.
To which one person replied, “Wow, congratulations on owning four guns and keeping them locked up, Nick Hanauer. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make you any more informed. Gun show ‘vendors’ who are federally-licensed firearm dealers must conduct the very same background checksthat they would perform anywhere other than a gun show. Private sellers are not required to conduct criminal background checks (nor are they allowed access to the NICS database to do so even if they want to) at a gun show or anywhere else. But they are prohibited from selling to anyone they know or have reason to believe would be prohibited from owning a firearm. There is no ‘gun show loophole’. It’s a myth.”
Another respondent summed it up, “Another do gooder for guns, lets (sic) look at history and learn something from it, common sense is hard to find these days, WDC!!! I like my guns, because shortly, I’m going to need them!!!”
Nothing right now hits the typical gun rights activist’s proverbial raw nerve more than talk about “background checks,” considering revelations over the past few days about government snooping on millions of Americans. The concern in the firearms community is that records will be kept, establishing a de facto registry of all guns, building on the state’s existing handgun registry.
Among gun owners, it is commonly considered nobody’s business, and certainly not the government’s business, whether they own firearms, how many they have and how they are stored. Revelations earlier this year that the so-called “assault weapons” ban measure contained aconstitutionally-challenged provision for annual warrantless searches of the homes of gun owners sent a clear signal about how extreme the gun control crowd has become. Once that story broke, anti-gunners swiftly backed off and their bill died.
Earlier this year, Alan Gottlieb at the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms engaged in a discussion with the sponsors of a background check bill that he initially opposed. When asked what might make a bill palatable, Gottlieb offered some conditions including the abolition of the state pistol registry and a prohibition on record keeping. That didn’t fly with the other side, the condition was not included in a final version of the bill, and Gottlieb publicly walked away, leaving in his wake the revelation that gun folks will negotiate so long as it is in good faith and there is give and take. It’s the other side that is inflexible.
But there is a growing impression that big money people like Hanauer and anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg think they can buy elections and thus force their lifestyle and philosophy on other people who do not care to live under that kind of autocracy. Fat bank accounts or not, nobody made these guys kings.
This issue is no longer about keeping firearms out of the wrong hands so much as it is becoming a battle between a relative handful of well-funded Seattle-centric anti-gunners and average citizens across the rest of the state who exercise a right to keep and bear arms, and don’t feel they should be treated like criminals.
People in the firearms community quietly worry that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to stop a well-funded measure billed as a “background check” initiative that is really something else; same as Initiative 676 was billed as a “gun safety” measure in 1997, when it was in reality an extremist licensing and registration effort.
It is almost as though the Seattle anti-gun clique is using its money to bully state lawmakers by threatening a ballot issue next year. The KING report noted, “The measure will go to the Washington legislature first, which will give lawmakers a chance to act on it, Hanauer said. If they do not, it will land on the ballot in 2014.”
“It typically takes millions of dollars to gather signatures to put a measure on the ballot,” KING reported, “but Hanauer has drive — and money — to accomplish the task.”
On the other side, gun owners are becoming more convinced their rights and privacy concerns no longer matter.
UPDATE: According to KIRO Radio, Hanauer has decided that Washingtonians who do not go along with his agenda are “irresponsible gun owners and the people that make money selling guns to irresponsible gun owners.”
“We want to give the legislature a chance to embarrass itself once again because we’re in the game for the long term, and we want to find out who are our friends and who are our enemies,” he reportedly stated.
Hanauer has a degree in philosophy from the University of Washington, and an article about him in Forbes yesterday was not terribly flattering, nor was a different piece about him in Forbes that appeared last year.
http://www.examiner.com/article/gun-control-measure-goes-to-legislature-today-says-king