Something dramatic has shifted in gun politics here, after decades of being kept in a stranglehold by voters and by the lobbying force of the NRA.
Nothing has been more jammed up in recent decades than the politics of guns. But now the dam has completely broken.
How can I tell? Well, for starters, the gun folks are completely freaking out.
“It’s all hands on deck, battle stations,” warned Alan Gottlieb[1], of Bellevue’s Second Amendment Foundation, about the possibility of a spate of gun-control measures sweeping the country.
This is the “most extreme anti-gun legislative agenda to date,”
the NRA said[2] in a blast bulletin Friday about proposals that may come before Washington state lawmakers in January. Said a headline Friday[3] on MyNorthwest.com, a site for talk-radio stations KIRO-FM and KTTH-AM: “Progressives really are coming for your guns in Washington.”No, they’re really not. The main proposal,
suggested this past week by the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility[4], is to ban high-capacity ammo magazines (clips that hold more than 10 bullets). To date they haven’t suggested coming for any actual guns, though it wouldn’t be surprising to see bills again in January to further restrict or ban the sale of so-called assault rifles.A more accurate depiction of what’s going on came from Dave Workman, a local gun-rights writer,
in Soldier of Fortune magazine[5]:“Second Amendment advocates from one coast to the other should be paying close attention to what is happening in Washington state, which has become a test tube for anti-gunners …”
That is right: We are now the nation’s gun-policy test tube. But it isn’t because of extremists or zealots. It’s because of
