At least 150 people attended the Gun Rights Coalition's Rally 4 UR Rights in early January 2018 at the state Capitol in Olympia.
Dave Kellett has mixed opinions on Washington state’s latest round of voter-approved gun-control legislation.
On the one hand, the lead trainer at The Range in Yakima said his company will come out ahead by offering the enhanced firearms training required under Initiative 1639.
“It’s gold for firearms businesses,” Kellett said.
But he and other gun-rights advocates pushed hard against the measure, seeing it as further infringement on a constitutional right.
Under the new law, the age for buying a semi-automatic assault rifle is raised from 18 to 21, a change that will take effect in January.
The law will also require people buying semi-automatic rifles to undergo an enhanced background check, which also looks at mental health records, as well as going through firearms safety training, including lessons on suicide awareness.
It also allows gun owners to be charged with “community endangerment” if someone who is not legally allowed to have a gun gets theirs and brandishes it, fires it or uses it in a crime. Depending on the circumstances, the offense can be either a felony or a gross misdemeanor.
Those aspects of the law go into effect July 1, 2019.
I-1639 passed with slightly more than 60 percent of the vote in unofficial statewide tallies. In Yakima County, which tends to lean more conservative than the state as a whole, almost 58 percent of voters rejected the initiative.
The law was opposed by the National Rifle Association and other gun advocates who saw it as an infringement on Second Amendment rights and interfering with a person’s self-defense ability. Opponents have vowed to go to court to overturn the law.
Kristen Ellingboe, communications director for Yes on I-1639, was confident it would survive a challenge.
“The gun lobby has proven with this initiative (and others) that they will likely take any chance they can get to go to court,” Ellingboe said. “We are able to address any legal questions.”
Yakima County Sheriff Brian Winter said the law creates the potential for requiring police agencies to do additional tasks without the funding.
Winter said the measure potentially requires sheriff’s offices and police departments to do extra work on the background checks for initial purchases, as well as the annual checks to determine if handgun and assault-rifle owners are still legally allowed to possess firearms.
“This is no surprise to anyone ... passing laws that affect law-enforcement agencies they don’t fund,” Winter said. “We’ll have to see what law enforcement’s roles are, and gun dealers’ roles are.”
In between Jan. 1 and Nov. 1, the sheriff’s office has issued 2,961 concealed handgun licenses, compared to 3,111 for all of 2017, according to sheriff’s office spokesman Casey Schilperoort. He said those figures covered permit holders living in the unincorporated parts of Yakima County, as well as the communities of Naches, Granger, Mabton and White Swan, where the sheriff’s office provides law enforcement service. Permits in the other cities and towns are handled by local police.
Kellett said The Range will add the new required training — including suicide awareness and talking to children about guns — to their regular classes, and try to keep it as affordable as possible. While the law does not require it, Kellett said he will also offer a live-fire training session for students who want it. He said people should not have to pay or get a government license to exercise a constitutional right.
He does not anticipate the law will make a difference in crime. California’s strict gun laws did not stop a man from fatally shooting a dozen people at a bar in Thousand Oaks this past week, he said. In that shooting, the shooter was using a semi-automatic pistol.
“The solution isn’t more gun laws. Criminals just don’t follow the laws,” Kellett said. “There are always guns available, if not in the next state, then in the next country.”
Winter also worries that the law, as written, would expose gun owners to prosecution if they do not use gun safes or trigger locks, devices he said make it difficult, if not impossible to use a gun for self-defense in an emergency situation.
Ellingboe said that was a misconception that was raised before the election, and one that she hopes will be finally refuted as the law goes into effect.
Under the law, a gun owner cannot be prosecuted for community endangerment if he or she had the gun secured or if the gun were not secured but stolen from their home, as long as they report the theft no more than five days after discovering the gun was missing.
And, she said it also gives prosecutors the discretion to not file charges if it is not in the public’s interest to do so.
Another point of contention for Kellett is defining an assault rifle. He sees an assault rifle as a military rifle capable of firing in a fully automatic mode, while the law says the gun must be capable of firing a single round with each trigger pull.
