Before he signed a trio of unconstitutional anti-gun bills, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee made sure the building was locked while he was surrounded by his gun-slinging state troopers.
Inslee may as well have said, Shhhh, we’re taking away your rights. Don’t tell anybody!
The governor knew that the gun laws he was signing into law broke faith with both the Washington State and U.S. constitutions, which is why he wanted only hand-selected “stakeholders” to be arrayed to witness his courageous and brave! ceremony.
Meanwhile, behind the locked doors…. pic.twitter.com/Wka6Smb74w
— Jim Walsh (@JimWalshLD19) April 25, 2023
Inslee smugly took his anti-gun victory lap surrounded by hand-selected gun grabbers behind the locked doors of the people’s house.
The second he signed bills HB 1240, SB 5078, and HB 1143, the Washington State-based Silent Majority Foundation and national Second Amendment Foundation marched to the state and federal courts respectively and filed for emergency injunctions to stop the confiscatory gun laws from going into effect.
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The bills accomplish three main objectives for the Left:
- Outlaws sales of a swath of semi-auto rifles, pistols, and gear such as certain kinds of grips, detachable magazines, suppressors, and devices that give the user much more control over their weapon among many other things.
- Requires paying indulgences to the state to use Second Amendment rights by requiring the serfs to prove firearms training before buying a gun. Dave Workman of Ammoland likened the new law to Jim Crow literacy tests for voting.
- Wipes out most Federal Firearms License (FFL) dealers by removing 40% of their business, according to Bill Kirk of Washington Gun Law.
- And a bonus reason: inflames the narrative that law-abiding gun owners are responsible for mass shootings.
Here was the “mob” Inslee pretended to be afraid of.
— Jason (@karmicwaverider) April 25, 2023
Both lawsuits invoke the recent Bruen decision in their arguments for an emergency injunction. The injunction would stop the new laws from being enacted until they can be litigated.
The Second Amendment Foundation’s argument for the immediate injunction stated that the governor and attorney general have just outlawed some of the most popular guns in common usage.
[The] State has barred law-abiding residents from legally acquiring common rifles and has deprived them of an effective means of self-defense and their fundamental individual right to keep and bear arms.
[…]the State has enacted, and Defendants have authority to enforce, a flat prohibition on the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, and offering for sale of many common firearms—tendentiously labeled “assault weapons”—by ordinary citizens
[…]In so doing, the State of Washington has criminalized one of the most common and important means by which its citizens can exercise their fundamental right to self-defense.
Both Inslee and the State Attorney General know their measures are unconstitutional. State executives have nothing to fear because the taxpayers foot the bill for their quixotic exploits while bleeding the coffers of the pro-gun groups.
The Second Amendment Foundation lawsuit said as much, citing Heller, Caetano, and Bruen Supreme Court decisions.
Defendants will be unable to meet their burden. … But to be banned, a firearm must be both dangerous and unusual. …Arms that are in common use—as the firearms Washington has banned unquestionably are—are neither unusual nor dangerous. Therefore, they cannot be banned, and the Washington laws challenged herein must be declared unconstitutional.
The Silent Majority states on its website that the Bruen decision “has changed the analysis of 2nd Amendment infringement/impairments to a single question that requires the government to ‘affirmatively prove that its firearms regulation is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms.’”
The gun ban not only includes semi-automatic rifles, pistols less than 30 inches in size, and semi-automatic shotguns, but it redefines them all as “assault weapons.”
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It is the height of arrogance and hubris to enact gun laws state executives know are unconstitutional and then waste taxpayer dollars to do battle to bleed dry the other side’s resources. State actors have no inducement to do the right thing, no skin in the game; just an endless stream of other people’s money.
Washington’s governor and Attorney General Bob Ferguson aren’t practicing law; they’re practicing Leftist lawfare. This is unbecoming of state officers and must be stopped.
Indeed, the Silent Majority Foundation’s brief argued that both Inslee and Ferguson seemed to be making stuff up as they went along. “Ferguson, Inslee, and the Democrat-controlled legislature, together with Defendants, cannot legally justify impairing Brumback’s [plaintiff] right to bear arms via ESSB 5078 since there is nothing historically that would justify such action.”
They said that one of the plaintiffs in the case, “Gimme Guns,” would have his business wiped out by the bans.
Washington voters and other West Coast, Messed Coast™ states should begin work on initiatives holding state executives personally liable for instituting laws forsaking civil law and order in favor of their unconstitutional, ideological extremism.
Donate to the Silent Majority Foundation’s state efforts here and the Second Amendment Foundation here and make sure you designate the donation to go to the Washington State legal fight. Oregon is in a similar fix, as I’ve explained before. Donate to the Oregon Firearms Federation here.
A recent edition of my Adult in the Room Podcast is a good backgrounder for Oregon and Washington’s gun legislation.
Put your other suggestions for fighting back in the comments below.
You knew it was coming. They’re taking away the ability to protect yourself from the mobs. The gun grabbers are here and they don’t care if they’re right on the law. Their efforts are twofold: to smear gun owners and to blame them for the recent mass shootings by all the Leftist crackpots.
And then they put a stranglehold on PJ Media’s efforts to shout it from the rooftops by throttling our website, muffling us on social media, and putting us on lists of undesirables.
Fight back.
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