Public Against Seattle Gun Ban

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While Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels appears to have lost sight of the fact that gun owners have rights, including the right to use public property, the citizens have not. I wrote about that here.

According to Bob Scales, senior policy analyst for the city’s Office of Policy and Management, in addition to the 1,088 comments submitted via e-mail to the city during a comment period that ended Sunday (Oct. 4), there were also ten telephone calls received by the Customer Service Bureau. Nine of those were against the idea and one supported the proposed ban.

Out of 1,098 comments, including the ten telephone calls, only 44 people supported the gun ban idea.
 

With results like that, what’s a lame-duck mayor to do?

Well, in the case of Greg Nickels, he hands off responsibility for adopting the ban rule to the director of Parks and Recreation. This is the end result of more than a year of posturing by the mayor, who had wanted to lobby the Legislature in January to erode this state’s long-standing preemption law, essentially allowing cities – or at least Seattle – to adopt their own firearms regulations.

Nickels apparently did not do his homework on that one very well, because if he had, he would have realized that the Legislature passed preemption in 1983 to prevent that kind of thing. Prior to that, the state had kind of a checkerboard of gun regulations, so that something which might be perfectly legal in Yakima would be illegal in Tacoma. Washington’s preemption statute works so well that it has served as a model for similar laws in other states.  

(Nickels) apparently thinks he is being clever by having a surrogate sign an order to post city parks off limits to firearms. If that is the case, the chicken has, indeed, come home to roost.” – Alan Gottlieb, Second Amendment Foundation

Upon learning that Nickels would not be signing an executive order banning guns, as he had originally threatened in June 2008, Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation said it was “chicken.” He issued a critical statement about Nickels and the public comment data on Thursday.

The data provided by Scales is revealing, showing once again how out of touch with his own constituents the mayor has become.

Only 8 percent of Seattle residents who commented on the proposed ban support it. Read more

Source: Seattle Gun Rights Examiner

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