A shooting in Seattle on Wednesday night left two teenagers with serious injuries, but the head of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (where, for the record, I serve as a volunteer and unpaid board member) says the violence could have been much worse were it not for the intervention of an armed citizen.
The shooting took place in downtown Seattle around 10 p.m., just outside the luxury Four Seasons hotel. When authorities arrived on scene they found three individuals injured, including the alleged assailant.
Investigators said the shootings stemmed from an argument between three people, and during that argument, one man shot two victims. That’s when a bystander with a concealed weapons permit shot the gunman, according to SPD. Police said the bystander was not involved in the argument.
Both victims, boys 17 and 18 years old, had serious injuries. The suspect — a young man — was critically injured. All three were taken to Harborview, where the suspect later died, police and fire officials reported. On Thursday morning, one victim had been discharged and the other remained in the hospital in satisfactory condition, hospital spokesperson Susan Gregg said.
In a press release, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb noted that Washington state lawmakers have imposed a large number of restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, while local politicians in Seattle have engaged in policing “reforms” that have left the police department decimated, with hundreds of positions either unfilled or unfunded.
“In a city where political policies have resulted in reduced police manpower while placing limits on the officers who remain,” he continued, “it should come as no surprise that an increasing number of law-abiding citizens are now licensed to carry firearms for their personal protection. Seattle and King County have the highest number of active licenses of any county in the state. Coincidentally, just a few blocks away at about the same time, there was a fatal stabbing, which says a lot about crime in the city.
The armed Samaritan remained on the scene and has reportedly cooperated with the investigation, according to published reports.
“What is also not surprising,” Gottlieb observed, “is the dead silence from the state’s gun prohibition lobby, which is headquartered in Seattle. There has been nary a peep, which seems to have become customary whenever an armed citizen takes action in defense of himself or others, anywhere in the country.
I suppose there’s an argument that, given the large number of defensive gun uses every year, it’s impossible for the gun control lobby to respond to each and every one of them. But that doesn’t change the fact that the anti-gunners ignore every armed citizen who saves lives by exercising their Second Amendment rights; a luxury not granted to Second Amendment activists, who are expected to explain why various anti-gun measures shouldn’t be imposed after high-profile shooting incidents.
Seattle (and Washington State) already has a lot of those laws in place: waiting periods, “assault weapon” and magazine bans, universal background checks, and soon a “permit-to-purchase” mandate that will require a permission slip and proof of training to simply keep a gun in the home. Meanwhile, 16-year-olds can easily get ahold of a firearm so long as they don’t mind breaking the law to do so.
Washington’s gun laws have been an abject failure when it comes to preventing violent crime. Thankfully they haven’t stopped every Washingtonian from exercising their Second Amendment rights, and there are still armed citizens out there who are willing to protect themselves and others when lives are on the line.
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