Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan Ignores Law, Signs Local Gun Control Ordinance
Image via KIRO-TV.

Who needs the rule of law when you have good intentions, right? For decades, Washington State’s preemption law has blocked cities from enacting their own gun control regimes. In spite of that, Seattle’s brave social justice warrior mayor just signed a firearms “safe storage” ordinance. Because, well, guns. Those icky guns.

Not long ago, the Seattle City Council approved the local ordinance. Earlier this week, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan signed it into law. With her police chief Carmen Best at her side, Herhonner claimed the new law will save lives. Additionally, she claimed, it will keep children from living in fear waiting for the next spree killing.

Here in the real world, we know her claims are utterly baseless. Obviously, no violent criminal will care about a $500 fine. On the other hand, the new law will hamper the self-defense rights of the law-abiding in King County’s biggest city.

On occasion, it might even leave residents or visitors sleepless in Seattle, worried about crime. The NRA has the facts:

…The ordinance, if signed by Mayor Jenny Durkan, will impose a one-size-fits-all method of storing firearms as well as punish victims of theft by requiring them to report a lost or stolen firearm within 24 hours or face increased fines.

For some reason, Mayor Durkan made no mention of flouting the rule of law when it comes to local gun ordinances during her signing ceremony.

Assuming the act takes effect next February as scheduled, it will impose civil, not criminal, penalties for violations. From the Mayor’s website:

Penalties for failing to safely store or for not reporting lost or stolen firearms within 24 hours after the loss or theft is discovered:

  • Basic requirement to store: Up to $500 fine (or community service) for failure by any person to store or keep any firearm in any premises in a locked container.

  • Accessed by prohibited person: Up to $1,000 fine (or community service) if the firearm is obtained by youth, prohibited purchaser or an “at-risk person” (expressing suicidal or harmful ideation).

  • Harm done by prohibited person: Up to $10,000 fine per victim if prohibited person uses the firearm to injure, kill, or commit a crime.

The fine folks at the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), based in neighboring Bellevue, Washington don’t think much of this new ordinance. Hence, SAF head honcho Alan Gottlieb promises a court challenge. A wise and prudent man wouldn’t bet against Mr. Gottlieb when it comes to legal challenges.

As for Mayor Durkan, perhaps she has more pressing issues for the City of Seattle besides picking a fight with gun owners.  She has her work cut out for her with plenty of big city problems, everything from police reform to a growing homeless population in her deep blue city. Instead, she’s keeping busy by conspicuously virtue signaling, signing a blatantly illegal local gun control ordinance into law. Good luck, Seattleites.

 

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

71 COMMENTS

  1. “Blue” cities seem to be in a race to see who can be the most outlandish. Each is trying to outdo the other in a downward spiral. For a city, any city to place itself above the state’s law is contrary to the law. Yet these leftist corrupt places do this with impunity. That strip of land from San Fan thru Seattle is so far down the sewer already it has become a communist socialist shit hole.

    • ” That strip of land from San Fan thru Seattle is so far down the sewer already it has become a communist socialist shit hole.”

      You mean *literal* shithole.

      San Fransisco is budgeting something like 30 million a year just to respond to reports of human defecation on the city streets and sidewalks.

      The Leftists are all about making sure impoverished countries get basic toilet facilities, yet they are perfectly fine with people shitting on the streets of San Fran, considered the most ‘Progressive’ city in the USA…

      • Well the super smart leaders of those progressive centers banned plastic shopping bags, which homeless people used as portable toilets, ….to help the environment. Unintended consequences are funny sometimes.

    • Sadly, the, uh, *excrement* problem extends all the way down to San Diego (see the recent Hep B outbreak and steam cleaning of city streets). It keeps spreading, to detriment of mainly the most vulnerable.

    • Seems like it would be a crime to violate a state law. Looks to me that the state attorney general should file charges on the mayor and city council for violating a state law and impeach these socialists.

      • Right? How come the mayor doesn’t suffer some very personal punishment for her law breaking?

        • Because she legally broke the law.. see its just ridiculous. Maybe Seattle is succeeding from Wa.? I cant help but joke at this, 2A? Yeah right, keep our way and dont you dare bear..

    • Excellent time to start voting the libturds right out of office for “doing whatever the hell they want to do”. Clean house, drain the swamp or whatever else you wish to call it, it is definitely time to get the libturds paying attention to WHO the boss really is.

    • That is why we have the Santa Ana Fault. One day that part of the continent will break away and disappear into the ocean.

  2. Hey, Mayor Durkoff, I’m on your side: I don’t give a sh!t about your damn laws either and intend to break as many of them as possible.

    Can I be Mayor too?

    • Not punishing victims of theft; just punishing irresponsible gun owners who invite theft.
      Like stories of boot camp when drill instructors steal rifles from recruits in the field at night; after the theft is discovered, the recruits are punished and everyone learns to tie the sling to their arm when they sleep.
      Gun owners must be responsible or it invites more restrictions. Lock up your guns.

      • We should also punish irresponsible women who invite rape. That will teach them to wear short skirts and not chastity belts!

        If my neighbor steals a spade from my unlocked shed and proceeds to kill his wife with it, should I get punished too? I swear I didn’t invite him to steal from me!

      • SurfGW: “…just punishing irresponsible gun owners who invite theft”.

        Invite theft? Would l ‘invite’ a thief into my home? Not very likely. How does a thief know whether or not my guns are secured in accordance with your standards? I’ll tell you how. He illegally enters my home, that’s how. So how is it that l am to be held responsible for someone breaking in to my house? I am white, and do sport (from birth) a penis, and I do enjoy the privilege of having been gainfully employed for the past 45 plus years, but that shouldn’t make me responsible for the illegal misdeeds of some fatherless miscreant, whether or not it involves my property. I suggest you reevaluate your pontifical position and adopt a more reasonable attitude regarding the criminal misuse of the property of law abiding members of the public, i.e. your family, friends, and neighbors. Thank you.

  5. I live in WA, and refuse to go to Seattle unless it’s required for work, travel.

    It’s the San Francisco of the Northwest, the homeless just aren’t as aggressive and backed-by-the-law.

    Yet.

    • San Francisco does have a particular ambience. But to most people it just reeks of urine and faeces.

        • Yet they want to spend your taxpayer money to build toilets in impoverished countries…

    • I moved from the west side to the east. I don’t believe I’ve been in the Seattle city limits for at least 18 months, if not 2 years. I am a little morbidly fascinated with how the current leadership is flushing the city down the drain. I just hope I don’t have to bail them out too much. That, or income taxes and I might as well just cross the last few miles into Idaho.

      • East side of Lake Wahington, or East side of the Cascades?
        Kirkland,Bellevue,Renton, or Yakima, Ellensburg, Spokane, Walla Walla, Kennewick?
        The words East side are used in both senses.
        Either way, I’m glad you got out of Seattle.

  6. visited seattle invited by a prospective employer. surrounding area is beautiful as is the city itself. once i started taking a look around and doing touristy things for a couple of days 2 things stood out the most:

    1- this is the whitest city I have ever seen, take that how you need it.
    2- the homeless population is out of control. I was confronted everytime I entered or left a restaurant or paused on the street to write a text or google use google maps. I would never let anyone in my family anywhere near that city at night.

    Good news though, I didn’t get the job and I get to stay in Texas 🙂

    • Your #1 is certainly “racist” and has WHAT relevance to ANYTHING.

      Lived in Puget Sound 30yrs ago (about the time Komifornians started to move in). Loved it, beautiful area. Was overrun with “homeless”/bums then Would return about the same time I’d move to Chiraq.

      • His #1 is relevant because it’s a very liberal city that loves to talk about diversity- and how everyone else must be diverse- while being extremely homogeneous.

      • While there has to be a whiter city out there, Seattle is pretty dang white. As of the 2010 Census, the ethnic breakdown was as follows:

        – White: 69.5% (Non-Hispanic Whites: 66.3%)
        – Asian: 13.8% (4.1% Chinese, 2.6% Filipino, 2.2% Vietnamese, 1.3% Japanese, 1.1% Korean, 0.8% Indian, 0.3% Cambodian, 0.3% Laotian, 0.2% Pakistanis, 0.2% Indonesian, 0.2% Thai)
        – Black or African American: 7.9%
        – Hispanic or Latino (of any race): 9.0% (4.0% Mexican, 2.3% Puerto Rican, 1.3% Colombian, 0.2% Guatemalan, 0.2% Salvadoran, 0.2% Cuban)
        – American Indian and Alaska Native: 0.8%
        – Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander: 0.4%
        – Other race: 2.4%
        – Two or more races: 5.1%

      • Your #1 is certainly “racist” and has WHAT relevance to ANYTHING.

        How is it racist at all? Racial cohorts vary in the extreme in gun crime commission rates. African Americans are about 13.7% of the US population and commit about 52% of US gun murder.

        So Seattle with about half the national average black population, and about 1/4 the national average for cities, is going to have way less murder. The point is they can’t call that a policy based lower murder rate, when it is rather a reflection of their demographics.

        Seattle claims a lower than national average murder for a city of its size, but adjusted for racial demographics, Seattle has a much higher murder rate than average.

      • His #1 isn’t racist, Seattle is. Incredibly.

        I knew a Seattle-native woman in her late 30s, and I was there when she met her first black person. Literally the first black person she has talked to in the decades that she’s been alive. She felt the need to comment that “they” are just like people. And her friends DIDNT BAT AN EYE.

        In two decades of working at four different downtown companies, I had ONE black coworker. His name was Dana, and I believe he was only hired because he was also flamingly gay, which would have made it a discrimination issue (because black clearly doesn’t).

        Source – I lived there for 20 years, recently. That whole metro area has gone to shit just in the last 6 years, and fug-bucking insane in the last 3. Which is why I moved to St Louis, which is far less racist than Seattle, and we have Ferguson.

  7. Safe storage laws don’t reduce accident, crime or suicide.

    They are just a way to criminalize many aspects of gun ownership

  8. So, this mayor is using her office to infringe upon our rights under color of law. Sounds like yet another example where a federal prosecutor should prosecute her for “Deprivation of rights under color of law”.

    • Only if they fail to report the rape within 24 hours. Because arbitrary timeframes matter.

  11. Having grown up in the 1970s it’s amazing to me how it’s always been the conservatives who are The Defenders of the Bill of Rights. It never really was people who call themselves liberals.

  12. Seattle is the only place where I’ve actually seen a city government sign that said “iIllegal Activities Prohibited.”

    Which by definition seems to imply that unless otherwise specified plenty of other illegal activities are fine — like public urination, defecation, and gun laws that flout preemption.

  13. I’ve read more than once that the City s having difficulty empaneling juries because no prospective juror wants to wade through the bums, feces and urine surrounding the courthouse. I can’t imagine whet the public library(ies) are like. I am supposing that City Hall has a large police presence, though, so that the City Council doesn’t have to face on of the most pressing issues of the day. I must say, though, that I really liked the fish market the one time I was there. The weather not so much. (It’s 106 here today. Nice and toasty!)

  14. The mayor and council members who voted for it should be personally liable for the legal fees to fight it

  15. “Additionally, she claimed, it will keep children from living in fear waiting for the next spree killing.”

    Helen Lovejoy always thinks of the children.

    • Kids would equally not be in fear if people stopped trying to scare them by taking them to protests about gun violence.

      Kids have more chance die in a car accident or drown in a pool than get shot to death. Why aren’t kids terrified of cars and pools? Because the idiots raising them don’t want them to be afraid of cars or pools.

  16. It’s tyrants like this that need to get run out of WA. Seattle’s overlords like Kshama Sawant, need to get run out of the U.S.A. Before they ruin everything and blame it on someone else!

    • Uh, no… I mean NO… thank you. Running them out of WA just sends them to another state they can uck fup royally.

      WA needs to deal with their problems without transferring them to some other unsuspecting state.

  17. What good is a preemption law if it doesn’t have teeth? Kentucky’s preemption law makes it a misdemeanor crime for local politicians to pass local laws and such. Who gets punished in Seattle? The taxpayers who fund the defense of this lawless mayor?

  18. Libcom d-rat may-whore signed the lock-up “law” because she does not want her constituents & relatives to get shot up while they are car-jacking, home-invading, mugging, etc. D-rats support gun control because they want their victims defenseless, same as abortion-rights aholes.

  19. Another Democrat, Elitist thinks she is above the Law, May the bird of paradise fly over and Sh*t on her head

  20. Hey mayor…… that goes for any of your people and those fine law abiding officers that you have under your thumb.. i hope you and all of your cronies gets your pants sued off….

    This is unconstitutional and it will not hold up in a court of law…..

    You cant blame a person if their weapon is stolen……. its not the victims fault that some theif cant control their urges and not steal……

    No why in hell would i move there….

    Cant see another term in office….

  22. Vote her out of office, move or take it up in a higher court. Yes the laws are about restricting law abiding citizens.

Comments are closed.