Posted on 05/28/2012 6:26:16 AM PDT by marktwain
A shooting near the Space Needle Saturday that apparently involved an admitted gang member from Kent will almost certainly spark a new effort by the City of Seattle, no doubt with support from Washington Ceasefire, to attack Washington State’s preemption statute.
Seattle tried that in the courts and in March, that legal strategy was derailed by the state Supreme Court when it declined to review Seattle’s unanimous loss before the state Court of Appeals last fall. That was 20 months after Seattle lost at the trial court level in an effort to ban firearms from city park facilities.
On the winning side, the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, chaired by Alan Gottlieb, is not likely to let another attack on state preemption go unchallenged. CCRKBA joined in a lawsuit against the city’s attempted ban with the Second Amendment Foundation, National Rifle Association, Washington Arms Collectors and five individual plaintiffs. Gottlieb has become a powerhouse in legal challenges to gun laws all over the country, and he's not about to ignore a problem on his home turf.
Saturday’s incident, detailed by both the SeattlePi.com and Seattle Times, ended with the shooter under arrest and his gun recovered by police. One report said it was a .22-caliber revolver. One bystander was hit in the leg.
Police said the shooting followed a fight between two men that erupted out on a lawn near Fourth Avenue and Broad Street at about 7 p.m. A large crowd had gathered on a grassy area, while others were sitting nearby and enjoying the first full day of the annual festival.—Seattle Times
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Y'see.
I think he should relinquish not only his NRA Membership (which I am sure he has), but also have his “Permit to Carry” withdrawn. Once again — it is those damn NRA members and those who are legally allowed to carry concealed who create all these problems.
You all know I am being cynical.
Why don't they just tear down The Space Needle. It would be just as effective.
Don’t ban guns; ban gang members.
If the crime only happened because of the gun, then put the gun in jail and free the gang member.
How would another law have stopped him?
Oddly enough, a solution that could be tried is a state level version of the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act. While RICO has been horribly abused at the federal level, a more carefully crafted state version could be applied exclusively to criminal gangs.
This creates an interesting paradox. While typically, efforts to crack down on gangs have been vehemently opposed, usually successfully, in federal court, the courts have almost always upheld RICO.
So it might be tailored to be like Arizona’s SB1070, which reflects federal law, but at the state level, making it hard to overturn without overturning the federal version.
And RICO is interesting and very flexible, as far as law goes. It has a very strict list of things that must be done to invoke the law, but once enough of those things have been done, the law comes down very, very hard on the organizations violating it, stripping away many of their protections under the law.
For example, mere membership in a street gang might be enough for the state to take away all their “stuff”, not just what they own, but what they rent and lease. As such, they might be driven out of their ‘hoods, not permitted to associate or contact one another, be prohibited from any license or privilege that could be used to further gang activity... The list goes on and on.
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