Washington Anti-Gunners Flaunt Restrictive 2025 Agenda

With a Democrat majority in the Washington Legislature and a new governor, Bob Ferguson, who has not been friendly to the Second Amendment, coming into office, Evergreen State anti-gunners are pushing their 2025 legislative agenda, and it is loaded with new restrictions.

Indeed, attorney William Kirk, president of Washington Gun Law, has just posted a 10-minute YouTube video titled “How Washington State Wants to Disarm You in 2025.” He essentially takes apart the seven-point agenda posted by the Seattle-based and billionaire-backed Alliance for Gun Responsibility.

As a testament to how bad this agenda is, Kirk suggests his audience should hit “Pause,” grab themselves a stiff shot of bourbon, do some breathing exercises, “or just grab a barf bag.”

Topping the list: A permit-to-purchase requirement, which has been rejected in the past and, in neighboring Oregon, ruled unconstitutional by a county circuit judge last year as part of Measure 114.

“This is one that many, many gun grabbing states are big on,” Kirk declares.

In their press release announcing the new agenda, the Alliance states, “According to research conducted by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, if Washington had adopted a Permit-to-Purchase law when Connecticut did, there would have been an estimated 1,205 fewer gun deaths in Washington over the first 10 years of implementation.”

It is speculation at best, critics might argue, a desired conclusion around which research was built.

The agenda also once again takes a shot at dismantling Washington state’s 40-year-old firearms preemption statute, which has served as a model for many, if not most, of similar laws adopted by other states over the past four decades. The gun prohibition lobby has despised this law since it took effect, with a string of mayors in Seattle and other large Washington cities who want their jurisdictions to essentially be anti-gun fiefdoms. Preemption was adopted to bring uniformity to state gun law from border to border rather than a checkerboard of confusing and often conflicting laws.

The 2025 Legislative Action Group is already gearing up for a bare-knuckles political fight.

There is also a safe storage requirement, which may be of questionable constitutionality under the 2008 Supreme Court’s Heller ruling.

And then comes a new tax on firearms and ammunition, an idea that was adopted by the Seattle City Council almost ten years ago, to reduce homicide and “gun violence.” In the years since the number of homicides in the city has gone up—300 percent in 2023—not down, and violent crime involving firearms has gone up as well. The tax has never come close to the original revenue projection.

How did this happen? It’s a matter of politics.

• Gun owners are lethargic and apathetic, so they don’t vote. This allows anti-gunners to elect their candidates.
• Many blame the state Republican Party for being ineffective, and over the past few cycles, plagued with infighting between moderates and conservatives.
• Another theory is the national GOP has essentially written off the entire West Coast, providing token support for state-level political candidates.
• Democrats benefit from strong financial support from wealthy elitists including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other Microsoft alumni including Steve Ballmer. State Republicans simply cannot compete when the money runs 20- to 50-to-1 against them.
• There has been a growing exodus of gun owners to other, more gun-friendly states including neighboring Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma. This weakens the “gun vote” even more, which delights and emboldens Seattle anti-gunners, and Democrats living along the I-5 corridor, to be even more extreme in their demands. It also further reinforces the image of Democrats as the party of gun prohibition.

What is odd about this is that Washington boasts some 700,000 active concealed pistol license holders. Gun ownership in the Evergreen State has always been part of the Pacific Northwest fabric.

Adding to the drama is the fact that Bellevue, Wash., is home to the Second Amendment Foundation and its sister organization, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. SAF is a leader in gun rights litigation, with some 60 cases currently in progress around the country, including some seeking review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Both groups describe themselves as being “behind enemy lines.”

The Legislature convenes early next month. Ferguson, who is presently the attorney general and boasts he has never lost a case to the “gun lobby,” pushed for the state’s ban on “large-capacity magazines” and so-called “assault weapons.”

The upcoming session has the earmarks of a political trainwreck for the Second Amendment and Article I, Section 24 of the state constitution.

About Dave Workman

Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.