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Seattle mayor, gun activists in stalemate

   At least eight innocuous signs posted around the Seattle Center over the Memorial Day weekend during the Folklife Festival declared “No firearms allowed at this event or on these premises.”

   The signs had no force of law, there was no authority cited, and there are anecdotal reports from some in the gun rights community that armed citizens simply ignored those signs, kept their pistols tucked under cover garments, vests or loose shirts, and contrary to what anti-gun Mayor Greg Nickels would have had everyone believe would happen, nobody got hurt.

   For months, the mayor had been blustering and threatening and promising that he would issue an “executive order” banning firearms from all city property, including those carried legally by private citizens. For just as long, the Second Amendment Foundation in Bellevue, its sister organization, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the National Rifle Association, have been waiting.

   Those groups are ready to hit Nickels with a lawsuit and he knows it. SAF founder Alan Gottlieb assured me the other day that “the papers are prepared and we have really good plaintiffs lined up.”

   The city “banned” guns from Folklife only by making a firearm prohibition a condition of the lease permit this year. This all stems from last year’s bizarre shooting incident in which an armed man tussled with another man, they grappled over the gun, it went off and the single round wounded two bystanders. Nickels exploited the incident to propose this citywide ban on legally-carried handguns on city (make that public) property.

 

 

   Just one fly in the ointment, however; according to Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office, Mayor Nickels does not have the authority to declare such a ban. That authority rests solely with the state legislature, under Washington’s model preemption statute. It might also be in direct violation of the State Constitution.

   The mayor even acknowledged almost three years ago in a letter to House Speaker Frank Chopp that he knows he has no authority to ban guns. State law hasn’t changed, and nobody repealed Article 1, Section 24 of the State Constitution.

   Nickels does not like concealed carry, putting him on the same level as Barack Obama, who told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last year that he also opposes concealed carry.  The Seattle mayor would probably suffer cardiac arrest if he were to drive down I-5 and find an Open Carry group cleaning up the highway shoulder. The Seattle Weekly did a story on open carry, that can be read here.

   Open carry is legal in Washington, always has been. Police agencies and sheriffs departments understand this and seem to respect it – while dutifully responding to all “man with a gun” calls to 911 – so one wonders how it is that a public official can’t grasp it. Even an official like Nickels, who was born in Chicago and moved to Washington at age 6, ought to understand that. Maybe he drank too much of that Windy City water before becoming a child carpetbagger. His entire career has been on the public payroll, which means he has never held a job in the private sector. He went from being an aide to Norm Rice, to a spot on the County Council, to the mayor’s office. More than one person with such a career track has come to think of himself as a ruler rather than a public servant.

 

 

   Nickels has insisted that such a ban would be in the best interest of public safety, yet Seattle’s homicide statistics belie that claim. Seattle – where thousands of citizens are legally armed – has a remarkably low homicide rate for a city of its size.

   When he called a public hearing on the proposed ban, and hundreds of citizens – many of them armed – showed up from both inside and outside the city, Nickels was noticeably absent.

   Adding a “no-guns” provision to a lease agreement with some private entity may work for an event like Folklife, but it may only apply to Folklife organizers, staff and people who attend. There is a huge legal question whether that applies to the general public. Armed citizens attending some other event at the Seattle Center, or picnicking or just strolling through a city park, or visiting the public library, or entering a public building would still be exempt.