Washington State's New Gun Law?!

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   This new Washington State Gun Law is nothing more than a pre-cursor to wholesale gun seizure/forfeiture weeks, months years, decades down the road. We should have seen this coming from our legislators but hey, they got it in and made it happen.
  Rather than write it again I've simply posted one of my comments I left on the site and below...
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  "...allows local authorities to confiscate firearms from people believed to pose a threat to themselves or others."

  This is ambiguous as hell. What criteria is used to determine whether a person poses "a threat to themselves or others"? I'm pretty sure the politicos have their definitions laying around somewhere that would address my question but I've yet to see it. I have read several proposed legislation "options" over this past legislative session relating to our politicos providing our law enforcement the authority to confiscate firearms from those of us who have legally acquired them, legally care for them, safely store them and otherwise legally posses and carry them. Judging from what I've read none of those proposed legislative pieces took into account that there's already laws on the books adequately detailing and providing the legal confiscation of any firearm if/when necessary (in this state anyways) in conformance with our second amendment rights. i.e. If a firearm was used in the commission of a crime including crimes against persons or property, threats of personal harm, psychological review and subsequent intervention and more then there's provisions to secure the firearm and hold the firearm until a court order is issued to release the firearm back to the owner or alternatively, a court order is issued to destroy the seized firearm. Let's not get distracted by the "Red Flag" banner. It won't stop there. There's also proposed legislation that would afford our law enforcement to arbitrarily wander out to the neighborhoods, do a "knock and talk" on known gun owners homes and conduct an inspection of the gun owner's premises to ensure the firearms conform to the new "storage" requirements. If not then the suggested remedy would be for the officer(s) to secure those firearms and remove them from the possession of the law abiding gun owner, i.e. CITIZEN. This is absurd, at best. Further there's another tool called a Protection of Abuse order. Personally, I think it has some merit but it also has potential for abuse by the authorities. A "Protection of Abuse" order is a tool used by law enforcement personnel that can be ambiguous and suggests any lower court judge (most any judge for that matter, with some exceptions) can make a decision, issue an order that could proactively be served on a gun owner who's deemed by law enforcement to be a threat to himself/herself and/or others so as to prevent a potential assault on any given citizen. Unfortunately it could also be abused to effectively trump our second amendment rights regardless of what the constitution provides, depending on the intent of the government at the time. Don't tell me judicial overreach doesn't happen... it does. Don't suggest to me double jeopardy is a thing of the past... it isn't. Don't tell me abuse of authority isn't real... it can be and quite frankly it does happen. In the meantime our rights would have been violated, our home's would have been invaded, our property(ies) would have been confiscated in addition to the previous "convictions" and/or charges, whatever they might be. And in the end we've been charged with a myriad of other offenses relating to the alleged "improper" hence illegal possession and security of our firearms. By the time we've paid the big bucks to sue to get our guns back from those who violated our constitutional rights by seizing them we're broke and the guns have either been destroyed or rendered inoperable or retained and farmed out to other agencies via the local "law enforcement transfers" program or otherwise sold at a Law Enforcement auction. Nah, I have a problem with this legislation. I truly don't trust our politicos and I surely don't trust the judges that preside over issues on behalf of the state. Enforce the laws we already have on the books. Don't create new ones just to justify a politico's seat in the local government.

  IMHO of course.

  
  

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