Opinion

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Westneat: Teens still able to buy assault weapons

By Danny Westneat

Published: February 24, 2019, 6:01am

If you’re like me, you probably thought that teenagers, at long last, were barred from buying assault-style rifles in the state of Washington.

Twenty years after Columbine, and after some horrific mass shootings of our own committed by teenagers armed up with the firepower of soldiers, voters in our state last fall did what state lawmakers wouldn’t: They overwhelmingly banned the commercial sale of semi-automatic rifles to anyone under age 21.

That law took effect Jan. 1.

I was recently browsing around on Armslist.com, which is like an online gun-rummage sale, and saw the following note on an ad for a Brownells semi-automatic rifle, a version of a gun used by the U.S. military in Vietnam: “If you are under 21 but over 18,” the ad says, “there are a few shops willing to transfer commonly owned semi-automatic rifles currently, and we can meet there.”

In other words: The seller, from Lynnwood, is openly advertising to sell a military-style weapon to teenagers. And some gun shops still are willing to facilitate such sales (by overseeing it with a background check). All despite the voters supposedly banning such activities.

How can this be? A few gun shops around the state are openly continuing to sell so-called assault rifles to teenagers. The owners argue the new law isn’t enforceable because the definition of assault rifle was placed in a section of the law that doesn’t take effect until later, in July.

“We can’t get in legal trouble for selling something that doesn’t legally exist, so we at Talos Tactical will continue to sell semi-automatic rifles to law abiding 18-20 year olds until July 1st, 2019,” announced the owner of a gun shop in Richland. In a setback for the law, the police chief there sided with the gun-shop owner. As have some sheriffs in other parts of the state.

Other sheriffs are going further still, saying they won’t enforce the measure because they think it’s unconstitutional (it’s being challenged in court for potentially violating the Second Amendment).

On Tuesday, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson took these police chiefs and sheriffs to task. He argued they might even be held legally liable if they ignore the voter-approved measure and someone wrongly gets a gun and commits a crime with it. “The taxpayers of your city or county assume the financial risk of your decision to impose your personal views over the law,” Ferguson said.

I have two big-picture reactions to this.

One is that the sheriffs are out of their lane on whether the law is constitutional. That said, it seems clear the rebel sheriffs have a point that this law wasn’t quite ready for prime time. We just barred sales of assault weapons to teens, but the law doesn’t define what an assault weapon actually is until six months later? Yes, that’s a technicality. But there’s the spirit of laws and the letter of them. Both matter.

This is why citizen initiatives can be lousy ways to make complex public policy. It’s the kind of mistake that likely would have been caught had it gone through the multiple hearings and markups of bills in the Legislature.

The maddening bottom line is that three months after the biggest gun-control win ever in this state, we have teens being sold assault weapons. And a bunch of sheriffs saying “see, we told you so.”

The gun-control side is winning the fight for public opinion. But it’s got to make itself more bulletproof than this.

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