New data from the Washington Traffic Safety Commission suggests the Evergreen State is on track to see one of the deadliest years on state highways since the 1990s, yet nobody is demanding a ban on automobiles, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms noted.
“This reflects a glaring hypocrisy on the part of people advocating for stricter gun control laws and bans on certain firearms,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “The gun prohibition lobby and their allies in Olympia (the state capital) have promoted gun bans and restrictions on gun owners, but all we hear are crickets when it comes to traffic deaths. Evidently, lives lost on the highway are somehow less important.”
Gottlieb pointed to rhetoric from the gun ban lobby, which demonizes guns rather than criminals who misuse them: “Someone is killed by a gun every 12 hours in Washington state,”
….according to the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility. Such arguments are deliberately misleading, he maintains.
“Nobody claims traffic victims are killed by cars or trucks,” he noted. “Instead, media reports acknowledge 30 percent of crashes involved alcohol-impaired drivers, 37 percent of the people involved test positive for drugs, and another 28 percent were speeding. People do those things, not the cars they drive, just like guns don’t have a finger to pull their own trigger.”
Another complaint from the gun ban lobby is that Washington “has the 40th highest rate of gun violence in the United States.”
“That translates to being tenth from the bottom,” Gottlieb said. “Apparently, the gun prohibition crowd is hoping nobody does the math but is only impressed by dramatic rhetoric. But if you look at the most recent data from the CDC, the leading cause of death in Washington is cancer, and the drug overdose death rate—28.1 per 100,000—is more than twice as high as the firearm injury death rate of 11.2 per 100,000, and the homicide rate is 4.5 per 100,000, which is lower than the rate in Maryland, New Jersey, New York or California, all states with stricter gun laws. The gun ban lobby is deceitful at best.
“Let’s remember one very important thing,” he observed. “Driving is not a right protected by the Constitution, but keeping and bearing arms is. The Citizens Committee is vigorously defending that right.”
Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.
