Mayor Greg Nickels Decides Which Constitutional Rights Apply In Seattle (AndrewsDad)

Since the last couple of days here at AoSHQ have featured a number of post taking shots at Seattle and since I was born in raised there and have lived all of my life there and am part owner of a small business inside the city limits, I wanted to make sure I also got in a swift kick to the nuts while I had the chance.

All City of Seattle properties are about to become a Gun Free Zone:

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has signed an executive order that asks all departments to come up with a plan within 30 days to ban guns at all property owned by the city. Nickels signed the executive order after the recent shooting at the NW Folklife Festival at Seattle Center that wounded two people. "At many of our properties, including City Hall, you can bring a gun if you have a concealed weapons permit. Under this order, people with concealed weapons will be asked to leave or hand over their gun." It's a city rule that cannot trump state law. The only thing the city and police can do is kick someone with a gun out of a building or an event.

Now for those of you who have jobs and therefore have never been to the Folklife Festival, this is where people who do not bathe regularly gather to do what they normally do the other 364 days of the year, nothing productive. This year there was a shooting at the festival that injured some people. Over the course of the 37 year history of Folklife, the number of shootings now total… I may need some time here to calculate this, fire up that new petraflop computer down at Los Alamos… including this 1 shooting… that would be 1. Just to recap, 1 shooting in 37 years, no deaths, just injuries from 1 shooting... in 37 years. Millions of people have gone to this festival over the years and there have been 1 shooting… in 37 years.

So Mayor Greg Nickels has taken it on himself to make us all safer from this epidemic of violence from this 1 shooting… in 37 years, by deciding unilaterally that the constitution, the part that says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, should no longer apply on city owned property.

Now I understand the need to get this gun violence at Folklife down to a rate that would make other gun free zones such as post offices or schools envious... ok, those might have been bad examples. But wouldn’t a better idea be to limit other constitutional rights that have no doubt been the source of more violence? How about if the Mayor imposed a restriction on speech, such as outlawing the phrase “Dude, you sure this is not oregano?” at Hempfest or any sentence that started with the phrase “Yo Mama” at the hip hop festival, wouldn't that result in a greater reduction of violence? I am sure the ACLU would not have a problem with this idea either.

Here is an actual transcript from the actual news conference announcing the ban.

Nickels: "It is not my goal to infringe on people's rights to possess firearms. It is my goal to keep people safe when they are using city facilities and when they are going to events that take place in the public realm such as Seattle Center and parks.
"There are three exceptions to that. There are three groups that I think should not be allowed to carry firearms at all. Those are convicted felons. Those are people who are mentally disturbed and might do harm to themselves and others. And those are children.
"And unfortunately, with the lax gun laws that we have in this state, all three of those groups find themselves with easy access to deadly force."

AndrewsDad: Mr. Mayor, but state law already prohibits gun ownership for convicted felons, the mentally disturbed and people under the age of 21.

Reporter: How does your executive order keep those types of people from carrying a gun?

Nickels: "It will keep them from carrying a gun into City Hall, or into Folklife Festival, or some other city event.

AndrewsDad: Stop the presses. So the way to keep people from doing things is to issue executive orders that carry no real penalty, telling them not to do those things? I see a Nobel Peace Prize in your future sir.

Nickels: Why this one individual was able to get a concealed weapons permit, I can not explain how that happened. A person with a serious history of mental illness, and a serious history of drug abuse, it seems to me, ought to, on the face of it, not be able to get a such a permit or buy a weapon."

AndrewsDad: Uh, Mayor, he got the gun by breaking a law, not a rule that has no enforcement provisions or penalties like you just put in place but an actual law and probably more than one. Just thought I would help you out there Einstein.

Next on Mayor Nickel’s agenda, passing a law against crime.

posted by xgenghisx at 02:35 AM

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