Washington Governor and Presidential hopeful Jay Inslee released a 10-point proposal to address gun violence after dozens of people were shot and 31 killed in two mass killings over the weekend.
Inslee, who has largely focused on climate change over the campaign, says that if elected, he will make it harder for people to get guns. This means closing loopholes in laws requiring background checks and creating a licensing and training system as prerequisites for owning some high capacity firearms. This already exists in Connecticut and a similar law went into effect in Washington state on July 1.
Of course, it’s now easier than ever to make guns that circumvent state and federal laws using 3D printers and plans downloaded from the internet, and Jay says he says he’ll ban untraceable and undetectable firearms, too. I’m not sure how effective this will be considering this is already illegal under federal law and the federal government doesn’t have jurisdiction over the entire internet, but this year Inslee signed a bill into Washington law that prohibits the manufacture or possession of 3D-printed guns that cannot be detected by metal detectors.
More than addressing the ease of access to firearms, Inslee’s plan is specifically focused on hate crimes. The first three points of his ten-point plan deal with white nationalism. His plan involves “directing federal law enforcement resources to confront white nationalism,” “creating systems to identify, track, and prosecute white nationalist extremists,” and “expanding international cooperation to fight white nationalism.” He says he will do this in partnership both with state and national agencies and social media companies. As part of this effort, Inslee says he would support the Disarm Hate Act, which was first introduced in Congress in 2017, and would ban anyone convicted of a misdemeanor bias crime from possessing a firearm.
After last weekend’s shooting by a self-proclaimed white nationalist in El Paso, it’s not hard to see why Inslee would focus on hate. White nationalists are responsible for more deaths than any other domestic terrorists in this country, and hate crimes appear to be on the rise: According to an oft-cited statistic from the FBI, reports of hate crimes increased 17 percent from 2016 to 2017. It’s important to note that the number of agencies reporting hate crimes increased by 1,000, and a 2019 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that while the number of reported hate crimes has slightly increased since 2010, the estimated number of unreported hate crimes has actually gone down. But after Charleston and Pittsburgh, and now El Paso, hate crimes are on peoples’ minds, and for good reason. It’s truly horrific.
Still, Inslee’s focus on mass shootings, hate crimes, and white supremacy will not address the bulk of gun violence in this country. This year in the U.S., an estimated 253 people have been killed in mass shootings, 23 have been killed by white supremacists, 945 have been killed by gun accidents, and over 8,000 have been killed in everyday gun violence, the kind that doesn’t make national headlines. Even more have died by self-inflicted gun wounds, and far more people are killed by handguns than assault rifles or 3D printed weapons. So while Inslee and all of the other candidates are right to release plans to finally address the plague of gun violence beyond the standard Republican line of “thoughts and prayers,” by focusing on the big, dramatic, headline-grabbing incidents, he ignores the bulk of suffering caused by these weapons and the people who wield them.
