Jim Geraghty has this to say about recent incidents in the name of #BlackLivesMatter:
My fellow men and women of the Right… yes, we have our bad days. Yes, there are times somebody on our side embarrasses us or does something stupid. But we can all thank our lucky stars we don’t have idiots, losers, and misanthropic rage-mongers like this claiming to act in the name in our cause.
You sure about that Jim? The thing that pisses me off about the current situation in Washington State is that we need people who engage in peaceful civil disobedience. We need people who are willing to engage in some Irish Democracy. I have no beef, in principle, with the “We Will Not Comply” crowd. But why would any sensible person want to live under a horrendously bad law when there’s an opportunity to make it just a bad law? To me, you take ground back where you can.
I get that a lot of people are unhappy with Alan Gottlieb because of the Manchin-Toomey deal. I was not happy with him after Manchin-Toomey either. It was a bad deal, and we had the votes to kill it, so we killed it. We were very lucky that Gottlieb’s endorsement didn’t cost us that vote, because it was very close. My fear at the time was some of our weaker Senators would use his seal of approval as pro-gun cover to switch their vote to a “yes”. I think it’s fair to criticize this move.
But I think trying to shit on other hard-working activists who are trying to take as much ground back right now, because they think they can get it, is beyond the pale. Taking back lost ground is not compromise. Even the simple measure of exempting transfers to Washington LCCP holders would destroy I594’s usefulness as a scheme to register all firearms. I don’t see the logic in not seeking even a simple exemption like that if the votes could be mustered for it in the legislature.
The law doesn’t cease becoming the law just because you choose to ignore it. They aren’t going to arrest people en mass engaging in political protest. They aren’t going to arrest someone who transfers a firearm to a friend. What they will do is take cases on the margin, and make examples out of those folks to intimidate the rest of the scofflaws. This is not a plea to comply with the law, just a dose of reality for how it’s going to work. If we can take action now to ease the law to make fewer scofflaws, we ought to.