Nickels' gun ban

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I have in hand a copy of an opinion from Attorney General Rob McKenna and Deputy Solicitor General William B. Collins to State Sen. Bob Morton and State Rep. Kevin Van De Wege, which bluntly says that a city in Washington cannot enact a local law that prohibits possession of firearms on city property or in city-owned facilities.

I think congrats are in order to Morton and Van De Wege, and also to Alan Gottlieb and the Second Amendment Foundation and Joe Waldron, legislative director at the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Bellevue, which fired the first legal shot across the bow of Mayor Greg Nickels, cooling his jets and essentially "buying some time" for these two state lawmakers to solicit an opinion from the AG's office.

The AG's opinion is dated October 13 (Monday) and should by now be in the city's hands.

Now, before anybody gets out the champagne and party favors, instead get set for a visit to Olympia because that is no doubt where Nickels will appear next, demanding and lobbying for an end to state preemption, or an exemption for cities of over 400,000 or 500,000 (Only Seattle qualifies!) so he can enact his own ordinances and set up Seattle as something of a city state.


AGO 2008-8 is not posted yet, but should be shortly, according to an e-mail I got from Waldron this morning.

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Good news Dave! Thanks!

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Dave Workman wrote:

I have in hand a copy of an opinion from Attorney General Rob McKenna and Deputy Solicitor General William B. Collins to State Sen. Bob Morton and State Rep. Kevin Van De Wege, which bluntly says that a city in Washington cannot enact a local law that prohibits possession of firearms on city property or in city-owned facilities.

I think congrats are in order to Morton and Van De Wege, and also to Alan Gottlieb and the Second Amendment Foundation and Joe Waldron, legislative director at the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Bellevue, which fired the first legal shot across the bow of Mayor Greg Nickels, cooling his jets and essentially "buying some time" for these two state lawmakers to solicit an opinion from the AG's office.

The AG's opinion is dated October 13 (Monday) and should by now be in the city's hands.

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Excellent work. Kudos to Messrs. McKenna, Collins, Morton, Van De Wege and Waldron.

Rasberry for da mare.

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Sweet! BTW, that link is badly broken...

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http://www.atg.wa.gov/uploadedFiles...inion_Archives/Indices Yearly Report 2007.pdf

see if that works better

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Yeah, the link.

I dunno how to make it do what it's supposed to when I cut and paste.



http://www.atg.wa.gov/uploadedFiles/Another/About_the_Office/AGO_Opinions/AGO_Opinion_Archives/Indices%20Yearly%20Report%202007.pdf

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Thank you Dave!

But, Geeze'o'lou... http://TinyURL.com is your friend!

I've always been curious why the WowBB code isn't smart enough to wrap long URLs.

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Jamfish wrote:

Thank you Dave!

But, Geeze'o'lou... http://TinyURL.com is your friend!

I've always been curious why the WowBB code isn't smart enough to wrap long URLs.

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You're certainly welcome, and I dunno why TinyURL doesn't happen automatically, neither.

This is the "long version" of what I told KING, KIRO, KOMO and the P-I and Times in June about this proposal.

The SAF/CCRKBA attorney sent Nickels & Co. a fairly lengthy letter explaining why the mayor couldn't pull this off and it did seem to cool his jets.

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Does the SAF letter or the AG's opinion mention anything about administrative prohibitions?

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Would this opinion then, also apply to the Port of Seattle?

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Dean f: Read the opinion.



j2l3: It appears to apply to everybody, though the Port of Seattle isn't a muncipality.



Let's not all start looking to make this opinion something it is not. This isn't the end all be all of the gun law battle in Washington and particularly Seattle.

It's sort of the end of round 1 and Nickels has a severe nosebleed. He hasn't been quite knocked out or TKO'd just yet.

Before you ask anymore questions, the link is there and you can read the letter shortly if not already, and look for the answers to your specific questions.

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Understand and agree. DIdn't see the document yet, but will keep watching for it.



Thanks.

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Dave Workman wrote:

Dean f: Read the opinion.



j2l3: It appears to apply to everybody, though the Port of Seattle isn't a muncipality.



Let's not all start looking to make this opinion something it is not. This isn't the end all be all of the gun law battle in Washington and particularly Seattle.

It's sort of the end of round 1 and Nickels has a severe nosebleed. He hasn't been quite knocked out or TKO'd just yet.

Before you ask anymore questions, the link is there and you can read the letter shortly if not already, and look for the answers to your specific questions.

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Dave - how is the port not a municipality ?

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Not only do I not see the topic, that PDF file is useless for the discussion at hand, and the AG's website functions like it was put together by a group of dyslexic monkies on acid.

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jddssc121 wrote:

Dave - how is the port not a municipality ?

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The port is not a city, it is a government entity, governed by a commission, and it exists in multiple jurisdictions (Sea-Tac, Seattle).

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CCRKBA HAILS WASHINGTON AG OPINION ON NICKELS’ PROPOSED GUN BAN
BELLEVUE, WA – The Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is hailing an opinion issued this week by Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna that says cities cannot enact local laws to prohibit the possession of firearms on city property or in city-owned facilities, effectively nixing a plan by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels to do just that by executive fiat.

The opinion was written in response to an inquiry from several state lawmakers. It was signed by Deputy Solicitor General William B. Collins.

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said the opinion, dated Monday, Oct. 13, “confirms what we said in June regarding the mayor’s proposal.” CCRKBA said then that the Nickels proposal would violate the state’s model preemption statute, one of the first and most effective such laws in the nation.

“We advised the mayor in a letter that his proposed ‘executive order’ would run afoul of the law, and that we would take legal action,” Gottlieb recalled. “Thanks to the attorney general’s opinion, that no longer appears necessary.”

“The opinion,” added CCRKBA Legislative Affairs Director Joe Waldron, “stands not only as a detailed explanation about why Mayor Nickels’ plan was legally unsound, but it also demonstrates why Washington’s preemption statute is a monument to legislative wisdom. Washington’s law has been duplicated by more than two dozen other state legislatures that saw the sensibility of statewide uniformity in the regulation of firearms, so that cities and counties could not create a confusing and even contradictory legal patchwork of local gun ordinances.

“This opinion should also have a spill-over effect on local ordinances banning firearms in parks and other municipal property and buildings in cities like Federal Way, Lacey and in the Seattle City Library,” Waldron said.

Gottlieb noted, “We have a law, and it works. It recognizes the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms as affirmed in both the state and federal constitutions. Mayor Nickels was wrong to think he could usurp legislative authority through executive edict. We expect state lawmakers to zealously protect their authority if Nickels comes lobbying in Olympia in January.”

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Dave Workman wrote:

jddssc121 wrote:

Dave - how is the port not a municipality ?

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The port is not a city, it is a government entity, governed by a commission, and it exists in multiple jurisdictions (Sea-Tac, Seattle).

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The Port of Seattle is a Municipality, according to RCW 53.04.060, ". . . and the port district shall then be and become a municipal corporation of the state of Washington . . .".

Also, I called and asked Linda Strout, the deputy CEO of the Port, and she confirmed to me it is a municipality.

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OKAY SWELL.,

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Dave:

Two things:

1. Could you remove the URL from your post until you are able to make it correct? It's messing up the column formatting; making the thread hard to read.

ETA: A couple of other people also posted the link. Please, for the love of my eyes, do something like this:

Yearly Report Indices

And/Or use TinyURL!



2. Do URLs like this:


Example rendered:

Click here for Example.com!

Keep in mind that this forum has a fancy java-based editor thing, that tries to smartly guess the correct thing to do with text you copy+paste (like, for example, if you copy bolded text, it stays bolded when you paste it into this forum, but not if you paste the same text into most other forums). Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. Lets say for example you copy+paste http://www.example.com/ from your web browers. If you paste a link, the forum software will internally attempt to rewrite it thusly using forum code:


Which renders as:

http://www.example.com

Unforatunately, when you post complex links (like the one you have), the "fancy" code that tries to do the right thing gets confused with all the ?'s and %'s and stuff, and munges it up, as you can see.

If it munges up a URL, the only thing you can do is trick it into not knowing it's a URL. One way to do this is to type it by hand. Another is to copy the URL from your browser, paste it into a flat text editor like Notepad (Note: Word, Wordpad, etc. won't work because they are also "fancy" and not simple, flat-text editors), copy the stuff you just pasted into notepad (which has now been translated, by the process of pasting into notepad, from "fancy" text to simple text), and then paste the simple text into the forum, surrounding it with bbcode to make it do what you want...

As if munging up URLs and trying to do the right thing, but usually failing, wasn't bad enough... When you go to edit a post, most forum software will show you the raw bbcode behind the message.

This forum software, with it's "fancy" editor, renders the bbcode in your message and hides it from you, making it effectively impossible to do simple things like, for example, changing a link. Because when you edit your post, instead of seeing:


You just see:

Example

The only way to fix problems like that is to totally delete it and retype, or repaste from notepad.

Annoying, huh?

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Thank you!

I can now read the thread.