New Washington State Law Causes Museum to Remove Rifles

Passed purportedly to prevent lawbreakers from getting guns, a law recently approved by Washington state voters requires background checks on all purchases or transfers of firearms.

This means you can’t even loan a rifle to a friend or relative–or a museum–without instantly becoming a criminal. The only way you could legally hand a gun to someone else is if you pay a dealer to perform a background check immediately prior to doing so.

The new law, a long-winded document known as Initiative 594, is very oppressive and will only lead to imprisoning and harassing regular gun owners, while doing nothing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.

For those who don’t understand: Criminals break laws for a living. It’s what they do. For that reason, gun control laws cannot, will not, do not affect them. Period.

Gun control laws only negatively affect regular folks who mind their own business and wish the government would do the same.

It has even affected the Lynden Pioneer Museum in Lynden, WA, which has a display on the Pacific theater of World War 2. In that display are 11 period rifles on loan to the museum. In order to protect themselves from prosecution under the new law, they have been advised by their attorney to either challenge the law or return the guns to their owners.

Sadly, they’ve decided to fold up and send the guns home.

This is just another example of how such laws do harm without doing good. The only true reason to require government interference with firearms transfers is for the government to compile data on gun owners in order to enable future confiscation of guns. It’s already happening elsewhere in the USA.

It also demonstrates the fallacy of putting such things up to a public vote. Just because the majority of voters approve something doesn’t mean it is right or that we should have it. And I’m willing to bet that 99.9% of those who voted for it never read the full text of the initiative.

I sincerely hope to see this and similar laws overturned in the future and to return to freedom here in the USA.

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.