Democrat ATTACKS on your 2ND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!

That's the point. Doesn't make anybody safer and infringes and impairs your right to protect yourself with a legal firearm. No on Senate Bill 5098. Hi, it's State Representative Jim Walsh here on the floor of the House, the wings of the floor, with my good colleague Hunter Ebell from the 7th District in Eastern Washington. We are the ranking and assistant ranking members on the House Judiciary Committee. And today, we heard a Senate bill, originated in the Senate, that came to that House committee, that is a terrible anti-gun rights bill. It's Senate Bill 5098, 5098. And it's another one of these incremental infringements and impairments of your right constitutionally to have and keep a firearm to protect yourself. Hunter, why don't you dig into the details of it a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Terrible bill. What it says it's designed to do is prevent individuals from having firearms in certain public places where it's anticipated that children will be present. And this is open carry. It doesn't apply yet to concealed pistol licenses, but you can't open carry in these locations. Yeah, exactly. Important distinction. So an example being places like fairgrounds and that sort of thing. So all sorts of problems with it. One, it's got significant constitutional problems. We pointed out in our committee, where, by the way, we brought almost 20 amendments to try and address some of the problems with the bill, but we pointed out that we have both protections under our U.S. Constitution, the Second Amendment, and then higher protections under our state constitution, under Article I, Section 24. So constitutional problems there. Also, it's another one-size-fits-all Olympia approach to a problem. I pointed out that this is really a bill in search of a problem. Right. Very true. We had a conversation about this arising out of an incident in central Washington. We found out that this incident was completely unrelated to anything pertaining to the bill. And then lastly, this is not going to improve public safety. I mean, people who are already going to violate the laws are going to continue to violate the laws, including if this law were put in place. So the problem, from my perspective, is that we're not enforcing our current gun laws, and the other side just wants to ramp up a bunch of new ones. And that might be the biggest thing. You know me. I like to talk about Article I, Section 24 and the constitutional elements, but Hunter's last point is maybe the most important. There's a false promise in all these anti-gun bills that they're going to reduce gun violence. We've been passing these bills through the floor here. We're against them, but the majority's been passing them for years. And our violent crime rates are going up. So restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves doesn't stop criminals from being criminals. And you're right. The example they used of this, it was a Grant County fairgrounds. There was this sort of junior varsity gangbanger, sneaked a gun into the fairgrounds, ended up dropping the gun. It fired and shot his girlfriend. I mean, this is like moron activity, frankly. The bill doesn't do anything to stop that. That's already illegal. Yeah, really all this does is that it prevents, you know, the law-abiding single mother who needs a weapon for protection of herself and her children from being able to have that weapon in a place where, frankly, she may very well need it and want it for her safety purposes. So again, terrible bill. I'm proud of the fight we put up in committee today. You know, you're going to see a lot more of it as this bad bill advances, if it advances. And so we'll continue fighting for you here in Olympia. Yeah, we're hoping we can stop it at the committee level today, but we'll see if it goes on for a floor vote behind us here. There'll be more than 20 amendments on this piece of work. Anyway, that's it for this week. Another update on gun rights. We're defending your Article 1, Section 24 constitutional right to keep and bear firearms in defense of yourself, your family, your community, and the state. Talk to you soon. Thanks, everybody.