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Shawn Vestal: Gun rights activist takes aim at nonexistent wolf

How much nonconfiscation of guns will have to occur before those who opposed closing the gun-show loophole recognize no one’s trying to confiscate their guns?

How many uncles will have to hand guns to their nephews without being prosecuted for it, how many patriotic neighbors, sharing guns and apple pie over the back fence, will go completely unarrested, before it’s clear that the opponents of background checks were, once again, as always, crying wolf?

There is no wolf. But that doesn’t matter – didn’t matter before the election and doesn’t matter now and it won’t matter next time.

The criers will not be denied their wolf.

A constitutionalist from Ephrata who has made a sport of confronting local officials on film has planned a rally against Initiative 594 in Olympia in December. The organizer, Gavin Seim, likes to pull self-aggrandizing stunts in which he casts himself as a noble warrior in defense of the Constitution; he films himself refusing to comply with cops at checkpoint stops, or getting into petty arguments with the local police chief, or, in one instance, pulling over a state trooper in an unmarked car, demanding to see ID, and informing him that pulling people over in an unmarked car is against state law.

At the I-594 rally, Seim and however many of his pals he can get to show up will stand in a circle and hand guns to one another. This is supposedly a violation of I-594, which passed with a 59 percent majority.

“Will you bow down and lick the boots of tyrants,” Seim asks in a video on his website, “or will you stand for the liberty of your children?”

Guess which one Seim suggests? Seim seems to be tethered a bit lightly to the Earth, so he is very, very committed to making sure you understand that he does not lick boots – so committed it makes you wonder how often he has been asked to.

His video is titled, “Arrest me! I will not comply.”

The problem for Seim is, no one is going to arrest him. No one is going to say boo to him. No one is – or ever was – going to arrest anyone for handing someone else a gun. No one is – or ever was – going to arrest anyone for loaning a friend a gun. No one is – or ever was – going to arrest family members for sharing guns while hunting, or gun-safety instructors for passing a gun to a student.

That was never, ever the case, and the people who suggested it was were either lying or woefully misinformed by people who were lying or so devoted to crying wolf that they simply did not care whether there really was one.

I-594 requires background checks for gun sales or transfers online or at gun shows. This is a mere expansion of the background check system that is already in place to the zones that have been, effectively, a black market.

And yes, a transfer includes gifts or loans. But the problem with the paranoid interpretation of that is this: The initiative – in nearly two pages of exceptions – exempted family transfers, loans to minors while hunting, the transfer of antiques and swapping guns at a shooting range, among other contingencies. Before the election, both federal and state officials said in no uncertain terms that simply handing someone else a gun would not be considered a “transfer” for the purposes of the law.

It will come as no surprise that this is the position of the Washington State Patrol as well. When it comes to Seim and his buddies mass-fondling their guns on the Capitol lawn – it’s totally, completely fine with the WSP!

“We don’t see handing a weapon to someone else as a violation of the law,” spokesman Bob Calkins told the S-R last week. “We don’t see that as a transfer.”

This must be disappointing to Seim. He calls the law the most “corrupt, tyrannical, lawless and draconian gun restriction” in history. He says that people have an obligation to break this law – to break it right now.

“If you are walking down the road and you see a child about to be raped do you stand aside and let it happen?” Seim asks in his video, to the soft beating of war drums in the background. “Do you say, ‘I cannot decide if that is lawless and wrong and a violation of their rights, I’ll let the courts decide.’ Or do you intervene? Then I ask you, if government tyrants are raping our liberty, our birthright, mine and yours and our children’s, do we stand by and wait for courts to decide? No. We peacefully stand up and we say no while we can still do so peacefully.”

Good to know that such a clear thinker is well armed.

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.

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