The CBS News affiliate in Seattle—KIRO-TV—is reporting how “downtown Seattle businesses that put up plywood before the election are beginning to take it down” because there have been no destructive protests in the wake of the presidential race that presumably went to Joe Biden.
It’s not that the Far Left extremists were satisfied, it’s because conservatives—especially gun owners—don’t riot. They don’t brazenly destroy someone else’s property because they didn’t get their way. They don’t smash store fronts, loot or burn.
A KIRO report included remarks from Pamela Morales, a small business owner in the downtown area who is planning to take down protective plywood, but with some apprehension.
“But I am a little bit worried because I don’t know what will happen in the future,” she told a reporter.
KIRO also heard from Joshua Skule, senior vice president at Allied Universal, described as “a risk advisory and consulting company.”
“There’s a lot of tension in our society,” he said.
Affirming that is no less than Associate Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. According to Fox News, Alito is concerned about the U.S. society.
“Tolerance for opposing views is now in short supply,” he told a gathering of the Federalist Society during a keynote speech Thursday.
Seattle, like Portland, Oregon 150 miles to the south, experienced something quite different from the “summer of love” predicted by liberal Democrat Mayor Jenny Durkan some five months ago. There have been demonstrations and riots, people have been injured, a section of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood was seized for a few weeks and two people were murdered inside the so-called “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest” (CHOP) zone.
Businesses boarded up their windows out of fear that anarchists would riot again if Donald Trump won a second term.
Seattle is currently experiencing an uptick in homicides and other crime. According to Seattle Police data, there have been so far this year 37 homicides. That’s nine more than in all of last year, and five more than during 2018. It’s ten more than the city logged in 2017 and nearly twice as many as the 19 racked up in 2016.
The Seattle City Council is working to cut the police department budget and reduce the size of the police force. Seattle also passed a special gun control tax on the sale of firearms and ammunition in the city back in 2015, but the tax hasn’t reduced murders nor has it brought in anywhere near the predicted revenue of $300,000 to $500,000 annually. It only drove one gun store out of town and cost the other one thousands of dollars in sales.
Further, Seattle adopted a so-called “safe storage law” two years ago. It was challenged in court and subsequently dismissed before a trial, but last month, the State Court of Appeals unanimously reversed and remanded, so the challenge may move forward under the state’s preemption law. There has been virtually no reporting of this important victory outside of the firearms press.
These laws penalized law-abiding gun owners, the people who don’t commit crime or stage destructive demonstrations.
To grassroots gun rights activists, there’s a message in there somewhere, but the radical far left Seattle City Council refuses to listen.