Up until 2012 I didn’t pay attention to gun politics. I didn’t really feel like I needed to - my guns were legal and it didn’t seem like anyone in government was trying to make owning or practicing with my guns more onerous. In my lifetime I had only seen gun laws become more permissive over time - first with the sunset of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban and then with the Heller and McDonald cases at the Supreme Court. The selection of safe, accurate, and dependable weapons had only increased since I bought my first gun and I had no reason to think that would change.

Then, several things happened:

• In December of 2012 a man murdered his mother, stole a rifle from her safe, and then proceeded to murder 20 children and 6 teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He committed suicide some point after police arrived at the school.

• 5 days later, President Obama announced that he would make gun control a central issue in his second term. In January 2013 he signed 23 Executive Orders related to guns and asked Congress to pass a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban as well as some form of Universal Background Checks

• In January 2013, Congress put together a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban and introduced Universal Background Check legislation to require NICS checks for sales of private firearms as well as from dealers. Both of these federal efforts failed in the Senate on April 7th, 2013.

• On June 17th, 2013 Initiative 594 was submitted to the Washington Secretary of State. This was a Universal Background Check initiative that mirrored the bill that just failed at the Federal level. It passed by a vote of the people and was made law on December 4th, 2014.

This was a really shitty time to be the guy at work who was ‘out’ about owning guns. I was processing the horror of the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School along with everyone else, but I was dragged into multiple conversations with colleagues about why I thought I should even be allowed to own guns. These conversations were universally respectful and fair, but with the clear implication that despite knowing me for years some of my coworkers thought I might be a threat to them or others. I was challenged in each of these conversations to assume the role of the defender of the NRA and mass shooters everywhere, regardless of how I actually felt.

It was during 2013 that I first got programmed to think most people approached gun rights as an all-or-nothing affair. Either you thought every single gun sale should be tracked by the government or you thought children and murderers alike should be able to buy guns. Either you thought that any gun that could shoot faster than a musket should be outlawed and confiscated, or you thought everyone should carry machineguns with them at all times. I didn’t fit neatly into either category, and neither did the people I spoke to once we got down to really talking about it. Despite my actual experience I continued to assume most people held extreme and unshakeable views about gun policy, and I noticed that people assumed the same thing about me.

There was still a clear knowledge gap between the people who wanted more restrictive gun laws and those who did not. I don’t mean about guns themselves - I mean the laws that regulate them and the bills that seek to change that regulation. Prior I-594 it would have been perfectly legal to sell any of my guns to another person in Washington as long as I believed they were not a prohibited person. Fortunately a valid CPL served as proof that someone was not a prohibited person and it was the stated requirement of many private sellers that they would not sell to anyone without a valid CPL. Gun owners who cared already had the tools to make sure they never sold a gun to a a prohibited person - we didn’t need I-594 to build that for us. People who didn’t own guns didn’t know this tool existed.

I-594 didn’t make the tools better, it made them more difficult to use. A valid CPL is no longer (legally) sufficient proof that someone isn’t prohibited from owning guns. So if I sold a gun to my friend on Dec 3rd, 2014 all I had had to do to verify that they were also a legal gun owner was make sure their CPL was up to date. That’s easy! The next day, the same sale would be a crime unless my friend and I drove to a dealer and paid them to $50 call the FBI and verify information that we all already knew. The crime carried a penalty of up to 364 days in jail and/or a fine of up to $5,000.

There’s also a clear impact gap here - the people I met advocating for more restrictions would suffer no impact from them. Advocates who owned guns didn’t anticipate selling them, and those who didn’t own guns didn’t have any guns to sell. Passing this initiative wouldn’t change their lives at all, so they didn’t care that the initiative made the process of selling guns more difficult. ¹

I believe I-594 largely passed because of the impact and knowledge gaps. Supporters of I-594 likely didn’t know how the current private sale process worked de facto, and they likely didn’t care that the process was now more difficult for the people who actually cared about making sure their guns went to other responsible folks.

It’s very important to point out that I-594 did not take anyone’s guns away. No guns were banned or confiscated, no features outlawed, and no one made a criminal for what they simply owned. This was not the Orwellian hyperbole it was made out to be by the NRA. What I-594 did was take a process that worked, that was embraced by the gun community, and made it harder. Worse, it made it a crime to use the old process even though that process accomplished the same goals.

This didn’t (and still doesn’t) make sense to me. If the goal was truly Universal background checks, in what way did it make sense to make getting a background check harder? It’s simply a reality that if you make tools harder to use, some people will stop using them. Why weren’t we trying to make the process cheaper, easier, and more accessible? Senator Tom Coburn (OK) had proposed in April 2013 that the background check service be opened to the public, for free, accessible anywhere via a smartphone. This amendment to the 2013 Federal AWB died with the bill and to my knowledge this proposal hasn’t been brought up since. ²

Notes

¹ In addition to making sales more difficult, the legality of merely handing a gun to someone else became an extremely complicated question. Proponents argued that the bill didn’t really mean what it said about temporary transfers and the Washington Attorney General would clarify that after it passed. The Attorney General’s Office has declined to do so.

² The Swiss Universal Background Check system operates in a very similar way to what Senator Coburn proposed.