Despite an NRA campaign and a spoiler measure on the ballot, polls suggest voters are likely to impose background checks on all gun buyers

Washington state voters appear ready to go where their politicians fear to tread and impose greater gun controls in the face of a well-funded campaign by the National Rifle Association and a rival spoiler measure on Tuesday’s ballot.

Opinion polls suggest a clear majority in favour of requiring background checks on all firearms sales in Washington state including at gun shows and through private advertising. The campaign for the only major piece of gun control legislation on the ballot in the US this year, Initiative 594, was launched in the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting on the other side of the country two years ago, in which 20 children and six adults were murdered. But the campaign drew to a close with a school killing in Washington itself in which five students were shot in the Marysville school north of Seattle last month.

Geoff Potter of the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a coalition of organisations which put the initiative on the ballot, said the campaign was born of frustration at the unwillingness of the US Congress and members of Washington state’s legislature to curb the illegal sale of guns because they are afraid of the power of the NRA.

“People are tired with putting up with inaction. If the elected representatives would not act, both at a national level and in our own legislature, then people were prepared to take the issue into their own hands and after two years they’ll have the opportunity to do that on Tuesday,” he said.

Initiative 594 requires anyone buying a firearm in Washington state, whether at a gun show, through private sale or from a friend, to undergo the same background check required by federal law of people purchasing from a professional seller, such as a gun shop.

The gun used in the Marysville school shooting was legally held, but the murders were a reminder of the levels of violence in a state where more than 600 people are killed each year with a gun, exceeding fatalities in traffic accidents. Research by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group funded by the billionaire former New York city mayor Michael Bloomberg, found that nearly two-thirds of the police officers killed in Washington state since 1980 were murdered by people prohibited from owning guns.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The billionaire former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg is funding the campaign for stricter gun controls in Washington state. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Several other incidents in the state this year have helped keep people’s minds on the issue. A white supremacist with a long criminal record including federal weapons charges, James Sapp, wounded a Vancouver, Washington, police officer, Dustin Goudschaal, with an illegally obtained semi-automatic handgun during a traffic stop in June. Sapp hanged himself in his cell a month later.

Illegally held weapons are also a common feature of domestic violence. More than 200 women have been murdered by their partners in Washington state over the past decade including Monique Williams who was shot by a former boyfriend, Aaron Newport, in May. Newport attempted to purchase a weapon at a gun shop but was rejected because of a history of domestic violence. He then bought the gun that killed Williams privately online.

“There are numerous examples of people being arrested after buying guns through the loophole despite having a record,” said Potter. “There’s clear evidence that this is a used avenue by criminals with 40,000 guns available online each year in Washington state without a background check. We know from states that have closed the background loophole that that can make it harder for them to obtain those guns.”

Among those in Washington state to campaign for the expanded background checks are Nicole Hockley, whose six-year-old son, Dylan, was one of the children killed at Sandy Hook school, and Sandy and Lonnie Phillips who lost a daughter at the July 2012 shooting at a Colorado cinema.

The initiative has received a mixed response from law enforcement with some officers strongly opposing it but some police organisations accusing the campaign against expanded background checks of falsely including them on lists of opponents. One of those most vocally in favour is the Republican prosecutor for Seattle and King county, Dan Satterberg.

“We have laws that say you can’t possess a gun if you have a prior felony conviction or you’ve been involuntarily committed for a serious mental illness or there’s a domestic violence restraining order. But we don’t enforce that law other than the very first purchase of a gun when it is new. There’s a vast secondary market for guns that is completely unregulated,” he said. “To me it’s just common sense. It’s like having security at the airport check half the passengers but not checking the other half.”

Satterberg said he has been struck by the vast number of guns being sold privately, “no questions asked”, on websites. He said at present it is impossible to track how many guns are sold illegally and used in crimes.

“This might help if we had the ability to track secondary market sales and see those kind of people who tried to buy one and were denied. We do know of incidents where people sold the guns to somebody for cash suspecting they were not allowed to buy. There was a case of somebody who came down from Canada. He was stalking a woman, bought a gun illegally in Washington and killed her in another state,” he said.

Satterberg said ordinary gun owners “have nothing to fear” from Initiative 594 but that is not how many of them see it thanks to an NRA-backed campaign to discredit the measure. It has focused in part on the support billionaires such as Bloomberg and the Microsoft founder Bill Gates have given the expanded background checks, saying they are using their fortunes to buy votes.

But opposition has also coalesced around a rival ballot measure promoted by a group, Protect Our Gun Rights, which would bar anything beyond federal restrictions on the sale or ownership of firearms in the state. The campaign for Initiative 591 has focused on claiming that 594 has a hidden agenda that if passed would go far beyond background checks. The ballot statement for 591 says that it “stops the state from creating a universal gun registry that could enable future confiscation”.

Philip Watson of Protect Our Gun Rights said the issue is not with background checks.

“I think if it were just background checks on gun sales most people would not have a problem with it but there’s so much more in the bill that they wrote. What the legislation is, and what it is marketed as, are two different things,” he said. “Voters are conflicted. They want background checks but they don’t want a system that’s only being backed by a few billionaires off in the corner somewhere.”

Opponents have latched on to a measure in Initiative 594 that would require a background check whenever a firearm is “transferred” between people whether in a sale or not. This, say the critics, would make it impossible for a father to lend his son his gun, or friends to exchange weapons on a hunting trip.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Critics claim that Initiative 594 would prevent gun enthusiasts from trying out each other’s weapons at a shooting range. Photograph: Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images

“The way the initiative reads, if you go to the range and I give you my gun so you can try it, that is not exempt,” said Watson. “The legislation is very aggressive toward firearms ownership.”

Satterberg said that the rival ballot initiative is nothing more than a spoiler.

“It very cynically says that Washington state can’t have anything beyond what Congress passes. Well, we all know the Congress of the United States isn’t going to touch this issue. It’s there to confuse people,” he said. “The responsible gun owner has nothing to fear from 594. The responsible gun owner would want to know that the person they’re selling their gun to is legally qualified to have it.”

That’s not how its seen at Southwest Washington Surplus gun store in Vancouver.

“The way I see it is a New York billionaire is deciding how common people live their lives,” said Steve Morris, a US navy veteran working as a salesman at the gun counter.

“Rights shouldn’t ever be voted on. It just boggles the mind because it seems so unnecessary. Socially I’d say I’m a very liberal person. Most people of my generation are. I’m just about 30. But because I’m for gun rights a lot of people assume I must be right-wing. A lot of people I know are just blindly liberal without understanding what this will mean. These are people who don’t own a gun and probably will never own a gun and they are voting on this issue.”



One of Morris’s customers, Vitali Nosenko, who was raised in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the US shortly after the collapse of communism, put it more bluntly.

“I’m voting for 591 to protect the second amendment [right to bear arms]. Before in Russia everybody had a gun and then the communists came and took them away and we had tyranny. I don’t want that to happen here,” he said.

Earlier this year it appeared as if both initiatives might pass in part because of confusion among voters who believe in gun rights in principle but favour background checks on all weapons sales. But as the campaigns have clarified the issues, support for background checks has held up while backing for the spoiler measure has fallen.

“Both measures started out with majorities earlier in the year. As voters learned about them they both lost some ground but the 594 kept a fairly strong lead,” said the Washington independent pollster Stuart Elway. “Back in April 40% of the people in our poll said they would vote for both measures. That’s gone down now to 22%.”

The latest Elway poll, which finished on 9 October, put support for Initiative 594 at 60%. Backing for Initiative 591 was just 39%.

“I asked people, just to be clear, are you in favour of more extensive background checks or do you favour keeping the system as it is?” said Elway. “Throughout the year, the number who said they favour more restrictive background checks was right at about 60% which now coincides with the vote for 594. Meanwhile 591 has dropped way down. I think what’s happened is voters learned more about it over the course of the summer, the attendant voting pattern now aligns with the underlying public opinion on the issue.”

Worryingly for opponents of 594, more than half of those polled who said they owned a gun supported expanded background checks. But if the polls are wrong and both measures pass, the issue is likely to end up before the state supreme court. Satterberg suspects that would be bad news for gun control.

“Initiative 591 effectively cancels out 594,” he said.