Seattle: The nation’s only major gun-control ballot initiative this year, here in Washington state, is drawing big money and star-power names like Bill Gates and former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York as backers. But the defining aspect is confusion, many residents say, because there are in fact two gun measures on the ballot, side by side, and they are diametrically opposed.
One proposal, Initiative 594, would impose background checks of gun buyers that go beyond federal law, requiring them in private sales and at gun shows. The other, Initiative 591, would expressly forbid state expansion of background checks beyond the current federal law.
If both pass, they would effectively cancel each other out, throwing the question to the Legislature or the state Supreme Court, election officials said, neither of which would have a legal road map to guide them. Polls show that considerable numbers of people, out of confusion or strategic thinking, plan to vote yes on both or no on both. It is also possible that many people, in frustration, will walk away without voting on either measure.
The back-and-forth has kept Nikolas Peterson from filling out his ballot at all, with only a few days to go before the vote-by-mail election.
“It’s been really confusing,” said Peterson, 27, a lawyer in Seattle who was walking through the city’s Pioneer Square district on a recent morning. He said the wording of the measures, not just the summary on the ballot, would sway his decision, though he was leaning toward support for tighter regulation. “I might just refrain from voting either way if they’re not clear,” he added.
Conflicting ballot measures, through intent or coincidence, have been posed before in Washington, where the barriers to citizen initiatives are lower than in many other states. The last time was 1995, when two rival measures about medical malpractice were presented. Voters rejected both. No state law guides the Supreme Court or Legislature on how to sort things out.
Washington’s two proposals are the first to face voters in any statewide election since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Connecticut in 2012 — when 26 people, including 20 children, were killed. Perhaps for that reason, passions on the issue have run high.
Of the $19 million (Dh69.7 million) raised for all ballot measures this year in Washington, by far the largest amount — $13 million (Dh47.7 million) — has poured into the duel over guns. Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and his wife, Melinda — huge names here in Washington, not just for their wealth — gave $1.1 million to the committee pushing Initiative 594, as did another former Microsoft executive, Steve Ballmer, and his wife, Connie. A gun-control group backed by Bloomberg, the Everytown Gun Safety Action Fund, has raised $891,000, and Bloomberg, founder of the financial information company that bears his name, sent another $285,000 last month to the group backed by Gates.
In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings, four states — New York, Delaware, Colorado and Connecticut — have begun requiring background checks at gun shows and in all private gun sales. But those changes came through their state legislatures rather than the ballot.
Opponents of tightened regulations in Washington have divided their forces, with the National Rifle Association focused on defeating Initiative 594, and spending $489,000 to do so. Another group, Protect Our Gun Rights, has spent $1.2 million to push for passage of Initiative 591, the no-new-regulations alternative.
“I think they’re throwing whatever they can at the wall right now,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a group based in Washington, D.C. “Mislead, and confuse,” he added, describing the opposition’s tactics.
A spokesman for the NRA, Andrew Arulanandam, said the tactics of confusion were on the other side.
“594 is an 18-page document that’s being sold as a simple background check,” he said, adding that the language in the proposal goes further than sales, to potentially require a background check for even the loan of a firearm to a friend, say at a gun range. The NRA’s campaign website also evokes questions of class and money, calling Initiative 594, “a universal handgun registration scheme being promoted by a very wealthy group of anti-gun elitists.”
Voters like Keiran Gorny, 52, who works for the federal Labor Department in Seattle, said people tend to be too busy to read through everything they vote on.
“People are so busy with everything else, they just wait until the last minute,” Gorny said. “After the fact they see what they have wrought, either saying no to something or yes to something, and they go, ‘Oh my gosh.’” He said he planned to vote for more background checks but was concerned that confusion could skew the outcome.
A recent poll by Elway Research, a Seattle firm, reflected some of that uncertainty. In the poll of 500 registered voters, conducted October 6-9, 22 per cent said they planned to vote yes on both measures, and 15 per cent said they would vote no on both. A clear majority of those voters, 60 per cent, said they planned to support Initiative 594 and its tougher registration rules. The telephone poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
But H. Stuart Elway, the firm’s president, said in an interview that voters who said they were paying “close attention” to the election were also less likely to support Initiative 594.
“That says the gun rights folks are getting their message across,” he said.
Washington state was rocked by a school shooting just last week, when a 15-year-old boy in Marysville, north of Seattle, fired on a group of his friends and relatives in a high school cafeteria, killing two and severely wounding three, before taking his own life.
Gross at the Brady Campaign said that more background checks probably would not have made a difference in that case — the gun was legally bought and registered by the shooter’s family.
In Marysville, yard signs for or against the ballot measures reflect the debate even as the community and the school grieve.
“A tragedy like this should call attention to the severity of the gun issue and strengthen our resolve to do something about it,” Gross said.
Arulanandam of the NRA said the group’s message has been consistent — that voters should look past slogans and emotions, and read the proposals. “The devil is always in the details,” he said.
