Violent crime rates in Seattle reached a 15-year high in 2022, and the city isn’t looking any safer this year. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson, along with the state’s Democratic legislative majority, have taken aim at legal gun owners as their primary response; approving a ban on so-called assault weapons earlier this year to go along with the state’s ban on “large capacity” magazines that was put in place last year.

While the anti-gunners continue their crackdown on responsible citizens exercising their fundamental right to keep and bear arms, actual criminals in cities like Seattle are routinely getting slaps on the wrist for serious offenses. Take the case of a 53-year-old man arrested and charged with stabbing a stranger to death on July 4th, for example. According to authorities, the suspect ran up to the man and began stabbing him, even as the victim pleaded for him to stop.

As KOMO-TV reports, the suspect has managed to rack up more than two dozen arrests over the years but has rarely faced seriously consequences from the city and state.

According to state records, the suspect has been arrested 28 times. KOMO News is not naming the suspect yet because he has not been charged, but prosecutors in court told the judge they intend to rush file this case.

“The defendant has significant criminal history, much of it misdemeanor history, but that history includes order violations, assault and behavior, etc.,” a prosecutor said in court, “He’s also got a felony conviction recently for felony harassment – that case happened in 2020.”

Prosecutors also called the suspect an “obvious threat to community safety based on the allegations.”

“I don’t understand, over two dozen times, that doesn’t make any sense,” Fields said, “This man clearly needs help, letting him out to society is a danger – why do you keep letting him out?”

Before Tuesday’s fatal stabbing, the suspect’s most recent run-in with the law was a felony harassment and assault case for an incident in 2022 near Third and Pine streets.

Court records in that case state the suspect “told the victim he would kill him and then repeatedly hit the victim in the head with a rubber mallet” over a disagreement over the price of a pack of cigarettes he wanted to buy from the victim.

Prosecutors asked for him to be sentenced to the maximum of 364 days per state sentencing guidelines, but a judge sentenced him to 184 days in jail with credit for time served and two years unsupervised probation.

Apparently Washington needs judge control far more than any new gun control laws, though I’m not sure we can let prosecutors off the hook entirely here. Many of the 53-year-old’s past cases resulted in misdemeanor convictions or guilty pleas, according to KOMO, but we don’t know how many times the man had originally been charged with felonies but was offered the opportunity to plead to lesser crimes. Given the rarity of taking criminal cases to trial, my guess is that the vast majority of his arrests ended with plea deals or dismissed charges, and only now that he stands accused of murder is the criminal justice system taking notice that he may pose a serious threat to the community at large.

I have no expectations that this case is going to change the Democrats’ approach to public safety in Washington State, but as long as the powers that be are more interested in depriving responsible citizens of their right to armed self-defense than they are at depriving career criminals their freedom to prey on innocent victims Seattle is going to be a more dangerous place for the law-abiding than lawbreakers. I’d like to think that at some point Washington State residents will wake up and realize what exactly they’ve been voting for, but I honestly have no idea what it’s gonna take for that to happen.