The state of Washington used to be fairly pro-gun. Unfortunately, in recent years, the state has started leaning more and more toward the anti-gun side of things. They’ve enacted a number of gun control proposals, all predicated on the idea that gun control will make their state safer.

Yet David Workman, writing at Ammoland, notes that a recent report shows that to be quite wrong.

In the midst of a continuing pattern of rising crime in Washington State, a new report released by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC) does two things, one of them completely unintentional.

The report says there were 325 murders last year in the state, “an increase of 5.9 percent since 2020.” It is the highest number of murders recorded since WASPC began collecting data in 1980.

What the data also demonstrates is that restrictive gun control initiatives pushed through by a billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobbying group based in Seattle have failed to make communities safer, essentially putting the lie to any promises or predictions made by their proponents.

Translation: Gun control advocates misled Evergreen State voters. Their forecasts and arguments were wrong, just as Northwest gun rights leaders said they would be.

According to the Crime in Washington 2021 report, “In 2021, Violent Crimes showed an increase of 12.3% with 29,238 offenses reported; compared to 26,036 offenses reported in 2020. There were 325 murders in 2021; this is an increase of 5.9% compared to 307 murders in 2020.”

That’s even more homicides than the annual FBI Uniform Crime Report listed for 2020, the most recent year for which FBI data is available. The Crime Report is released in late September each year. For 2020, the FBI listed 298 homicides, of which 177 were committed with firearms. That was up from the 209 murders, including 141 involving guns, posted in the 2015 Crime Report.

The new WASPC report “compiles data from 232 state, county, municipal and tribal agencies,” according to KOMO News. It “is designed to give residents information on what is happening in their communities. It covers a wide variety of crime, an issue people living in Seattle say is getting out of hand.”

Now, keep in mind that they’ve passed all this gun control that was explicitly said to be necessary to stop this kind of thing.

Clearly, that didn’t work.

Of course, we all knew it wouldn’t. Gun control doesn’t really impact the criminals. They’re already skirting gun control laws. New laws don’t really have much of an impact on them because of that.

Yet they do impact the law-abiding people of Washington state. These laws keep them from being able to exercise their Second Amendment rights to the fullest.

This report illustrates just how completely gun control failed in the Evergreen State. So-called gun violence is soaring even while new gun control measures keep being implemented. While correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, the lack of a corollary suggests that such anti-Second Amendment measures aren’t anything like what proponents claim.

That said, don’t expect Washington to repeal any of them anytime soon. Right now, they’re deep in the anti-gun Kool-Aid. They’re going to stay there until something changes, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon, either.

Which is a shame, because Washington sure looks like a lovely state, but as it stands, I’m not sure I’d even want to visit under the current climate.

I mean, it seems pretty dangerous with all those criminals ignoring the state’s precious gun control laws.