Washington state has gone deep down the rabbit hole on gun control over the past few years. They’ve seemingly embraced every anti-gun measure that’s come along.

Now, crime is soaring throughout the state, and since it’s campaign season for another week or so, that’s going to be an issue that’s bound to come up.

In one race, it did.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was put on the defensive during her debate with Republican Tiffany Smiley, who took aim at the incumbent senator’s record on crime amid a surge in crime across the country.

“We have a crime crisis in Washington state… crime is on the rise everywhere,” Smiley said.during Sunday’s debate, which comes just over a week before next month’s midterm election’s. “My opponent, Senator Murray… she went on the Senate floor and she called for funds to be diverted from our police force. And then she disappeared and she went into hiding.”

“Our cities are being destroyed by crime, our police are not being supported,” Smiley continued. “In addition to the crime, we have fentanyl all over our streets… we’re allowing a humanitarian crisis to unfold right before our eyes, we’re allowing people to poison themselves to death, and we do nothing.”

…

“In that slew of a response, you did not hear anything about gun violence,” Murray responded. “This is an issue we need to address. After Uvalde, we made some small steps at the federal level, but we need to ban dangerous weapons. We need to ban assault weapons, we need to make sure that we have really good background checks.”

Except, as I noted in a previous post, so-called assault weapons are rarely used in crime. They’re scary and often show up in the kind of crimes the media loves to talk about for months on end, but they’re not commonly used for things like homicides, armed robbery, carjackings, etc.

For those, criminals tend to prefer handguns, and they don’t get those lawfully in the first place.

That’s why being anti-gun, as Murray is, isn’t an anti-crime position. Gun control doesn’t inhibit criminals. Even handgun control wouldn’t do that because bad guys don’t follow the law.

Let’s remember that over the last few years, Washington state has passed numerous gun control laws. They’re seeing their violent crime rate skyrocket despite doing exactly what Murray is trying to say would prevent it.

It sounds to me like gun control isn’t the solution she thinks it is.

Of course, that’s par for the course with many lawmakers, both inside Washington and outside the state. They think that depriving law-abiding citizens of the right to keep and bear arms will somehow stop bad actors from doing bad things.

And that doesn’t even get into the fact that post-Bruen, any attempt at an assault weapon ban is likely to die ingloriously in the courts. You simply cannot find a law from around the time of the nation’s founding that bans an entire category of firearm simply because lawmakers find it scary.

So Murray’s defense of her soft-on-crime approach is to pass the buck, blame others, and advocate for laws that will do absolutely nothing.