The state of Washington has gone down a very dark road of late. While they were pro-gun for quite some time, they've started heading in the opposite direction just as fast as they can.

It's been startling to watch. Horrifying, even. Especially as Washington state is a gorgeous place that I'd long considered as a possible place to relocate to someday.

I won't now.

Especially since it seems that the taxpayers of that state funded their own oppression.

Over the past two bienniums (2021-2023 and 2023-2025) the Washington State Department of Commerce has apparently provided more than $350,000 to the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobbying group which hardly needs taxpayer support, Ammoland has learned.

Public documents available online for both bienniums show the Commerce Department provided $263,750 to the Alliance during the 2021-2023 biennium for “Grants, Benefits & Client Services” and “Goods and Services,” In the 2023-2025 biennium, Commerce provided $102,102 in public funding to the Alliance, again for “Grants, Benefits & Client Services” and in July of last year, $30,000 for “Personal Service Contracts.”

The grand total for taxpayer money—including Evergreen State gun owners who pay taxes—over the past two bienniums comes to $365,852, and that does not include the proposed expenditure of another $100,000 this year for what is being labeled by Second Amendment activists as a ‘gun control conference” in Seattle. Checking back further, there does not appear to have been earlier allocation of state funds to the Alliance.

As explained by attorney Bill Kirk, president of Washington Gun Law, in a recent YouTube video, “They are using your tax dollars to disarm you.”

There is something inherently wrong in forcing people to pay taxes, only to use that money to fund private groups seeking to infringe on their rights.

It's akin to using taxpayer money to fund neo-Nazi organizations, at least in my mind.

How dare the state of Washington do this. It's bad enough that they're passing laws left and right that blatantly trample on people's gun rights, but to also take their money and give it to those who want to do just that so they can lobby and more effectively trample on those gun rights is wrong on so many levels.

Now, consider what we've seen out of DOGE lately. We know our federal tax dollars are going all over the place, including funding anti-gun efforts throughout the nation, but it seems we're also seeing it at the state level in Washington.

That should never happen.

This is what the Dickey Amendment was really trying to deal with, not research into violent crime. The idea of using taxpayer money to curtail people's rights is wrong, regardless of what right we're talking about. 

Yet doing this to curtail the right to free speech or the freedom of religion would be something that would never fly. Doing this with the right to keep and bear arms shouldn't be accepted, either. 

I'd say the people of Washington deserve better, and I think they do, but if they want it, they need to start voting that way instead of re-electing the numbskulls who approved of this crap.