Washington state didn't use to suck so bad when it came to guns, but from what I gather, all the Silicon Valley types moved to Seattle, then started voting for the exact same policies that made them leave California in the first place. Typical, really. Today, it's an anti-gun state on par with places like New York and Massachusetts.
That is especially true in light of the new permitting requirements.
On a local radio station, a CNN contributor expressed his opinion of those new requirements.
Washington’s new permit-to-purchase gun law will price working families out of their right to self-defense, according to CNN contributor Shermichael Singleton, who called the $126 permit and its mandatory training requirement unconstitutional on The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red 770 AM.
Under House Bill 1163, which Governor Bob Ferguson signed in May 2025, Washington residents will need a five-year state permit before they can buy a firearm starting May 1, 2027. The permit costs $126, a $90 fee plus a $36 fingerprint-processing charge, and applicants must first complete a certified safety course that includes live-fire training. Buyers still face a background check and the state’s 10-day waiting period.
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“It seems like a complicated process in a tough economic environment, Jason, that will absolutely have a deleterious effect on working people. Now, a lot of your audience are working people, who bust their butts off every single day to make an honest wage and living for themselves. Now, you’re expecting these people who are stretching every dollar to take care of all of their bills to now figure out where a couple hundred extra dollars will come from so that they can exert their constitutionally protected right of self-defense? It’s unconstitutional, in my opinion. It’s why I’m a constitutional carry guy,” Singleton said on The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red 770 AM.
Singleton also rejected the argument that the mandate is needed to keep untrained people from arming themselves.
“And by the way, for the skeptics out there who say, ‘Well, we don’t just want people carrying guns and they’re not trained,’ 95% of gun owners, according to NSSF, National Shooting Sports Foundation, 95% of gun owners get trained. They’re lawful. They’re responsible. It is the criminals, the thugs, the hooligans, the hoodlums that we have to worry about, not the gun owner,” he countered.
Singleton isn't wrong here. All of that money, $252 before you pay for the class, which may involve time off from work, isn't chump change, especially when you factor in that this is a requirement to own a freaking gun. This is more than the cost of an inexpensive handgun in and of itself, and it's a fair percentage of the cost of even something more typical like a Smith & Wesson, Sig, Glock, or other common handgun brand. It's only when you get into higher-end pistols that the money seems trivial.
If you can afford a Cabot Arms handgun, you probably aren't hurting enough for the fee to be a strain.
Most of us aren't in that camp, though. We're in a position where $252 is a lot of money, especially when it's just the tip of the iceberg. I still have to find a class, which no one knows what it will really entail because the state hasn't approved the first curriculum yet, so we don't know if this will be a $25 course or a $250 course, or worse.
So Singleton is right about who will be most impacted by this, as well as being right about how the criminals won't be stopped. The whole "We don't want people carrying guns if they're not trained" monologue is tiring, in part because we've had people carrying guns for centuries without official training, and they're not the problem.
The criminals are.
