An interview with Seattle Mayor Ed Murray by KIRO radio’s Ron and Don – the afternoon drive time co-hosts – included an interesting revelation, according to a story posted on the station’s website.
“Murray admitted,” the report explained, “that the city doesn’t know for sure if safe injection sites will work and they’d like to do it as a pilot project to see if it helps Seattle’s drug problem.” The audio bears this out.
This came up during a lengthy conversation with the KIRO talk team about the city’s homeless crisis. The mayor acknowledged that homeless camps provide cover for some criminal activity including drug abuse, some sex trafficking, car break-ins and burglaries.
He’s asking voters to tax themselves $275 million to expand programs “to combat homelessness.”
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Mayor Murray is the public official who intimated that guns were to blame for crimes committed by illegal aliens during a press event in Seattle back in January. At the time, Murray was protesting President Donald Trump’s first immigration order and the mayor declared that he would fight the president in court to “insure…that the United States Constitution is not violated.”
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which is based in nearby Bellevue, reacted by noting that Murray has “expert experience” on the subject of violating someone’s constitutional rights. When he was in the state Senate, Murray sponsored legislation that would have allowed warrantless searches of gun owners’ homes by sheriff’s deputies. Once that tenet of the bill was revealed, an embarrassed Murray tried to change the language, but then the bill died in committee.
At the time, Murray acknowledged that he didn’t realize the provision was in his legislation.
The proposed “safe” heroin injection site where drug addicts could shoot up is presumably aimed at preventing overdoses and the spread of diseases. Critics assert it is something on the order of a government-funded “shooting gallery” that underscores the city’s inability to deal with a drug crisis that it seems to be helping perpetuate.
The city wouldn’t be supplying illegal drugs, just a safe environment.
This interview happened only a few days after MyNorthwest.com reported that Seattle and King County set a new record last year for the number of fatal drug overdoses. In 2016, the story said, there were 359 drug overdose deaths. A staggering 61 percent of those involved opioids, including synthetics such as methadone.
Last year was the seventh straight when drug overdose deaths crept upward, the story said.
Whether Murray likes it or not, critics assert that his agenda will not solve the homeless problem, nor will the “safe injection site” reduce drug abuse. Would it instead only encourage drug users?
On the other hand, he signed the city’s “gun violence tax” into law in 2015, and that seems to be aimed at discouraging firearms ownership. Some critics suspect that the tax was designed to drive gun stores out of the city. One gun shop has already left.
The tax resulted in a lawsuit by the Second Amendment Foundation, National Rifle Association, National Shooting Sports Foundation and two Seattle gun retailers. A spin-off lawsuit was filed by SAF and its monthly news magazine, TheGunMag.com, when the city refused to disclose its revenue from the gun tax, initially predicted to be somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 annually.
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