Dan Satterberg, Prosecutor, King County, WA

Women are five times more likely
to be murdered when guns are in the home.
– Dan Satterberg, King County, WA Prosecutor

Do you want to be a survivor or a dead woman?

Get the damned guns out of your house.  Don’t wait for the government to pass a law.  Be the queen of your castle, and pass you own damned law:  NO guns in MY home.

It’s how I survived.  You can too.

Source: US Dept of Justice

I’ve posted this Department of Justice graph multiple times, but thousands of people are dead because they deluded themselves into thinking they were safe with guns in the house.  They weren’t, and you aren’t either.

Quite frankly, if 500% more likely to end up dead doesn’t wake you the hell up, nothing will.

If you are enlightened about how guns and domestic violence intersect and want to make a difference, Washington State passed HB 1840 which requires domestic violence perpetrators who are subject to no-contact orders, protection orders, and restraining orders to temporarily surrender their firearms or other dangerous weapons.

Unfortunately, the bill didn’t set up a mechanism to actually enforce it:

Recently, a review found that, in a 3 month timeframe in 2015, of the 94 cases where an affidavit of surrender (or non-surrender) was due to the court, only 12 respondents complied with filing the required declaration.

Ooops!

Yesterday, the King County Council, the Prosecutor’s Office, Seattle’s Police Chief, and the Board of Health got together and decided to fix it.  Prosecutor Satterberg opined:

Building a seamless process to give effect to those judicial orders is the single most important thing we can do this year to save lives in King County.

Bravo!

Please note that the Board of Health is integrally involved.  I’ve said for a long time that the pathway to domestic violence prevention is via medical care rather than our criminal “justice” system.  Medical providers can more effectively intervene before there’s blood on the floor.

Jaylen Fryberg killed four of his friends and wounded his cousin in the cafeteria of Marysville Pilchuck High School in 2014 before he shot himself with his daddy’s gun.

If this law had been effectively enforced up here in Snohomish County, we wouldn’t have had a school shooting in Marysville that left five high school kids dead and one wounded.  The shooter’s daddy was a domestic violence perpetrator who is now doing hard time for illegally owning the gun used in the shooting.