Editorial: Long fight for state’s gun safety laws must continue

Published 1:30 am Saturday, December 6, 2025

By The Herald Editorial Board

It’s only one round in what’s likely to be a long — if not unending — fight for firearm safety, but a judge in Thurston County Superior Court late last month upheld Washington state’s law, passed in 2023, that bars the sale and distribution of semiautomatic assault weapons, one of a group of common-sense firearm laws passed in recent years by the Legislature or adopted by citizen initiative.

Superior Court Judge Christine Schaller affirmed the state law, rejecting a challenge by the Silent Majority Foundation and two gun sellers in Moses Lake and Ephrata that sought to overturn the law for violating the state constitution’s protection of the right to bear arms for self-defense. The decision sided with the state attorney general’s contention that the state constitution doesn’t preclude regulation of a deadly weapon used disproportionately in mass shootings and ill-suited for self-defense.

The law, House Bill 1240, sponsored by state Rep. Strom Peterson, D-Edmonds, bars the manufacture, sale and distribution of “assault weapons,” specifically 61 models of semiautomatic rifles and pistols, including the AR-15. The law does not outlaw possession of the listed weapons from those who already own them, and exceptions are made for law enforcement and the military.

Among those firearms considered assault weapons is the AR-15. Modeled after the military’s M16, the AR-15 is now the best-selling rifle in the United States. A Washington Post story from earlier this year reports that about 16 million Americans — 1 in 20 — own at least one AR-15. The “gun of choice” for many mass killers, the AR-15 has been used in 10 of the 17 deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. since 2012.

Unlike more conventional firearms, the ammunition used in the AR-15 and other semiautomatic firearms is fired at such high velocity that the projectile doesn’t just pierce the body but deforms in the body and creates a shock wave that can blow apart much of the skull as it exits, demolish vital organs and cause unstoppable bleeding, as the graphic and sobering online report from the Post shows.

Recent research has shown assault-weapon bans in Washington and nine other states and the District of Columbia, and restrictions on the capacity of ammunition magazines appear to have had an effect in reducing the lethality of shootings in the U.S., according to a recent summary of studies assembled by RAND, the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.

Of seven studies evaluated, three with higher-quality methodology found that states’ assault-weapon bans significantly reduced school shooting casualties, while one found that bans of high-capacity magazines significantly reduced mass public shooting deaths and injuries. (Another study of the federal assault weapon ban that was in place from 1994 to 2004 showed it led to increases in the secondary-market prices for such firearms, perhaps affecting their availability to those contemplating mass shootings.)

The research reviewed by RAND noted that while mass shootings make up a smaller percentage of firearms deaths, in such shootings between 2009 and 2022 with four or more fatalities, those where assault weapons, large-capacity magazines or both were used resulted in five times the number of people shot compared with shootings that involved neither.

The bans of assault weapons and restrictions on magazines may not reduce the incidence of shootings themselves, but they can have an effect in scaling back the number of deaths and grievous injuries.

This, of course, is not the final word on this or other firearm safety measures in Washington and elsewhere. The Silent Majority Foundation or others appear likely to appeal. While the law seems likely to be upheld by the state Supreme Court, which earlier this year upheld a 2022 law that adopted a ban on ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, its fate in federal courts, especially before the U.S. Supreme Court may be less certain.

The U.S. Supreme Court did decline earlier this year to hear two cases on state firearms laws — one on assault weapons and another on high-capacity magazines — but three of the court’s conservative justices signaled their preference to hear the cases and a fourth, Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote separately to say the assault-weapon ban likely runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

As well, the court’s six-member conservative majority, just last year struck down a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulation — requested by President Trump in his first term — that barred the after-market devices known as “bump-stocks,” which effectively turn a semi-automatic firearm, which normally allows only one shot for every pull of the trigger, into an automatic weapon capable of continuous and rapid fire.

Incredulously, wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent, “The majority puts machine guns back in civilian hands.”

Yet logic-confounding court decisions shouldn’t keep cities, counties and state legislatures or Congress from addressing a continuing epidemic of gun violence in the country.

There is some good news in that the incidence of gun homicides and injuries have declined from their most recent highs that began during the pandemic in 2020, although both remain higher than they were before the pandemic. Homicide deaths involving firearms, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, peaked at 20,958 in 2021, falling sharply to 15,363 in 2024.

But even with a decline in overall shooting deaths, easing to a total of more than 44,000 last year — down 5 percent from the year before — those figures still demand action at all levels of government.

Most concerning in those numbers is a continuing rise in the number of suicides by firearm, again noting CDC data. Suicides, which have long outnumbered homicides and accidental firearm deaths, totaled nearly 16,600 in 2000, but have steadily risen since to 27,591 in 2024.

Gov. Bob Ferguson, who requested the assault weapons legislation in 2023 while he was state attorney general, recognized that the ban and other firearms legislation — such as a law adopted this year requiring a permit to purchase firearms — were likely to face challenges.

“We spent a lot of time carefully crafting the legislation being mindful of the U.S. Supreme Court and recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court, and doing everything we could to craft a piece of legislation that we thought could best withstand the inevitable legal challenge,” he said when the bill was signed into law.

We can hope that — in crafting laws and court decisions — common sense and the best arguments prevail.