Ding Dong Danny Westneat, columnist for the Seattle Times, introduces us to Mark Pursley
I’m not sure what people in Rainier Valley were expecting to hear from the Seattle mayor’s gun adviser, Mark Pursley. But it probably wasn’t this:
That he, Pursley, owns two guns, a Glock 9-millimeter and a pump-action shotgun.
That he’s a member of the National Rifle Association.
And that he believes there’s no way to stop Americans from continuing to buy guns so powerful and destructive, they could potentially bring down a jet from a mile and a half away.
“I’m not here to take away people’s guns,” Pursley, 48, told the Rainier Valley Rotary Club on Tuesday, in a talk on “Reducing Gun Violence in Rainier Valley.” “The Second Amendment means what it says — we have the right as Americans to bear arms.”
This is former Mayor Greg Nickels’ gun guy? The one Nickels hired so Seattle could be a leader on gun issues at a time the federal and state governments seem paralyzed?
Yes, it is.
Westneat spends his column trying to convince readers that Pursley is a “centrist” on the 2nd Amendment. I suppose that a guy hired by the bigot Nickels who thinks that kicking in doors and confiscating firearms would be a bad idea could be considered close to “in the middle†if you’re comparing him to Nickels.
But the guy also buys into the MAIG’s lies about what the Tiahrt Amendments does and doesn’t do and would like to see draconian registration of inanimate objects that go click and bang.
I believe that it is a huge step forward for firearms owners when the guy hired to be Seattle’s “gun law guy†wants to see criminals who commit crimes with firearms prosecuted to the fullest extent, and not just giving them counseling and a kiss on the way out the door. But for some reason his idea about strapping a bureaucratic Lo-Jack to the firearm tells me he hasn’t spent the proper amount of time thinking his way to “the middleâ€.
I can confirm that he isn’t in “the middleâ€, because I’m standing here and I don’t see him.