Anthony Teso believes if we treated firearms the way we treat automobiles, Washington’s gun laws would be considerably stricter than they are, not looser

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

Jonathan Hines ends his Aug. 3 letter to the editor with an analogy he should follow all the way. He is right that a car has no agency. He is wrong about what we did about that.

Anthony Teso

We license drivers and test them. We register and title every vehicle. We require insurance. We set a minimum age. We mandate seat belts, airbags and crash standards, and we pull the models that fail them off the road. We criminalize driving drunk and we run checkpoints to catch people doing it. The result, by the federal government’s own accounting, is that the traffic death rate per hundred million miles driven has fallen from 3.35 in 1975 to 1.26 in 2023, a decline of more than 60 percent. That did not happen because Americans became better people. It happened because we regulated the tool, the operator and the road at once, and kept at it for fifty years.

If we treated firearms the way we treat automobiles, Washington’s gun laws would be considerably stricter than they are, not looser.

Now the particulars. Hines writes as though Washington parks are already posted gun-free zones. They are not. The bill that would have added parks and public buildings to the list, Senate Bill 5098, passed the state Senate in 2025 and again in January 2026, and died in the House both times. It is not law. And the version that passed exempted concealed pistol license holders, which means the lawful, permitted, armed citizen at the center of his argument was never going to be disarmed by it. Sen. Jeff Holy, a Cheney Republican, said so on the Senate floor. That is not a technicality. That is the entire claim.

The Bite of Seattle does not fit the story either. Police describe a gang-related shootout involving at least three shooters. One was 19. One was 15. Under Washington law neither could lawfully carry a handgun in that park under any circumstances, sign or no sign, and the 15-year-old was booked on firearms violations. Investigators recovered fourteen shell casings in two calibers. Three people died, one of them a shooter, and four more were wounded, including a two-year-old boy shot in the arm. None of the victims had any connection to the dispute. The problem in that park was not a shortage of armed civilians. More people firing into a crowd of thousands is not a public safety plan.

On the Vancouver Police Department, Hines has the causation backwards. The city is not signaling a retreat on accountability. It has run out of public defenders. Vancouver has dismissed more than fifty cases for lack of defense counsel, some of them domestic violence charges, after the state Supreme Court adopted caseload limits for public defense. Every misdemeanor citation opens a separate case that needs a lawyer on a short clock. Consolidating low-level offenses is how the city keeps the serious cases from being thrown out, and the chief has said the policy lifts once there are enough attorneys.

That is a funding problem, and it is the argument Hines should be having. He wants violent offenders “fully accountable” and laws “vigorously enforced.” Accountability runs through courts, prosecutors, public defenders, and jails, and every one of them costs money. You cannot demand enforcement while starving the institutions that deliver it. Before we argue about signage in parks, it is worth asking which officials in this county have voted to pay for the courts.

Anthony P. Teso
Camas

---

Also read:

• 
  Opinion: Were Republican voters just sleeping during the August primary election?
  CCRP Chairman Matt Bumala says 60% of primary no-shows in the 17th and 18th districts were Republicans.
• 
  Opinion: WA Cares’ launch showcased care WA Cares did not provide
  Gov. Ferguson showcased a caregiving arrangement at the WA Cares launch that the program had not paid for a single day of.
• 
  Auditor, auditor candidate address scrutiny over job title
  Greg Kimsey says roughly 40 county employees hold the deputy county auditor designation Kelly used in his campaign.
• 
  Opinion: Is Mitchell Kelly misleading voters with his ‘deputy auditor’ claim?
  Clark County HR records show no position called “Deputy County Auditor” has ever existed, Anderson argues.
• 
  Opinion: Democrats rig the ballot to save their income tax
  Churchill argues the ballot disclosure warning voters of education cuts describes revenue never collected and not yet allocated.