BELLEVUE, WA – The revelation that Washington State, for the first time in history, has more than 700,000 active concealed pistol licenses is proof the public is concerned about personal and community safety and will be an issue in this year’s statewide elections, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is predicting.

Last week, the State Department of Licensing reported 701,020 active Concealed Pistol Licenses (CPL).

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said the number reflects “a growing concern about Washington’s crime rates, and the fact that the state is dead last in the number of commissioned police and sheriffs’ deputies per 1,000 residents, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC).”

“While reported homicides were down slightly last year from the record 399 posted in 2023,” Gottlieb noted, “violent crime continues at an alarming pace while there are fewer lawmen and women to deal with it. The data suggests two things. With fewer police officers and more gun control laws restricting honest citizens, criminals are more brazen. Obviously those laws adopted since 2014, promising less violent crime, have been total failures. The public is fed up, and it appears they are arming up.”

While a new report from Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs shows murder declined last year by 5.8 percent from 399 in 2022 to 276 in 2023, it is still up 87 percent from 2019 on a five-year comparison. There were 207 slayings in 2019.

“Washington has reached a milestone,” Gottlieb said, “and the gun prohibition lobby should take note that these are not the people committing crimes with firearms. They are honest citizens, working or retired, who want to keep their families safe. They have seen the failure of anti-gun-rights policies firsthand in the Evergreen State, and they want things to change.

“By no coincidence, violent crime has gone up on Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s watch,” he added. “Ferguson has promoted and lobbied for increasing restrictions on law-abiding gun owners which have had no impact on criminals. He has allied himself with elitist gun grabbers whose agenda of public disarmament has proven itself to be a deadly social experiment. It’s time to take a different approach, and 700,000 Washington citizens agree.”

Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.