King County Council addressed the need to make guns less accessible while also stressing the importance of providing essential resources — housing, career opportunities, health care, education — to those in more impoverished areas of the county during its meeting Wednesday morning.
“I will never forget the day that our prosecutor’s office showed me a map of where gun shooting incidents occurred. And how that map looks eerily similar to the map of where we have highest poverty rates in King County,” King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said in the meeting. “So we have a lot of work to do on both the close up, downstream, at the shooting itself level, but also upstream level, making sure that we invest in these communities that are seeing disinvestment so that they can live healthy, thriving lives.”
The discussion on gun violence prevention was originally scheduled to respond to the mass shooting at Uvalde, Texas.
Since the tragedy in Uvalde, 106 mass shootings have occurred across the U.S., resulting in 113 casualties and 493 people injured, according to Gun Violence Archive. On July 4, seven people were killed alongside 30 injured during a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.
“Over the July 4 weekend, 220 people were killed in just one weekend,” Zahilay said. “220 people were killed by gun violence, and 570 others were shot. And the most devastating part of this carnage is that these are preventable. These are preventable.”
Washington state has passed new legislation on preventing gun violence, including banning the sale or