As you may have heard, a bill (H.B. 1692) has been introduced in the Legislature of my home state of Washington to reduce the maximum penalty for drive-by shootings. It has been referred to the ominously named Committee on Public Safety. One may hope that it will be guillotined there. One sees, though, that its co-sponsors include three committee chairmen and a Public Safety committee member. This isn’t some lark and detour that nobody takes seriously.
An article posted yesterday by The Spectator furnishes background on the bill’s author, Rep. Tarra Simmons, a lily-white former drug dealer who enjoys the distinction of being the first convicted felon to have won election to the State House of Representatives.
What her bill specifically would do is amend the definition of “aggravated first degree murder”, which carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole (25 years to life for juveniles under age 16). (The death penalty used to be an option, but the state’s very woke Supreme Court abolished capital punishment in 2018.) At present, one of the aggravating circumstances is –
The murder was committed during the course of or as a result of a shooting where the discharge of the firearm, as defined in RCW 9.41.010, is either from a motor vehicle or from the immediate area of a motor vehicle that was used to transport the shooter or the firearm, or both, to the scene of the discharge.
H.B. 1692 would strike that paragraph and require that all murderers currently serving time for aggravated murder be resentenced. For those who were under age 21 at the time of the killing, there is additional leniency, a waiver of the mandatory minimum sentence for ordinary, non-aggravated first degree murder. Rep. Simmons –
is at least upfront about her intentions. She claims the new law would “promote racial equity in the criminal legal system.” That’s because the vast majority of drive-by violence, in both Washington State and elsewhere, is perpetrated by young black males. Oddly enough, most of their victims are also black. So in the looking-glass world of Washington’s public officials, it’s apparently fine to shoot an African American while you’re out cruising in your customized Dodge Viper on a Saturday night provided you’re the same skin color.
“Murder is murder,” Representative Simmons sagely reminds us. “But locking children up and throwing away the key is not the answer,” she adds, noting that “everyone deserves a second chance in life.” (Other than those mown down from a passing car, presumably.)
(You may read the representative’s maudlin argument for leniency here.)
One killer to whom Rep. Simmons specifically wants to give a second chance is Kimonti Carter, who in 1997 “unloaded at least 19 bullets into what he believed to be a car full of rival gang members”. It wasn’t. The victims were teenagers with no gang connections. One, Corey Pittman, was a 19-year-old black man, home from college on summer vacation. He was studying political science and aspired to become a lawyer. Thanks to Kimonti Carter, he never got a first chance, much less a second.
This case illustrates why drive-by murders have been classified as an aggravated offense. The likelihood that bystanders will be killed is high, and the murderer is already in the getaway car, ready to speed off and evade arrest. As an empirical fact, most victims of gun violence, including drive-bys, are black. If the law that Rep. Simmons wants to repeal is an instance of racism, it is racism of a peculiar sort. Indeed, if one is going to toss around accusations of racism, which is more racist: to punish severely people who kill blacks or to reduce their sentences on account of their race?