Seattle Police Chief Makes the Case Against Gun Control

Not on purpose, mind you. In fact, my guess is that Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes would dispute the headline of this post if it was brought to his attention. But the fact remains that in a recent press conference related to the mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle food festival last weekend, Barnes put forth a statistic that demonstrates why the state’s numerous restrictions on lawful gun owners are a waste of time from a public safety standpoint. 

“The problem of gun violence is worsened by small groups,” Police Chief Shon Barnes said during a news conference Monday. “We have small groups that appear to be at odds with each other, and in our city 0.01% of the population is connected to 52% of our shootings.”

By Tuesday, Barnes was more direct.

“We believe this is linked to gang violence, and we are working to determine the groups involved and what their relationships may be,” Barnes said.

The evolving assessment has renewed attention on how Seattle investigates gang violence after eliminating its dedicated gang unit in 2020.

Today, those investigations are led primarily by the department’s Gun Violence Reduction Unit, with support from the intelligence unit and other specialized investigative teams rather than a standalone gang squad.

“We have our Gun Violence Reduction Unit,” Barnes said. “They take the lead on most of those cases, as well as our intelligence unit.”

According to Barnes, fewer than 80 people are connected to half of Seattle’s shootings. Now, the chief might have been a little hyperbolic with his figures, but his basic point about a very small number of individuals being responsible for a large portion of the city’s crime is accurate. 

There were 3,191 incidents of aggravated assault in Seattle last year. Those incidents include shootings as well as assaults in which a firearm wasn’t used. Even if every single one of those incidents involved a gun, though, we’d still be talking about, at most, 0.41 percent of the population being connected to 100 percent of shootings. 

Gun control laws make no sense from a public safety standpoint because they turn lawful activities into victimless crimes while failing to target the relatively few individuals in any given community who are the ones responsible for real crimes of violence. Many of these individuals are already well known to police and prosecutors, and most of these crimes are committed in an almost equally small portion of a city. As much as 75 percent of shootings typically take place within about 5 percent of a city’s footprint, so when targeted deterrence efforts are aimed at both the small number of individuals and a city’s crime hot spots, we can see massive reductions in violent crime. 

These strategies are already in place in a lot of cities, which might help to explain why our homicide and violent crime rates are plunging to historic lows. You won’t find many gun control activists touting targeted deterrence though. Why? Because even though gun control advocates frame their policies as a way to improve public safety, at its most basic level gun control isn’t about reducing crime. It’s about reducing gun ownership.  

Washington’s “ghost gun” ban didn’t stop a 15-year-old from getting his hands on a privately manufactured firearm. The state’s magazine ban didn’t stop one of the suspects from having a “large capacity” magazine. 

If the city of Seattle used these targeted deterrence strategies, it’s possible that these suspects would have been identified, arrested, and charged with other crimes long before last weekend’s shooting took place. But as a 2025 report from the city auditor bemoaned, “[o]ur 2015 Street Outreach audit noted that the City of Seattle does not use a focused deterrence approach to address violent crime and victimization, and that is still the case today.” 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

Help us continue to report on and expose the Democrats’ gun control policies and schemes. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.