This just in from la La Land

The LA Times, of all papers, weighs on on Nickels' Gun Ban, and is not impressed.

The backdrop to Seattle's gun debate is the growing concern about crime, sometimes violent, in downtown Seattle. The downtown core's edgier neighborhoods have been havens for drugs and prostitution, but lately upscale condos and restaurants are popping up as part of an attempt to fight sprawl and keep the city from rolling up the sidewalks when downtown workers head for the east side at 5 p.m.

Merchants and residents in neighborhoods like Belltown have been on a harangue against the police, complaining that street bums and their occasionally violent counterparts are making their community's sidewalks a no-go zone after dark.

One Belltown woman became an Internet sensation this year by posting home videos shot from her apartment window depicting various scenes of drug-dealing, heroin-shooting and sex -- with whimsical titles like "Crackhead makes a pipe out of a can while wearing a sombrero."

Nothing was to prepare the city, though, for what happened last month to 53-year-old Edward McMichael -- the offbeat merrymaker known as the "Tuba Man" who had long been a fixture outside sporting events across the city, playing his tuba in oversize Dr. Seuss or Uncle Sam hats.

McMichael was not far from where the Folklife Festival is held when he was set upon by five youths who the same night had been hitting up others for money and cellphones. As he lay on the ground in a fetal position, the youths kicked him and beat him, fatally injuring the Seattle man.

More than 1,000 people turned out at Qwest Field for a memorial service Nov. 12.

Although Seattle has problems with gang violence in the suburbs, and the papers have written exhaustively about some recent high-profile shootings elsewhere in the state, relatively little of the recent downtown crime has involved guns, which is one reason not many Belltown residents are lining up to support the mayor's proposed gun ban.

In a column for the local online newspaper, Crosscut, veteran journalist Knute Berger argued that citizens who may have good reason to feel threatened in the city's backcountry-like parks have every right to go there legally armed.

"I've been stalked. I know others who have been the victims of stalkers and involved in domestic violence situations that pose an ongoing threat," Berger wrote.

"To ask citizens with the legal right to carry guns elsewhere to disarm themselves in circumstances where vigilance is often required and protection hard to come by is unfair, even dangerous."

Gun rights advocates, who have pledged to sue immediately if Seattle proceeds with the ban, agree.

"It's criminals who break laws, by nature of being criminals, and they're not going to care if you pass a law saying you can't have a gun on public property. It's meaningless," said Alan Gottlieb of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which with the National Rifle Assn. is challenging gun bans in San Francisco and Chicago.

Those challenges are having a measure of success: Lawyers at the San Francisco Housing Authority said this week they were preparing to settle the case by revising their prohibition against all firearms in public housing to a ban on "unlawful possession of a firearm," meaning tenants with gun permits could still keep a weapon at home.

Seattle officials said they would ask the Legislature next year to expand the state's preemption law to make room for regulations like the one Nickels proposed.

Penaluna, for his part, doesn't think a gun ban would have made him any more safe.

"I was hurt by a stupid person who happened to make a stupid decision with a gun," he said.

"There are thousands of people all over Seattle, I know, who walk strapped. And they're not gang-bangers. They're responsible adults who are afraid of gang-bangers," he said.

"I think this ordinance is nothing more than a classic governmental way of trying to put a Band-Aid over a problem instead of finding a solution."

There was a letter to the editor in Sundays fishwrap objecting to the idea that some "Gun Person" had written in, suggesting that, if the Tuba Man had been lawfully armed, he might be alive today.

("Penaluna" is Joshua Penaluna, who was injured at Folklife Festival when some idjit decided to disarm a guy who was carrying concealed with a permit.)(So remember, kids, "concealed means CONCEALED"!)

I may have to stop making fun of LA and the LA Times. Not gonna be easy...