By Harold Hutchison
Shootings that took place near a pizza restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, and a food festival in Seattle, Washington, occurred in places with a pattern of leniency involving firearm misuse.
Nine people were wounded in a July 19 shooting near Empire Pizza and Pub in Tucson, while three people were killed and four others were wounded during the Bite of Seattle food festival near the city’s iconic Space Needle. However, information after both shootings indicates that these shootings could have been prevented by locking people up for past firearm misuse. (RELATED: Watch Cop Bring Mass Shooter’s Rampage To Screeching Halt)
The alleged shooter in Tucson, 21-year-old David Leroy French, is a felon who previously received probation after being convicted on charges related to an incident where he fired a rifle at a car wash employee in 2024. Instead of serving two to nine years in prison for firing a gun, French was put on probation.
Democratic Tucson Mayor Regina Romero blamed “easy access to guns and Arizona’s weak gun safety laws” in a statement posted the day of the shooting, with Democratic Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva attacking pro-Second Amendment groups for blocking “common sense gun safety reform” in a post on Facebook.
Conveniently, Romero and Grijalva don’t direct any anger toward the judge who imposed the lenient sentence, or admit that someone convicted of violent felonies can’t possess guns because that would violate federal law.
In Seattle, we don’t know much about the alleged perpetrators, one of whom is reportedly 15 years old, a second is at large and the third, a 19-year-old, was among those killed. In this case, though, there is a more damning pattern that KIRO-TV reporter Gary Horcher pointed out in a Monday post on X: State laws involving juveniles misusing firearms to commit crimes require authorities to give those charged many breaks.
“Washington State law says a juvenile can be arrested for gun possession five times, with five different guns for five different gun-related crimes, before a judge even has the legal option to send a teen to detention for longer than 30 days,” Horcher posted, linking to a May 2025 article describing several incidents, including one where a 16-year-old charged in a murder had twice been arrested for possessing stolen firearms but was let out both times.
In another case Horcher detailed, three kids ages 14 and younger were caught with pistols that had been illegally converted to fire full auto but were let loose. Never mind the fact that the National Firearms Act has big-time penalties for having unregistered fully-automatic firearms, and the ATF would not let 14-year-olds send in the form to legally convert firearms to fully-automatic firearms.
“They just assume nothing’s going to happen to them. And you know what? They’re right most of the time,” former Seattle Police Department homicide detective Cloyd Steiger told Horcher in the May 2025 article, adding, “To wait five convictions is outrageous!”
When states like Washington let juvenile offenders avoid going to prison for serious crimes, that increases the crime rate among juveniles, because they know that instead of going to jail for a substantial period of time, they get only a short stint in juvenile detention. As criminology professor Peter Moskos notes, “Recidivism among 16-year-olds went up” a lot when the age for being prosecuted in adult court was raised in New York. Restrictions on punishment of violent juveniles have resulted in out-of-control, dangerous juvenile jails where guards and inmates alike are attacked.
Carjacking exploded among teens because teenage carjackers knew that even if they were caught, they would be treated very leniently. In 2021, two teenage girls aged 13 and 15 carjacked and killed an Uber Eats Driver in Washington, DC, a crime for which they received only juvenile detention, not prison. Juveniles often do only a short stint in juvenile detention for violence or serious crimes that would land an adult in prison for a substantial period of time. Juveniles are more likely to commit a crime if they know they won’t be imprisoned for it. “A 12-year-old responsible for emailing seven bomb threats to Maryland schools this month knew a state law would prevent authorities from bringing charges, police announced Wednesday,” reported NBC News. As a result, he went ahead and emailed the bomb threats.
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes hinted that the issue involved with the Bite of Seattle shooting was gangs shortly before he was reportedly fired by Democratic Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson over frequent trips to Chicago, where his family lives. Wilson asked for Barnes’ resignation Thursday, KIRO TV reported.
“The problem of gun violence is worsened by small groups,” Police Chief Shon Barnes told reporters during a Monday news conference. “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.”
You think people would have learned after the Parkland shooting, where reports quickly surfaced that Nikolas Cruz, the shooter, had previously been expelled from school after ammunition was discovered in his backpack. Cruz was never arrested, even though he had arguably violated the Gun-Free School Zones Act.
We wonder why these shootings happen. All too often, the answer is that those who misuse guns don’t get locked up when they’re caught the first time, and then anti-Second Amendment politicians want gun owners to accept punishment for crimes that would otherwise not have happened.
To curb violence, violent offenders need to go to jail for a serious amount of time. Longer sentences keep dangerous people locked up so they can’t get out and harm law-abiding people. Studies of countries with very low incarceration rates have found that letting criminals out early increases the crime rate, and that higher levels of incarceration are a good investment. In Baltimore, most killings are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but who are no longer in jail due to getting a lenient sentence for that earlier crime.
