Why Washington state’s constitution bans armed militias
Before statehood, mob violence and labor suppression raised serious questions about who had the right to maintain public order.
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Updated at 9:51 AM Jan. 21, 2021
Demonstrators with rifles slung across their backs attend a rally by gun-rights advocates in 2014, in Olympia, Wash. The armed protest drew members of the Three Percenters, a militia movement and paramilitary group described as having right-libertarian and far-right ideology. (Rachel La Corte/AP)
In 1888, a confrontation in the coal-mining town of Roslyn, in Kittitas County, just east of the Cascade crest, helped shape the Washington state constitution. The incident, a small chapter in a longer narrative of regional tumult, involved union laborers, strikebreakers, hired railroad guards armed with weapons and violent clashes over race.