Museum gets rid of vintage weapons to comply with Washington state gun laws

Museum gets rid of vintage weapons to comply with Washington state gun laws
(Image credit: Twitter)

The Lynden Pioneer Museum in Washington state features exhibits on life in Victorian times, the area's natural resources, and the Pacific Theater of World War II. The latter display has gotten the museum in trouble with a new gun law approved by Washington voters in the recent election.

The law requires the recipient of any gun transfer not between family to undergo a background check. While it is unlikely that the museum would actually be prosecuted for retaining the guns, the difficulty of defining what would qualify as a background check on a museum — and the potentially ruinous legal fees if prosecution did occur — led to the decision to pull the weapons display by December 3.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.