I am leading with Shawn Vestal’s piece on the Texas Children Massacre. My point: couldn’t we make it so that at least the guy had to take some time to reload?

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The Spokesman-Review

Good ideas are out there, but it will take true zeal to make progress on gun safety

More Washington renters are being overcharged for damages, advocates say

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The Spokesman-Review

Good ideas are out there, but it will take true zeal to make progress on gun safety

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

– “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

The death toll was 14 children when I left to pick up my son at school.

It was 18 kids – and two teachers – by the time we got home.

It would eventually be 19 children, whose parents had to be DNA-tested for the purposes of identifying the bodies. The wondrously effective murder weapons that are dearer than children to so many American politicians had rendered these children unrecognizable.

Meanwhile, the “good-guy gap” had already closed.

The good-guy gap is my way of thinking about how long it takes after a massacre for gun zealots and paid-off politicians to begin spouting off in defense of wondrously effective murder weapons.

It’s based on the insane Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, who did something a decade ago that seemed inconceivable. A week after 20 children and six educators were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut – back when it seemed possible that the shock and horror of that event might prompt in a unified response – LaPierre delivered a lunatic rant calling for more guns everywhere, deploying what has become a cliche of American gun zealotry: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

LaPierre let a week pass after the massacre before doing that. It was widely expected beforehand that Newtown might force him to throw a bone to the people who thought it might, maybe, be worth trying to prevent further Newtowns.

How naive that seems now. That weeklong silence seems quaint in retrospect. These days, no self-respecting zealot, or do-nothing legislative quisling, waits even a day before rushing to the ramparts to defend our wondrously effective murder weapons. The good-guy gap is now minutes. It closes before the death count is final and the bodies are cold – calls for more guns, calls for arming teachers and lunch ladies, calls for “hardening” the target of schools.

It was minutes, not days, before people started saying we can’t blame the “tool.” Minutes, not days, before the cynical rush to change the subject to mental illness. Minutes, not days, before the right began a lockstep parroting of the importance of locked doors. Minutes, not days, before Second Amendment zealots began posing as victims of politicization. Minutes, not days, before the do-nothing engine was roaring at full speed.

This cynical chorus is as big a sign of our national disease as the children who died at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, or the shoppers who died at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, or picnicgoers who were shot at the neighborhood picnic in Dumas, Arkansas, or … It doesn’t matter a bit that in our two most recent massacres, good guys were present and did not stop the bad guys.

The good-guy gap is a realm of pure passion and magical thinking.

Another post-massacre dynamic has become routine alongside the good-guy gap. In this channel of discourse, a certain set of thinkers adopt a cool, detached analysis of our gun crisis – arguing with studied, eye-rolling aloofness that fury and grief are tiresomely beside the point.

In this view, the simple, human act of responding with sorrow and anger to a school massacre – along with emotional calls to do something about it – is dismissed as naive. We must be practical and realistic, this line of thinking goes, and not emotional.

I think this is exactly wrong. One hundred and eighty degrees.

And the reason I think so is the good-guy gap.

The good-guy gap – as a measure of how far impassioned people will go to defend the thing they love most – tells us something about passion and politics (and money, obviously). And it tells you how far you have to go with that passion to make things happen, which is very far indeed.

After all, you would not have argued that the smart thing to do, post-Newtown, was to stick up defiantly for wondrously effective murder weapons over the lives of kids.

But it worked like magic. The fury inside that speech kicked off a whole new chapter in our gun-violence denialism, and it’s become the template for the American right on the issue.

Meanwhile, in the more than two decades of the post-Columbine era, gun sales have tripled (based in large part on a small proportion of individuals buying a lot of guns), gun zealotry has hardened into a fundamentalist religion (witness the “Jesus Guns Babies” campaign in Georgia for one of a zillion examples), and national gun politics have been held hostage by zealous minority views.

Oh, and guns became the leading cause of death for American children.

There are many sound ideas for ways we can try to create change. But the path forward, on this issue, is not about ideas. It’s about grief and rage and passion, and turning those into action.

It’s about zealotry. There are many organizations and policy-makers and leaders who are calling for change, including important work being done by victims and families of victims from past school massacres.

But until we produce a national zealotry for protecting 10-yearolds that is politically stronger than the national zealotry for protecting our wondrously effective murder weapons, nothing’s going to change. Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or at shawnv@spokesman.com.

SHAWN VESTAL

SPOKESMAN COLUMNIST

More Washington renters are being overcharged for damages, advocates say

By Wilson Criscione

INVESTIGATEWEST

As a single mother of four kids, losing their apartment was hard enough for Natasha Pabon. But then came another brutal blow: $3,500 in charges from theproperty manager for damages and other fees.

It was a cost that 35-year-old Pabon – evicted over a conflict her daughter had with a neighbor – could not afford. Not only was she having to forfeit her $1,155 security deposit, but the property manager at Fern Ridge apartments in Olympia was charging her for things she didn’t think she should have to cover, like replacing blinds and painting cabinets. She was particularly upset that they charged $300 for “general cleaning” even though Pabon, who works as a cleaner, knew the place was spotless. They also charged her nearly $900 for “attorney fees,” according to documents Pabon provided to InvestigateWest, despite nothing having been filed in court. (Fern Ridge did not return a message seeking comment for this article.)

Natasha Pabon is photographed outside her former apartment building in Olympia on May 10. After being evicted, Pabon faced a second blow: $3,500 in charges from the property manager for damages and other fees.

DAN DELONG/ INVESTIGATEWEST

But Pabon has few options to prove that these fees are unreasonable. Housing providers and landlords argue the current system in Washington largely works as intended, allowing disputes to be resolved in small claims courts.

That route would require Pabon to make time to file a complaint and be able to attend a hearing. Then, she must argue convincingly – likely for the first time – against a landlord or housing company.

“It’s just ridiculous how this all just transpired,” Pabon said. “They want to evict you and then they want to put you in an even worse situation.”

Tenant advocates argue that Washington’s law doesn’t adequately protect tenants from being billed with unreasonable damage charges that can saddle tenants in debt and stymie their effort to find a new place to live. They tried in the last legislative session to change state law to better clarify what landlords can charge for, but were unsuccessful.

But they say there’s urgency to protect renters from unreasonable damage charges, particularly now amid a perfect storm of low vacancy rates and rising evictions following a two-year moratorium.

In April, 126 evictions were filed in King County – a nearly 1,400% increase over the eight filings in April 2020.

Terri Anderson, statewide policy director for the Tenants Union of Washington, said it’s “one of our most common calls to our tenant hotline.” And Scott Crain, an attorney with nonprofit Northwest Justice Project, which provides free legal assistance to tenants, said Justice Project hears from renters dealing with what they feel are unreasonable damage charges “all the time.”

“People really don’t get their deposit back these days,” Crain says. “It’s a real, problematic statewide issue for renters.”

Defining wear and tear

Once tenants move out, housing providers in Washington have 21 days to return the deposit. If they are withholding part of it or asking to recover damage costs exceeding the deposit amount, they must provide a “full and specific” statement explaining why, per the state’s Residential Landlord- Tenant Act. They cannot charge tenants for “normal wear and tear resulting from ordinary use of the premises.”

But the “normal wear and tear” standard isn’t explicitly defined in state law. That can create confusion between landlords and renters, said Sarah Nagy, a staff attorney at Columbia Legal Services.

Do scuffs on the carpet meet that definition? What about dirty drip pans, or light bulbs that have gone out?

The lack of clarity in Washington, Nagy argued, opens the door for bad actors to take advantage of low-income tenants.

“It’s completely up to any given landlord to determine themselves what’s the legitimate claim for damage,” Nagy said. “And you have to go to a third-party adjudicator like a small claims court to get any clarity on that.”

Going to small claims court, however, is a time-consuming barrier for many renters. Even though attorneys aren’t allowed in small claims court, renters can feel outgunned if going up against a landlord or property management company in front of a judge.

Crain, with Northwest Justice Project, said he has a hard time advising renters to take unreasonable charges to court because “everyone has a different definition” of wear and tear.

“You can’t predict what happens when you go to court, which is one of the failures of the law,” Crain said. “You want predictability.”

But if the tenant is unable to pay, the other option isn’t much better. If the housing provider sends the damage costs to collections, it can severely hamper a renter’s ability to find new housing, since it would appear on any routine credit check.

Of course, some renters do successfully fight questionable charges in court. Still, the experience can weigh heavily on them.

Robert Elon Mix, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran who has diabetes, was living homeless when a $5,000 bill for damages to the apartment he was evicted from was sent to a collections agency. The apartment complex he had lived in had changed ownership and wouldn’t allow Mix to pay rent in two separate checks, based on when he received his Social Security and Veterans Affairs benefits.

“Not a day went by when I didn’t get some type of crap from these people,” Mix said.

Mix contacted Crain, with Northwest Justice Project, who helped him win a case that saw the damage charges reduced to zero after arguing the company discriminated against Mix based on his disability.

But losing his housing, being harassed by a collections agency and battling in court brought back Mix’s depression and post traumatic stress disorder, which he’d battled since the war.

“And it hasn’t gotten any better,” he said.

Bill fails in Legislature

Mix was one of several people who testified in favor of state House Bill 1300, introduced in 2021 by state Rep. My-Linh Thai, D-Bellevue, aimed at preventing landlords from charging unreasonable damages.

The bill clarified “normal wear and tear” as any damages due to aging or deterioration caused by simply living and specified that deposits generally cannot be withheld for things like carpet cleaning, or replacing lighting fixtures, equipment, appliances and furnishings if their condition had not been documented at the start of tenancy. It also called for landlords to provide receipts of any work they are charging tenants for.

“The effect would be to clarify what a landlord can charge for before the parties are forced to take on the time and expense of small claims court,” Nagy said.

But HB 1300 has gone nowhere in each of the last two legislative sessions. Initially, housing providers strongly objected to other aspects of the bill that they thought were impractical, such as a provision requiring a walk-through assessing damages shortly before the move-out date because furniture or wall hangings present during an inspection could hide damage.

“Rep. Thai’s proposal presents logistical challenges and ultimately creates the potential for a contentious parting of ways between landlord and tenant when there otherwise is a good relationship,” said Cory Brewer, vice president of residential operations for Windermere Property Management, who testified against the bill.

Pabon, the mother in Olympia, found a new home under the condition that she pay a higher security deposit because of the damage charges from her previous tenancy.

But all of that, combined with the fees just to fill out applications for a new apartment, completely drained her savings.

“It just means you have nothing at the end of this,” Pabon said.

So now, she’s already trying to build up her savings for the next time she moves.