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."
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kim.murphy@latimes.com
Stuart Glascock of The Times' Seattle Bureau contributed to this report.
