The politician in this article is not a senator in the US federal government, who would work in Washington DC, but a senator in the Washington State government,

The politician in this article is not a senator in the US federal government, who would work in Washington DC, but a senator in the Washington State government, whose capital is Olympia. He represents a heavily forested rural district whose largest city has 38,000 people, very much the kind of place where carrying a gun is common. You joke about the Wild West but that is exactly what this is about; frontier mentality has not yet vanished in rural parts of the American West.