BELLEVUE, WA – Acting in accordance with the order of a King County Superior Court judge, the City of Seattle on Monday afternoon revealed what had been suspected for more than a year, that its revenue from a so-called “gun violence tax” was far below projections when the tax was hastily adopted in 2015, the Second Amendment Foundation has learned.
According to court-ordered data provided to the senior editor of TheGunMag.com, a SAF-owned publication, the city collected $103,766.22. That is woefully short of the predicted $300,000 to $500,000 predicted by then-City Council President Tim Burgess when he championed the tax.
“We suspected all along that the city’s predictions were fabricated,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “That’s why we were happy to support the First Amendment-based lawsuit initiated by editor Dave Workman. Earlier this year when the city would only acknowledge that it had collected ‘less than $200,000’ we were certain that Seattle’s stubborn reluctance to reveal their actual revenue was a matter of embarrassment.”
Gottlieb noted that a Sunday editorial in the Seattle Times admitted that it was “reasonable” for opponents “to assume regulatory intent by a City Council that talked about limiting gun sales,” and acknowledged that the city “didn’t help its credibility by concealing how much the gun tax raised…(The city’s) recalcitrance will result in city taxpayers paying gun advocates $35,000 in legal fees.” That doesn’t include the penalty against the city for withholding the information, he added.
“When you consider the money Seattle spent dodging Workman’s Public Records Act request,” Gottlieb observed, “combined with the fact that this gun tax caused one major retailer to move out of the city and another to refer his customers to a store in Fife, plus the losses in B&O taxes along with not coming remotely close to projections, this outrageous tax has resulted in a net loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Our opposition to the gun tax, which was unfortunately upheld by the state Supreme Court in a rather tortured opinion last week, has been vindicated,” he concluded. “For a newspaper to defend such a foolish scheme is simply astonishing.”