City of Seattle

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Declining “Gun Violence” Tax Revenue In Seattle

March 19, 2018 by 1 Comment

Who’d a thunk it? Collections of the Seattle, WA “gun violence” (sic) tax are down again. Did any of the politicians on the Seattle City Council not figure out that buyers could vote with their feet and buy their ammo and guns outside the city limits?

I guess not given their original estimates of annual revenue was expected to be in the $300-500,000 range and actual 2017 collections were $92,220.74. We only know these real numbers thanks to the efforts of Dave Workman and the Second Amendment Foundation who had to sue to force the original disclosure of the 2016 numbers.

The Second Amendment Foundation released this statement regarding the tax collections:

BELLEVUE, WA. – Seattle’s “gun violence tax” revenue has once again failed to meet predictions, demonstrating once again that this was really a thinly disguised gun control scheme that was sold to the public as an effort to reduce so-called “gun violence,” the Second Amendment Foundation said today.

Figures released by the city under a Public Records Act request by the senior editor of SAF’s monthly magazine TheGunMag.com show the city collected $93,220.74 last year, a decline of nearly $10,000 from the amount collected in 2016 and far below the $300,000 to $500,000 revenue originally predicted by its proponents on the Seattle City Council when the tax was hastily passed almost three years ago.

“Once again,” noted SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “Seattle’s pie-in-the-sky gun tax revenue forecast has been proven to be a complete failure, essentially like other gun control fantasies. The revenue data only reinforces our claim in a lawsuit against the tax that this was a gun control scheme to drive firearm sales and gun stores out of the city, which it obviously did.

“It is important to remember that the city would never have released this data if it hadn’t been for our lawsuit in 2016 that forced Seattle to come clean and turn over the revenue figures,” he observed. “Otherwise, we believe the city would have continued to conceal this information because it is embarrassingly short of their prediction.”

“This was, and remains, a First Amendment issue,” said TheGunMag.com Senior Editor Dave Workman. “The public, and especially Seattle taxpayers, have a right to this information.”

“The city probably spent more on legal bills to keep the information confidential, and on manpower to comply with the Public Records Act and last year’s court order than it has so far collected,” Gottlieb estimated. “But this is a pretty good example of what gun control is all about. It always begins with grandiose promises, it invariably hurts the wrong people, it doesn’t stop criminals, and in the end those responsible stubbornly refuse to admit their real goal was to further erode gun rights. And the public winds up essentially worse off than they were before.”

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Another Of Bloomberg’s Illegal Mayors Bites The Dust

September 14, 2017 by 1 Comment

Mayor Bloomberg’s Illegal Mayors has gained another member. Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle resigned effective as of 5 pm PDT today. He has been accused of child molestation by at least five men.

From Oregon Public Radio:

The resignation comes after a younger cousin accused him of sexual abuse in the 1970s.

The Seattle Times reports that Joseph Dyer, 54, accuses Murray of repeatedly molesting him when he was a teenager.

Dyer is the fifth man to accuse the mayor of such abuse.

Murray has repeatedly denied allegations of sexual abuse. He has said in the past that accusations from four men were part of a right-wing political agenda to take him down. According to the Times, Murray said the latest accusation is false and is likely because of a family rift.

Dyer says Murray forced him into sex while they shared a bedroom in Dyer’s childhood home, according to the Times. Dyer says he was 13 years old at the time. Murray lived with Dyer’s family in New York after his mother passed away.

Dyer has provided a signed declaration to a Seattle lawyer representing Delvonn Heckard, the man who sued Murray earlier this year for repeatedly raping him in the 1980s. The lawsuit has since been withdrawn but Heckard has filed a claim for damages against the city of Seattle.

Murray denies the claims of molestation but nonetheless has resigned. I hate to say it but you don’t publicly accuse someone of child molestation over a mere family rift. Dyer, Murray’s cousin, provided a signed declaration to the attorney representing Delvonn Heckard who had also accused Murray of molestation.

I don’t know if the statute of limitations has passed or not. However, child molestation is one of the most sordid of crimes especially when done by either a family member or someone in a position of authority. Murray was a family member of Dyer and a counselor to the other men. Resignation from his mayoral post and deciding not to run for re-election seems to me an effort on the part of Murray to hide as much of these incidents as possible.

I hope these men get the justice that they deserve. Three years ago the headline in the Seattle Times read, “Big winners: gun control and Mayor Ed Murray.” How times have changed in Seattle for at least one of these two.

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“Gun Violence” Tax Receipts Prove People Vote With Their Feet

August 17, 2017 by 6 Comments

When the City of Seattle city council passed their “gun violence” (sic) tax in 2015 the proponent of the measure, Councilman Tim Burgess, projected tax revenues from it to be between $300,000 and $500,000 annually. Opponents of the measure suggested at the time that gun buyers would just avoid the $25 tax on firearms by purchasing their firearms outside the city limits. As we suspected all along the opponents were correct.

Thanks to a lawsuit originally brought by Dave Workman, senior editor of TheGunMag, Seattle was forced to divulge the real collection numbers. The real numbers differ from those projected by Councilman Burgess.

The real number is $103,766.22. Of that amount, $86,410 comes from Sodo’s Outdoor Emporium whose owner has indicated that he might just shift his gun sales entirely to his other store outside of Seattle.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Councilman Burgess isn’t fazed by the numbers.

“I’m neither disappointed or pleased,” he said Tuesday, adding that he knew the $300,ooo to $500,000 was just a guess. “It is what it is.”

The tax charges $25 for every firearm sold in the city and 5 cents for every round of ammunition of .22 caliber or greater.

Harborview’s take from the tax was always supposed to be about $130,000. The 2016 tax revenue falls short of that, but while the tax was contested in courts, the city allocated $275,000 from the general fund toward the study.

Money generated by the “gun violence” (sic) tax was supposed to go to fund “gun violence” (sic) research at Harborview Medical Center.

Burgess goes on to say about the tax collections:

Burgess defended the tax as a means of making gun sellers part of the solution to the effects of gun violence.

“The fundamental principle behind the tax is that the firearms industry should contribute to mitigating the harms caused by their products,” he said. “That remains the primary motivation for the tax. That’s what we set out to do, that’s what we passed and that’s what the state Supreme Court has validated.”

The law was not written to specify where the tax revenue would go, but it was always intended to go toward programs like Harborview’s, Burgess explained. So if the city had collected an amount beyond the agreed-upon $130,000, the excess would have gone to other education and public safety causes, he said.

But should the tax continue to generate less than $130,000 or progressively shrink, “then I’m sure my colleagues would continue to fund the program with other sources,” Burgess said.

I guess in liberal paradises like Seattle the voters don’t really care if their councilmen and women take a cavalier attitude towards taxes. That is just a price to pay to live in a city where the wealthy hire off-duty cops to give them extra protection from the criminal class.

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Dave Workman And SAF Win Against City Of Seattle (Updated)

August 3, 2017 by 3 Comments

The City of Seattle thought adding a “gun violence tax” of $25 for every firearm sold within the city limits would raise between $300,000 and half a million dollars. They forgot to factor in that buyers can vote with their feet and patronize gun stores outside the city limits. Thanks to a lawsuit under the state of Washington’s Public Records Act by Dave Workman and the Second Amendment Foundation, we now know the real amount collected. It was just a bit over $100,000 and most of that comes from one gun store that publicized its own figures.

It is not surprising that Seattle wanted to keep this embarrassing amount quiet. No politician wants the public to know that his or her pet program is an abject failure

According to the press release from the Second Amendment Foundation, they will be awarded a $377  fine plus their attorneys’ fees. The fine is a dollar a day for each day the City of Seattle drug its feet in bad faith on releasing the requested information. The unfortunate part is that city taxpayers and not the politicians are the ones footing the bill.

Congratulations to Dave, Alan, and everyone else at SAF for their win on this First Amendment case with Second Amendment overtones.

UPDATE: More on the win by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Mike Coombs, owner of the Outdoor Emporium, was the store owner whose collections constituted about 80% of the collections. Given his comments in the interview, I think the real aim of Seattle City Council is to make the city the next San Francisco. That is, no gun stores within the city limits.

Coombs sought to force the city’s hand by releasing his own pay-ins to the tax. He wrote in a memo to the court that he paid $86,410.63 last year.

The city has only said it collected less than $200,000 and that one business has paid more than 80 percent of the total tax revenue — by that math, Coombs believe he is that big fish, and estimates the city only brought in about $108,000 total.

Coombs also laid out additional devastating statistics for his business: Outdoor Emporium’s firearm sales dropped about 20 percent last year from 2015 and its ammunition sales were cut in half. Overall sales were cut 15 percent because customers who bought guns and bullets also bought other supplies at the store.

His store in Fife has not suffered the same losses.

“Many of our customers have told me that they stopped shopping at our store because of the firearm and ammunition tax, and that has meant that they have started shopping at stores outside Seattle for all their sporting goods needs,” Coombs wrote to the court. “I believe most of Outdoor Emporium’s loss of sales is directly linked to the firearm and ammunition tax.”

What’s more: Coombs laid off some staff and collected $183,747 less in sales tax last year. Deducting the portion of the sales tax that goes to the city from the amount it collected with the gun safety tax, Coombs estimated that Seattle gained only $25,000 from Outdoor Emporium as a result of the ordinance.

 Given the city pulled $275,000 from its general fund to help fund the “gun violence” (sic) prevention pilot program at Harborview General Hospital, the tax was never about raising money. It was about control.

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Confusing The NRA With The NSSF

July 2, 2016 by 2 Comments

The Seattle City Council has mandated that pistols that would normally be traded in when the police department makes upgrades will be destroyed. This boneheaded move which passed council with an unanimous vote will cost taxpayers approximately $30,000 according to the website Blue Lives Matter.

“Officer Blue” then went on to make this statement:

What the Seattle city council is ignoring here is that guns are still being actively manufactured and sold. Destroying old guns doesn’t reduce the number of guns on the streets, it just increases the number of newly manufactured guns being purchased. The NRA is unlikely to oppose such a knuckle-headed policy, because destroying old firearms increases the profits of gun manufacturers. Gun manufacturers only make money on the first time that a firearm is sold. All used gun sales are potentially a lost sale to a gun manufacturer. If other police departments follow suit in destroying their used firearms, then you might want to look into purchasing stock in gun manufacturing companies.

“Officer Blue” is making the common media mistake of thinking that the NRA is an agent of gun manufacturers. While they have good relationships with the manufacturers, it is not the job of the National Rifle Association to increase the profits of the firearms industry. That is the job of their trade association the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

In reality, I think both organizations would oppose the destruction of these firearms. The NRA would oppose it as a matter of public policy as it recognizes that not all shooters can afford new firearms. Moreover, historically many surplus firearms such as M1 carbines were sold directly to shooters under the auspices of the NRA. The NSSF would oppose it because their constituency also includes FFLs as well as manufacturers.

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SAF, NRA, And NSSF Move For Summary Judgment In Seattle Gun Tax Case

October 26, 2015 by 5 Comments

After the City of Seattle imposed a “gun violence tax” on sales of arms and ammunition within their city limits, the Second Amendment Foundation, National Rifle Association, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation jointly sued the city. Under Washington State law, cities and counties are preempted from passing regulations that impact firearms. That is reserved for the state.

This suit is groundbreaking because it is the first time the three have jointly sued on a gun rights issue. Now comes word that they have moved for summary judgment in King County Superior Court.

Plaintiffs Move For Summary Judgement In Challenge To Seattle Gun Tax

BELLEVUE, WA – Plaintiffs challenging a so-called “gun violence tax” recently passed by the Seattle City Council have today filed a motion for summary judgment in their lawsuit, citing Washington State’s long-standing preemption statute which “fully occupies and preempts the entire field of firearms regulation within the boundaries of the state.” The motion was filed in King County Superior Court.

Attorneys Steven Fogg and David Edwards, with Corr Cronin Michelson, Baumgardner Fogg & Moore LLP filed the motion for the Second Amendment Foundation, National Rifle Association, National Shooting Sports Foundation and their co-plaintiffs. They allege that the city “is well aware of this restriction on its legislative power, in part because its most recent attempt to regulate firearms was emphatically struck down by the Court of Appeals.”

That case was Chan v. City of Seattle, brought by SAF, NRA and several other plaintiffs. Fogg also argued that case. It derailed an attempt by the city under former Mayors Greg Nickels and Mike McGinn to ban guns in city park facilities. But Washington State’s preemption statute, passed 32 years ago and used as a model by other states to adopt similar legislation, stopped that effort in its tracks.

“Seattle is trying to be too clever by half,” said SAF Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb. “Our motion shows that members of the city council brainstormed with members of local gun control groups to try to skirt the preemption law. This so-called ‘gun violence tax’ clearly seeks to limit access to firearms and ammunition by imposing what amounts to a regulatory fee on the sale of all firearms and ammunition within City limits. The city can’t do that, and we’re confident the court will tell them so.

“The city can’t even pass this off as a B&O tax, because it’s a flat fee, not a percentage of sales,” he continued. “In the final analysis, this is an attempt to skate around, and thus erode, our state’s model preemption law. That cannot be allowed to stand. The City of Seattle is not an entity unto itself, but still part of Washington State, and therefore the city has to abide by the same laws we all follow.”

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Christmas Comes Early For The Second Amendment Foundation

December 20, 2013 by 1 Comment

Thanks to the City of Seattle’s obstructionism, the Second Amendment Foundation is $38,000 richer. SAF had filed a public documents request regarding the city’s gun buyback held in January of this year. While SAF received some documents, hundreds more were “accidentally overlooked” in anti-gun Mayor Mike McGinn’s office.

The Second Amendment Foundation had sued the city in King County Superior Court back in July  for violating Washington’s Public Records Act.

From SAF:

BELLEVUE, WA The Second Amendment Foundation has accepted a $38,000 settlement from the City of Seattle for the city’s failure to release public records about the city’s gun buyback in January.

As part of the agreement, the city has acknowledged that it did not promptly or properly provide all of the documents sought by SAF under the Public Records Act. SAF was represented by Bellevue attorney Miko Tempski.

“It is a shame that this had to drag out so long,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “but the important thing is that the city, and outgoing Mayor Mike McGinn’s office has been held accountable for sloppy handling of our request. One would have thought the city had learned something earlier this year when the police department had to pay the Seattle Times $20,000, for also not providing requested documents.

“Maybe the citizens of Seattle can consider this a Christmas gift from the departing mayor,” he remarked. “This would not have been necessary had McGinn’s office done its job.”

SAF had pursued e-mails and other documents related to the January buyback, which was conducted in a parking lot underneath I-5 in downtown Seattle. The operation was something of an embarrassment that even Washington Ceasefire President Ralph Fascitelli had advised against, the recovered e-mails revealed.

Earlier the city had supplied some of the requested documents, but a story in the Seattle P-I.com revealed there were other materials that had not been provided to SAF by Mayor McGinn’s office.

“It seems hard to conceive,” Tempski said, “how you could accidentally overlook hundreds of documents and how that could be unintentional.”

“The settlement,” said Gottlieb, “will help SAF continue its legal work. Hopefully, we will see better performance from a new city administration in January.”