By Dave Workman | Editor-in-Chief
A dramatic spike in Seattle, Washington homicides in 2020 proves the city’s five-year-old “gun violence tax” on firearm and ammunition sales has been “a disastrous failure,” according to one of the nation’s largest grassroots gun rights organizations.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms opposed the tax when it was hastily adopted during the summer of 2015. At the time, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb predicted nothing productive would come from the tax. He also said it would drive gun retailers and their clients out of the city, and both of those things happened.
According to the Seattle Times, Seattle murders last year jumped an alarming 61 percent over 2019. The Seattle Police Department reported 50 slayings in 2020, though TGM checked police data and found 52 listed on their website. An SPD source said two of the murder investigations were turned over to Burien police because the victims washed ashore from Puget Sound on a section of beach that is within the Burien jurisdiction.
“Seattle city leaders rammed through this gun tax over our objections back in 2015,” Gottlieb recalled. “It has never come close to creating the tax revenue that was predicted, and the number of homicides and non-fatal shootings has not gone down. Claims that this tax would help reduce violent crime amounted to nothing more than a snake oil sales pitch.”
TGM has retained data over the past five years, confirming Gottlieb’s claim. When the tax was adopted, the chief proponent—Councilman Tim Burgess—forecast annual revenue between $300,000 to $500,000. But the revenue has never come close. In 2016, the city collected $103,766, and in 2017 the take declined to $93,220. In 2018, the number fell again, to $75,518 but in 2019, revenue bounced up slightly to $85,352.
TGM had to sue the city in 2016, with support from the Second Amendment Foundation, which owns the publication, to force disclosure of the revenue data.
In 2019, the city recorded 31 slayings, according to the Times. However, SPD data for that year says there were 35 murders and 32 in 2018. Either way, last year’s dramatic increase is ample evidence of a dramatic failure of the city’s gun control law to produce the desired results, Gottlieb contended.
“The tax literally drove business out of the city and into a neighboring county,” he recalled, “resulting in a loss of revenue, and it’s pretty clear the actual intent was to push gun stores out and make it harder for Seattle residents to purchase firearms and ammunition. Obviously, when you do that, only criminals will be armed and crime will go up.”
TGM has learned from the city that gun tax revenue data for 2020 should be available around Feb. 15. “Revenue returns have been pitiful,” Gottlieb stated, “but not nearly as pathetic as the city’s incompetence in adopting the tax in the first place. The current situation was more predictable than winter rain in Seattle.”
According to the Seattle Times, 60 percent of Seattle’s homicides last year involved firearms, while in 2019, guns were used in 66 percent of the murders. But that might be misleading, considering the hike in the number of murders. Fatal stabbings were up last year, and some victims were murdered with blunt instruments.
Last year’s death toll was the highest in 26 years, making it the deadliest year so far in this century, one online news service said.
