After Seattle news media reported a 30-percent rise in the number of shootings in Seattle over this time last year, and a Tuesday homicide in the city’s Alki neighborhood, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is blasting the city’s so-called “gun violence tax” as a “monumental failure.”
“You simply cannot provide better evidence of such a colossally stupid idea gone wrong than the Seattle Police Department’s crime statistics,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb in a Thursday morning news release.
Gottlieb has challenged the city administration to “publicly admit” the gun tax has been a failure.
Those statistics are alarming, showing 36 shootings in the city so far this year including four fatalities. The number of “shots fired” reports to Seattle police is up 17 percent, at 155 as of May 15, and that didn’t include Tuesday’s exchange of gunfire that left a 23-year-old man dead.
According to KIRO and MyNorthwest.com, “Of the 35 shootings — not including the West Seattle shooting on Tuesday — police say six victims ‘appear to be true innocent/unintended.’”
Seattle’s controversial tax, modeled after a similar tax in Cook County, Illinois – evidently with the same aftermath of rising violence and death – was passed hastily nearly two years ago, in the summer of 2015.
Almost immediately after the gun tax was signed by anti-gun Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, CCRKBA’s sister organization, the Second Amendment Foundation, was joined by the National Rifle Association and National Shooting Sports Foundation in an historic lawsuit to overturn the tax on the grounds that it violates the state preemption law that places sole authority to regulate firearms in the hands of the State Legislature. It is the first time all three gun rights organizations have partnered in a joint legal action.
SAF has also filed a separate lawsuit, along with the senior editor of its monthly magazine, TheGunMag.com, over Seattle’s failure to disclose revenue from the gun tax under the state Public Records Act. The city will only say the tax as brought in “less than $200,000,” which is well below revenue forecasts that ranged between $300,000 and $500,000 that were used to justify adoption of this gun control tax. It has also been reported that the city has not spent any of the gun tax revenue on its gun control program while the lawsuit is in progress. Instead, the city reportedly took money out of the general fund to get that project started.
By no small coincidence, next Tuesday, May 30, is the fifth annual fund raising luncheon sponsored by the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a Seattle-based gun prohibition lobbying group financed by wealthy elitists and supported by Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety.
While this group is touting passage of another billionaire-bankrolled initiative last fall, they have not been so vocal about the gun tax and its negative results.
The keynoter at Tuesday’s gathering will be Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress. She is described as a “progressive champion.”
However, a 30-percent increase in shootings after a “gun violence tax” was passed by the city council is a rather unusual display of progress.
Related:
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Startling Revelation About Chicago Crime Guns
Turmoil in the Gun Prohibition Lobby?
