Mike Coombs feels like he is in the crosshairs of Seattle lawmakers, who this year implemented a special tax on the guns and ammo his Fourth Avenue store has sold for more than 40 years.
(FOX)- On January 1 Seattle began imposing a $25 tax on every gun and a 5-cent tax on every round sold within city limits. The stated objective was to raise up to $500,000 per year to fund programs to prevent gun violence. But Coombs claims the real effect is to kill his business, and a gun rights legal foundation is battling the city for figures it believes will show the law was never about taking in revenue.
“What they’re trying to do is get gun stores out of the city,” said Coombs, 48, whose Outdoor Emporium store operates in the shadow of Safeco Field and boasts of having “the largest selection of outdoor related products at affordable everyday warehouse pricing.”
Longtime customers have told Coombs they simply go outside the city now to buy firearms and ammunition rather than pay the tax, which he blames for the layoffs of two workers so far this year. Precise Shooter, a smaller gun shop in Seattle, moved 16 miles outside of the city to Lynnwood on the day the tax took effect.
“We feel that, basically, a crackpot politician was trying to buttress his ‘progressive’ credentials and we got run over,” owner Sergey Solyanik told MyNorthwest.com.
Solyanik was referring to Seattle City Council President Tim Burgess, who drafted the law providing for the so-called “gun violence tax.” The City Budget Office estimated the gun violence tax would collect between $300,000 to $500,000 a year, which Burgess said would fund gun violence prevention programs and medical research.