The Gun Counter

The City of Seattle on Monday afternoon confirmed what had long been suspected by Second Amendment advocates, that their so-called “gun violence tax” had pulled in far less than originally projected, a total of $103,766.22 for all of 2016.

When the city council hastily adopted the gun tax two years ago, then-Council President Tim Burgess projected revenues ranging from $300,000 to $500,000.

(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.

Jered wrote:So, they've netted $68,766.22.

And there's still going to be a penalty for not complying with the public records request.

randy wrote:If they dedicated more than 2 city employees worth of time to this effort, they probably are running at a loss.

Kommander wrote:This case and those like it are why there need to be real costs to the government employees themselves for disregarding the law like this. Sure they will find the city, but that's just tax payer money. The real entity that should be being fined is the city employees who thought this kind of thing is ok. Let them pay the fine out of their own pocket, not the taxpayers.

What I would really like to see is elected government officials being permanently barred from office if the Supreme Court rules that a law they passed or signed was unconstitutional.

We don't have the numbers for full 2016 because we only opened in Lynnwood in March. But for the year starting in March through February 2017, inclusive, we paid Lynnwood (and therefore did not pay Seattle - these are strictly local taxes, not the state taxes) $52671.44.
For the first half of 2017 we paid Lynnwood $33234.79.
In terms of sales of guns to Seattle residents, we have sold 781 guns to Seattle residents from 3/2015-10/2015 when we operated in Seattle and 855 guns 3/2016-10/2016 when we operated in Lynnwood (these are the sales to residents of Seattle ZIP codes, in both cases).
For the sales at the Outdoors Emporium, I was chatting with them just after the tax was proposed and they said that they were selling between 6000 and 7000 guns a year. It looks like in 2016 the sales dropped to under 2000, which means that Seattle lost tax revenue on 4000 guns. Average price of a gun is about $500, so at 3.1% local sales tax in 2016 it looks like they lost $62000 in sales tax for just the guns - not including (probably worse) reduction in sales on ammo and itinerant items because people no longer visit the store.
So between our store and OE, it looks like the combination of sales tax losses and gun tax revenue results in a mildly negative total, probably lost the city $10-20k.