Does Tacoma really want to reduce gun violence? If so, it’s time to bite the bullet
To listen to the Tacoma City Council is to believe they see the urgency of the problem. When you hear them discuss the ways that gun violence impacts this community — the lives it steals and tears apart, and the disproportionate impact it has on communities of color — you’re left with the genuine sense that they care, and there’s little doubt they do.
More than anything, that’s what makes the inertia so frustrating. Words are good, and occasionally even important. Actions actually matter.
Unfortunately, the latter has proved elusive.
Regardless of how it’s spun, that was the major takeaway from a minor budget request passed by the City Council on Tuesday. On its own, the $25,000 allocated by the council Tuesday night to fund community engagement efforts and research to help the city understand how it can effectively reduce gun violence in Tacoma is hard to quibble with — and noncontroversial. At a time when homicides are up and guns are playing a major factor, what the city pocket change will pay for in the coming months is an important — and safe — first step.
It’s just that … well … we’ve been talking about this for a long time, and the time for cautious first steps was long ago.
Tuesday night’s vote was progress, sure. But it was also an irritating reminder that we’re still essentially at the starting line. Our elected officials clearly want to help — to make things better, and reduce the number of senseless gun deaths in our communities — but they’ve also been undeniably slow and timid.
Why? It’s a question that takes us back to the pre-pandemic (seemingly prehistoric) year of 2019, when Tacoma’s council passed a gun and ammo tax that would raise $30,000 annually to fund violence prevention programs. An amendment to the tax stipulated that the the kind of outreach, community engagement and research that the $25,000 will now pay was required to come first. That was more than a year ago. Meanwhile, implementation of the tax — which was originally scheduled to begin being collected in July 2020 — has been repeatedly delayed.
According to the city, the lack of progress is largely pandemic related. COVID-19 has made meeting the requirement for community outreach and research difficult, at least until now, we’re told, despite the fact that everyone else, including the council, has apparently figured out Zoom. While there’s truth in the excuse, it also feels like half the story, the part that gets said out loud.
Currently, collection of the tax is penciled on the calendar for July 2022, assuming the council maintains the resolve to go through with it, which seems fair to wonder. It also seems fair to wonder whether at least some of the delay can be attributed to what Council member Lillian Hunter recently referred to as “the hornet’s nest” that is the Great Gun Debate, which the city perhaps unwittingly jumped into when it first presented and passed its since-shelved gun and ammo tax.
This brings us to the present, and the acknowledgment that this is actually about more than a small tax that will raise a small amount of money to help solve a problem that’s much bigger than Tacoma can tackle alone — or the tiny step toward it the City Council took this week.
Even the tax’s most ardent supporters have always maintained it isn’t the be-all-end-all solution to a national epidemic. There’s no grandeur or naivety. Of course Tacoma — on its own — can’t solve the problem or rise above a national crisis to enact the kind of gun reform that continues to elude a country ravaged by bullets and tragedy. But it’s something. It’s one tiny thing the city can do, to play its part, or simply send a message.
So is that a stand that Tacoma’s elected officials are still committed to taking? Or have they been effectively scared off?
On Tuesday, City Council member Catherine Ushka — who co-sponsored Tuesday’s resolution — stood firm. Spending $25,000 to fund much-needed research and outreach efforts is a smart investment, Ushka said, and one she believes will help inform the council when the tax is eventually collected. If passing the gun and ammo tax in 2019 was about “sending a signal that cities are ready for reasonable gun control,” as Ushka believes it was, this week’s expenditure sent a signal that “it’s time to invest in research and prevention,” she said.
Council member Keith Blocker, the resolution’s other co-sponsor, took a pragmatic approach, describing Tuesday’s funding allocation as “not a lot of money, but at the very least enough to get the research going.”
Like Ushka, Blocker still supports the gun and ammo tax, and expects it to one day come to fruition. He said there’s “always a sense of urgency” when it comes to working to reduce gun violence, but — in 2020 — other emergencies took precedent. As a Black man who has spent his entire life confronted by the disproportionate violence and death guns have wrought on his community, for Blocker “the work is the work,” he said, slow and unending. He’s not frustrated; he’s dedicated to the long haul.
All of this is fair. But it also understates the unspoken challenge the council is facing, which has nothing to do with the pandemic.
For 16 months now, the city’s elected leaders have said all the right things but continued to kick the ammo tax can down the road. Part of that can be chalked up to COVID-19 and the various crises that have recently consumed the council, yes. But there’s also no denying that the debate surrounding the tax — which was fraught with all Second Amendment thumping and gun industry posturing you’d expect — appears to have loft a lasting mark. It didn’t stop the tax from being passed, but it sure seems to have created a level of second-guessing and trepidation that, at least so far, has been just as effective.
During Tuesday’s study session, Hunter spoke in strong support of the $25,000 expenditure to pay for gun violence prevention research and community engagement.
She also recalled the late 2019 discussing surrounding the gun and ammo tax, as a warning.
“The discussion veered toward Second Amendment rights, and I won’t revisit all the drama that came with that. What’s happened is (the tax) has been delayed, and we’re not sure what the future is. And then in the interim, we had a year and a half at least, maybe even two years … where gun violence just continues to escalate in our city. No one can dispute that,” Hunter said.
“Until we get the whole gun (and) ammo tax remedied — if we even go that direction — (I hope) that we just look at what the goal was here (in funding research and community engagement), and not let the hornet’s nest of a discussion about an ammo tax derail this important work any longer.”
It’s a nice sentiment, but as the history Hunter points to inadvertently suggests, it’s also unrealistic. There is no comfortable middle ground to be had here — no uncontentious lane for the city to stick to if it actually wants lead on gun reform or take meaningful steps toward reducing the number of lives lost — and our elected officials should stop tricking themselves into thinking otherwise.
If Tacoma’s experience with its gun and ammo tax has taught us anything, it’s that trying to address the problem of gun violence without invoking the wrath of lobbyists, zealots, Right Wing talk show hosts and the comments sections of Facebook groups with names like Moms with Machine Guns is impossible. That’s reality in America; the sides are entrenched. You have to get dirty to plant a garden.
What should an average Tacoma resident make of Tuesday night’s vote? For a mother who has lost a child to gun violence, how should the contradiction between words and tangible actions be interpreted?
Spending $25,000 to talk about and study the problem is good, and it won’t raise any hackles. But if the city actually wants to reduce the number of guns on our streets and make our neighborhoods safer, our leaders have to be up for the bigger fight.
There’s no avoiding it.
Only delay, which is the path they’ve chosen so far.
