The plaintiffs in a case against the city of Seattle says that Washington state firearms preemption laws are clear and settled, and have asked the presiding judge to throw out the city’s attempt at backdoor gun control.

Plaintiffs in the case against Seattle’s gun sales and ammunition tax have asked the court to issue a summary judgment.

Lawyers representing the National Rifle Association, the Second Amendment Foundation, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and local gun owners filed the motion for summary judgment with King County Superior Court on Friday. By filing the motion, the plaintiffs are arguing that the facts of the case are settled and the court should issue its decision.

They say the city’s tax is illegal since Washington state law “fully occupies and preempts the entire field of firearms regulation within the boundaries of the state.” Additionally, the plaintiffs argue, Seattle “is well aware of this restriction on its legislative power, in part because its most recent attempt to regulate firearms was emphatically struck down by the Court of Appeals.”

The lawsuit was filed in response to Seattle’s decision to impose a $25 tax on the sale of every firearm and two to five cent tax on the sale of every round of ammunition within city limits. The tax, passed on Aug. 10, does not go into effect until January. City officials say the tax is designed to offset the costs associated with gun violence, not restrict access to guns.

Seattle has a very left-wing city government that is purposefully levying this tax in order to make firearms ownership and especially shooting a gun much more expensive as a way of disenfranchising those who do not have a significant amount of money to spend in shooting sports or self-defense.

The gun and ammunition tax came from exact same sort of thinking the inspired a previous generation of Democrats to create poll taxes as a means to make voting more difficult for minorities in the Jim Crow South. These poll taxes imposed a tax to register to vote, just as Seattle would impose a heavy tax of $25 for every firearms transfer and a per-bullet tax that would drive up the cost of a brick of .22LR by $10.00, or the cost of an standard case of 9mm up $50.00.

That’s extra money that the city’s working poor don’t have to spend, putting firearms ownership out of their reach… and we have to believe that was specifically the point of the tax.

This gun tax is the same as a poll tax, and is nothing more or less than an attempt by the Seattle City Council to disproportionately strip the gun rights of the city’s African-American and Latino minorities.