Washington state announced what the fee for permits required to purchase a firearm come May 1, and it's a whopping $126. That's a lot of money, but it's especially egregious when you consider that you also have to pay for things like training first, plus it does include the $36 fingerprinting fee required for the permit. Still, it's kind of ridiculous how much it'll cost just to be granted permission to buy a gun in the state.
But now we at least know where the money is going.
Supposedly.
When Washington state starts collecting $126 from each gun owner for their mandated permit-to-purchase next May 1—under a law pushed through by Democrats and opposed by Republicans—it is likely to be quickly challenged by essentially every gun rights group on the map, on both state and federal constitutional grounds.
Reason Magazine is reporting the breakdown as $90 for the permit and $36 for a fingerprint background check.
But there will be other costs, according to Reason. In a short article posted Tuesday, Reason noted, “Licensees must also, at additional cost, complete a state-certified gun safety course, which includes live-fire exercises and covers safe storage, suicide prevention, and the use of deadly force.”
The permit must be renewed every five years for $90, “and existing concealed pistol or hunting license holders are not exempt.”
According to Reason, the Washington State Patrol (WSP) “expects 200,000 applicants in its first full year, potentially generating over $25 million in fees.”
Kevin Baird, commander of the WSP Firearms Background Division, “The fees for the permit to purchase will be used to fund the operations of the program. However, the $36 for the fingerprint background check fee is not retained by our program, so it’s more like $18,000,000. (200,000 X $90 (the permit fee)).”
That makes no sense to me.
While there's time involved in any permit-to-purchase issuance, $90 would be appropriate if it took a single person multiple hours to process the information. That's not what's going to happen. The actual man-hours will be relegated to a minute or two here, a minute or two there, and so on. I'd be very shocked if anyone spends an hour on a single application.
So I fail to see how $90 is an appropriate amount if the purpose is simply to fund itself.
It sounds to me like a system set up to fleece the taxpayer and create more jobs and more authority for the state government, but without it feeling like a tax increase to the non-gun-buying general public.
Of course, that's just my own speculation here versus something I have hard data on, but it shouldn't fall on me to do more than raise questions, because this is especially troubling to me.
According to Google, Washington state employees work approximately 250 days per year. That means weekend, holidays, etc when you'd reasonably expect an office to be closed. With an expected 200,000 applications, that would be about 800 per day on average. At a few minutes per pop, let's assume 10 employees are doing the actual nuts and bolts work, plus their supervisor. I'm not counting desk clerks who are already paid via the general budget for the WSP and will take applications as part of their general duties.
That's about $1.6 million per employee.
Now, I'm sure there are fees the state has to pay to do the background checks, and I'm sure there's overhead I'm not accounting for, but unless they've got a legion on staff and the expected turnaround time on permits is measured in minutes, the gun owners of the state sure feel like they're getting screwed in this, even without the Second Amendment considerations.
The math ain't mathin', folks.