A.G. Gancarski
Jon McGowan, former owner of McGowan Firearms, should’ve had his Kevlar handy when The Florida Times-Union took aim Monday.
Their charge is that overdue sales taxes should have blocked McGowan from getting a $150,000 grant from the Jacksonville Tourist Development Council to promote his Shooting and Outdoor Convention.
The TDC guidelines require being current in taxes. McGowan, from his former business, owes thousands of dollars of unpaid sales taxes, the newspaper report contends.
McGowan took issue with the article. He claims that the facts weren’t exactly as represented; that the timing of the piece was contrived; and that there is a larger attempt by the Times-Union to reposition itself in terms of the larger gun debate just as city government is turning its attention to the most recent wave of slayings.
One thing he stressed: “The Department of Revenue is a beast – fighting with them.” And when they claim someone owes them, he said, they’re considered “guilty until proven innocent.”
McGowan, in 2009, “got behind on sales tax,” an issue he attributes to the pitfalls of having a new business.
“Many business owners are fighting the same battle,” McGowan said. “You run a business for seven years, sometimes you miss something.”.
Also mentioned in the story were “liens I thought were gone were still there,” McGowan said. He also said there were problems with paperwork from the Department of Revenue’s end coupled with a failure to return his call for three months in 2015.
McGowan also objected to the article focusing on his corporate name of Gun Con Inc. He said that while the concept originally was a gun show, it was rebranded as Shooting and Outdoor Convention a year and a half ago.
“They just dug in on” the name, he said.
McGowan noted that the piece appeared “exactly where the gun show ad was” from the time in 2015 when an ad for a gun show was pasted over a story about a school bus shooting.
“I know I’m an easy target,” he said. The placement of the story was, in part, because it was “easy to attack a gun show.”
McGowan noted that he had a business license also, despite what the story said. And that he wasn’t evicted, but moved his business of his own free will.
“All they did was file paperwork,” McGowan said. “The [property owners] were selling the property.”
“When they come out and do soil samples you know the [strip mall] is going to be torn down,” he said of the first location of McGowan Firearms.”
The Times-Union writer did not want to be quoted for this story, yet internal sources dismissed McGowan’s theories. The time spent on the story was because of multiple rounds of editing and communication with various governmental entities to get the facts right, they said.
The real issue, the Times-Union said, is the Tourist Development Council has guidelines it doesn’t check.
Whatever happens with the TDC, the show will go on, McGowan said. The event already has 100 vendors, both big companies and small innovators in the industry.
The TDC money was going to be used to promote the event in other markets.
