You can't actually capture the subref with arguments in this manner. It's actually calling the sub immediately and your callback ends up being a reference to whatever is returned by your sub. To get around this, Tk callbacks accept the subref and arguments as an anonymous arrayref. See 'perldoc Tk::callbacks' for details but what you want is:

$action->command(-label=>"Sort by Number", -command => [\&queryDB, 'it
+em_number']);
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... and likewise for the other.

- danboo