Sen. Chris Murphy is a lot of things, but a friend to gun owners is never going to be one.
In last year's budget fight, we got the taxes stripped away from suppressors and short-barreled long guns. This was a huge win because those taxes were stupid. They still have to be registered, at least for now, but they don't cost extra anymore. And guess who wants to change that.
That's right, Murphy, who never met an anti-gun proposal he didn't like, took umbrage at the repeal of the taxes, and he wants them back...only not at the modest $200 rate they always were.
Oh no, he wants to adjust for inflation.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill Monday seeking to impose a massive tax increase on suppressors and certain firearms.
The reconciliation bill signed into law by President Donald Trump in July contained provisions that reduced the taxes on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and guns described as “any other weapon” to $0 after the Senate Parliamentarian struck language that removed those items from any coverage of the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA). Murphy’s amendment, known as SA 4159, would restore the taxes and increase them to $4,709 per item.
“This is actually not the first time that Sen. Chris Murphy has proposed this tyrannical tax hike,” Gun Owners of America Federal Director Aidan Johnston told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “His goal with this amendment is to price Americans out of their ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights.”
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Johnston noted that when enacted in 1934, the $200 tax imposed by the NFA was intended as a prohibitive financial barrier to owning a machine gun, adding that the figure Murphy selected adjusts the tax for inflation. Other pro-Second Amendment organizations also condemned the amendment Murphy offered.
And none of them liked it, for the record.
Big shock, right?
The problem isn't that bad people use these items. NFA rules don't stop criminals from sawing off barrels to shotguns or swapping the uppers on their ARs for shorter ones. It never did, and everyone knows that. Suppressors are a little bit different, but suppressors aren't nearly as useful for average criminals as one might think.
After all, besides the allegations against Luigi Mangione, when's the last time you heard of a suppressor being used in a crime? My guess is the 2019 shooting at the Virginia Beach municipal center, and even then, most of us were unaware of a suppressor being used at all.
That's because suppressors are long and unwieldy enough that your average criminal won't fool with one, and since Mangione is accused of making the suppressor himself, it's pretty clear that if bad guys felt otherwise, they'd act accordingly. They don't.
So why is Murphy intent on jacking up the prices for getting into Class 3 stuff?
Because he doesn't like average citizens having these kinds of things at all. It's not about whether or not criminals use them. It's about you and me, like it always is. He doesn't want us to have an easier time dropping a short-barreled upper on our AR-15 or protecting our family's hearing if we have to respond to a bump in the night with a loud bang. He doesn't want us doing things because it interferes with his end goal, which is effective disarming the American population.
At the end of the day, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, as well as suppressors, make the American populace a more effective fighting force should we be called upon to defend this nation against tyranny. I figure he knows this and believes that what we call tyranny, he'd call Utopia and he simply can't have anyone getting in the way of his and his buddies' struggle to create their own paradise.
You know, one where there aren't luxuries like food for most of us.
