When our Founding Fathers felt their tea was being taxed unfairly, ostensibly to pay back the debt England incurred during the French & Indian War, they didn't just sit around and do nothing. No, they boarded a cargo ship loaded with tea and tossed it in the harbor. They were so polite about the whole thing that, though they smashed open a lock securing the cargo, they brought a new lock to the ship the next morning.
After that, "No taxation without representation" became a battle cry leading into the American Revolution.
Since then, Americans have a propensity to get a little salty when it comes to the subject of taxes. This is especially true when the tax in question is punitive or impacts a civil liberty.
Poll taxes, for example, were tossed by the courts because it interferes with people's right to vote.
Unfortunately, some states have decided that gun owners should be forced to pay a special tax to fund things that have nothing to do with lawful gun owners. Usually, it's to pay for things tied to violent gun-related crime, which lawful gun owners have no part in.
Yes, it's stupid. It's worse than that; it's evil.
But there's a move afoot to hopefully put an end to this nonsense.
A growing number of state politicians are testing a new way to burden the lawful exercise of the Second Amendment by imposing targeted excise taxes on firearms, firearm parts, and ammunition and routing the proceeds to “gun violence prevention” or taxpayer-funded gun control programs.
California has already enacted an additional 11% excise tax on firearms and ammunition, administered by the state’s tax agency. Colorado has a 6.5% excise tax on firearms, firearm precursor parts, and ammunition that went into effect last year.
This approach is not limited to one region; legislators in five additional states — Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and Washington have introduced similar bills. Framed as “public safety” measures, these state-level schemes are designed to make it more expensive to purchase the tools of lawful self-defense and practice shooting responsibly, particularly for working families and first-time gun owners.
Crafted to stop states from weaponizing tax policy against a constitutionally protected right, the Freedom from Unfair Gun Taxes Act, S.1169, draws a clear line; States can regulate within constitutional limits, but they cannot impose punitive, targeted excise taxes designed to burden the free exercise of the right to keep and bear arms.
Excise taxes are traditionally used on goods a government wants to discourage citizens from consuming, like tobacco. When that concept is applied to constitutionally protected rights, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a policy lever meant to make a right more expensive and, therefore, less accessible.
These proposals are often marketed as a way to make the “gun industry” pay for “public safety” measures, i.e., criminal misuse of firearms. In practice, they single out a constitutionally protected activity by a law-abiding American for a special financial penalty. The revenue is then earmarked for advocacy and programs that treat lawful gun ownership as a problem to be reduced rather than a right to be protected.
The truth is, though, that most of the "minds" behind these measures actually do see lawful gun ownership as a problem. When lawful gun sales increase, they're alarmed. Not because there's a link between lawful gun owners and violent crime, mind you, but because they really want to discourage people from owning guns in the first place.
It's part of why gun ownership has been stigmatized so much over the last handful of years. They want you to feel a certain kind of way about guns.
When that doesn't work, though, they need other mechanisms. In this case, it's by making guns a lot more expensive than they should be, often by a significant degree, and therefore out of reach for Americans of more modest financial means, as well as too expensive for many of better means to decide is actually worthwhile.
That's the goal, and it's complete and total BS to use state tax code to justify it.
This is a constitutionally protected right. People use these guns without adverse outcomes all the time. Millions have used these guns to prevent adverse outcomes, for crying out loud, and those who use them irresponsibly are usually people who didn't get them lawfully in the first place, so why are we taxing the good guys?
I'd love to see this practice banned at the federal level, because even if there's technically representation on that taxation, it's still a BS tax meant to infringe on our right to keep and bear arms.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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