Exercising the Right
Ammunition Tax
In an October 15 editorial, Frank Miniter, writing for the NRA publication America’s 1st Freedom, discussed the latest tactic of the gun-control crowd to repeal the Second Amendment through indirect means. Miniter’s column discussed the various measures currently being proposed, such as microstamping ammunition, which adds to the cost of shooting. Another runaround being exploited by gun controllers is to tax ammunition so prohibitively high that it ends up having the same result as banning guns.
Assemblyman Jim Cooper (D) of California has proposed a new law that he said would tax gun and ammunition sales to help fund new counselors and school resource officers at public schools in order to deal with potential school shooters. “We are not banning guns or ammunition, but we would tax that…. And to me that’s a small price to pay,” Cooper said to KCRA.com. Of course, to Cooper, the tax may be “a small price to pay,” but to working-class citizens who are just making enough to survive, increased taxes such as those proposed could prohibit the purchase of a gun or ammunition.
As the NRA’s Miniter wrote, “Bans, restrictions, fees and taxes do one thing and one thing only — they further burden America’s 100-plus million gun owners, which is what [gun-control groups] are really after. If they can make gun ownership and use more expensive and difficult, then they can discourage the poor and those who don’t have the time to navigate the bureaucracy from utilizing their Second Amendment rights. If they can make the Second Amendment too burdensome a right for many to utilize, then, over time, they calculate that the large voting bloc of law-abiding gun owners will shrink into a smaller constituency. This would then allow them to further restrict or even ban Americans’ right to bear arms.”
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