Owning a firearm in New York isn’t exactly a trivial matter. The state really doesn’t want you armed, and if you’re going to own a firearm, they’ve got a lot of laws in place to discourage you from doing so. That’s especially true with handguns, but it doesn’t necessarily stop there.
Still, they can’t ban them entirely. They might want to, but they can’t, and they’ve been smacked down by the Supreme Court too much to try it.
That doesn’t mean they’ve stopped trying to make it an even bigger pain in the posterior. In fact, while guns aren’t super cheap as it is, they’re trying to make them even more expensive.
The latest such effort by anti-gun Democrat lawmakers is a proposed tax on guns and ammo in an attempt to make it too expensive for the average New Yorker to keep and bear arms.
“If they cannot outright confiscate your firearms, they will make sure you cannot afford to buy or shoot them,” NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) wrote in a recent legislative update. “Former Chief Justice John Marshall once famously proclaimed that ‘the power to tax is the power to destroy.’ Albany Democrats understand this axiom all too well, and this appears to be the motivation behind their latest push.”
The measure, S. 5813-A would impose an 11% excise tax on the sale of all firearms and ammunition in the state. Of course, violent criminals, who mostly get their guns through illegal means, would not be affected by the proposal—only law-abiding gun owners.
To add insult to injury, the bill would take the newly stolen “tax dollars” and launder them into a Gun Violence Prevention and School Safety Program, also created by the legislation.
Of course, we all know that any program these guys concoct will be as vehemently anti-gun as it can be, if it’s not just a copy and paste from someone like Everytown’s proposals on similar programs.
Let’s keep in mind that an 11 percent excise tax on both guns and ammunition will have a drastic impact on gun ownership for the poorest New Yorkers more than anyone else. As it stands, if they want to carry a firearm, they’ll have to have a permit-to-purchase, pay for a concealed carry course that includes live fire training, which means they’ll need ammo to practice beforehand as well as for the class, then on top of all of that, plus the firearm itself, they want an additional 11 percent tax on the guns and ammo.
Seriously.
And then they’ll funnel that money into a program that will demonize guns, likely offer zero real safety instruction to anyone beyond a simple “stay away, they’re evil,” and then pretend they did something to make New York safer.
Meanwhile, the criminals who are getting these guns via the black market aren’t just bypassing background checks or permitting requirements anymore; they’re also skipping out on the tax that their own actions have supposedly justified.
This is beyond ridiculous, but it’s New York state. What else can we expect from them when it comes to guns?
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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