In addition to gun control, I’m not fond of taxes. I might understand why a government needs to tax its citizens to some degree or another, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Especially when the taxes aren’t just about funding things like police and fire departments, but about trying to create some kind of social change.
Yes, even if that social change is something we can all agree is a good thing.
For example, let’s take homicides. No one seems to think of murder as a good thing, after all, and while homicide really just means one person killing another, even if it’s justified, we tend to think of “murder” and “homicide” as synonyms.
But a couple of Ivy League academics have an idea that they think won’t just curtail homicides, but will do it in a way that doesn’t cost gun owners.
I saw that headline and was intrigued. I don’t like taxes, but what did they have in mind?
Stupidity, it seems.
Using our estimated model of the firearm market, we simulate alternative tax regimes to replace the 10% federal excise tax for handguns and 11% for long guns that is currently in place for all new gun purchases. We first consider scaling up California’s new firearm sales tax, finding that approximately doubling the federal rate on all firearms to 21% would produce meaningful gains to society through a reduction in violence. Yet, these gains would come at a significant cost to both sides of the firearm market, totaling about $1.2 billion per year in lost consumer surplus and industry profits. Moreover, this blunt, double-the-tax regulation would disproportionately harm consumers in conservative neighborhoods. Given the partisan nature of the firearm regulation, with advocacy groups such as the NRA and NSSF maintaining a strong presence in Washington, partisan gridlock would likely make such a policy infeasible to implement.
With this in mind, we instead consider an alternative reformulation of the federal excise tax, that aims to reduce firearm-related violence as much as possible, while also minimizing harm to firearm consumers. Given the large differences in violent crime between handguns and long guns, a natural tax scheme is to raise taxes on handguns only, while simultaneously reducing taxes on long guns to alleviate harm to consumers. We find that zeroing-out the tax on long guns while increasing the handgun tax to 15.5% would considerably reduce firearm violence, achieving two-thirds of the homicide reduction that doubling the existing tax would generate, while simultaneously causing no harm to gun buyers or manufacturers on aggregate.
Moreover, individuals in Republican-leaning states and neighborhoods with high NRA presence, where the typical consumer is more likely to buy long guns, would actually enjoy higher consumer surplus under this policy redesign.
Now, there’s a lot more, and they lay the groundwork for their thinking here, but I also think it’s flawed.
First, they figure that people who buy handguns and people who buy long guns aren’t the same folks. In a lot of cases, that might be true, but there are a lot more cases where there’s a huge overlap. I’m not sure their assumption that there are simply long gun buyers and handgun buyers is sound. Especially since most gun owners aren’t really open about what they own, what they buy, and so on.
One massive oversight seems to be that they’ve not made the case successfully that any excise tax has an impact on violent crime. They simply seem to assert that this is the case, without any links to studies showing this to be the case. Maybe they have data they failed to provide, which is a problem because it’s impossible to assess the validity of anything they propose if the underlying assumptions can’t be validated as well.
At best, such an increase in the excise tax will discourage some people from buying handguns from licensed dealers. These will largely be people who simply want one for self-defense and aren’t a threat to anyone who isn’t a threat to them.
For straw buyers, it will be irrelevant. For criminals who steal guns, it will be irrelevant.
Moreover, the idea that this wouldn’t cause an issue for gun owners is absolutely insane. For long gun buyers, sure. They’ll love it, and it might encourage more people to buy long guns for home defense–that includes things like AR-15s on top of the ever-popular shotgun–but for anyone who wants a firearm to carry in public, which is legal in all 50 states on a shall-issue basis now, it’s a major problem.
Plus, there’s a gun storage issue. While gun locks for each are plentiful, anything beyond that changes the equation. I’ve got a gun safe and a lock box for handguns. One is easier to slide under my bed at night, and while there are issues with those, they still keep small hands from finding my handguns. Long guns, on the other hand, have to go somewhere else, in a much bigger safe. That also means it’s less handy for home defense, and that might encourage some to not bother securing their firearms.
Luckily, this is just academic clucking at the moment.
The problem is that some politician somewhere will see this, think it’s swell because it lets them pretend to not be anti-gun, and then they’ll try to put this in place, thus screwing over millions of Americans who just want a handgun for self-defense.
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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