Mental Health Tax on guns

[Thirties Child]

My husband's thoughts on guns:

I'm a gun enthusiast. I enjoy firearms. But after Newtown and its aftermath, something has to be done, and it needs to be effective.

Laws to ban the purchase of firearms equipment, such as 30-round magazines, are useless. There are too many of them already out there. These are simply feel-good measures

It has been amply demonstrated that one doesn't need an AR-15 "assault rifle" and a couple of 30-round magazines to kill a lot of people. A recent article in Mother Jones magazine showed that handguns were used twice as often as AR-15s in mass killings since 1982.

Finally, people are beginning to suggest that we'd be better off dealing with the potential shooters than their tools, although New York's new state law requiring therapists to report any patient who mentions mass killing or suicide is a pathetic start.

Perhaps shooters could help carry some of the mental health burden.

Good firearms are very expensive. The last pistol I bought cost $600. But another $20 or $30 wouldn't have soured the deal. I think a lot of shooters, maybe even most of them, would be willing to pay a modest tax on firearms, ammo and equipment if it would all go to helping the mentally ill.

There would seem to be plenty of loonies out there with guns already -- witness the abuse heaped upon the gentlemen who helped some kids outside the Sandy Hook school. One could reasonably assume that most or all these savages are living in paranoid fear of losing their firearms. It's people like these who cast a shadow over gun owners.

A mental health tax on weapons and ammo would certainly do a lot more good than forbidding the purchase of odds and ends of weapons, and it would show the non-shooting public that shooters want to stop the bloodshed as much as anyone else. And might help stop the carnage.

[JaneyVee]

1. Why not do both, tax guns while banning assault weapons & high capacity magazines?

[Thirties Child]

2. Sounds good to me.

He's talking about what is feasible, not ideal.

[Recursion]

3. There's currently an 11% tax on guns and ammo that funds wilderness conservancy

That goes way back, too, I think it was created with the National Parks system. We could just transfer that to mental health services.

[hootinholler]

4. No, that would kill most of the funding for state DNR

Most states rely on that excise tax to fund their wildlife management.

[DogPawsBiscuitsNGrav]

5. Just curious, what would the tax be for?

This new spy center is supposed to allow LEO to get every bit of personal information on us. Everything is being connected through this new network, and we already have background checks so why another tax? Is it just to punish gun owners? Taxing for punishment because you don't like something someone else does is a bad thing. They get carried away. Tax the smokers to death, now places are starting to tax soda's and such to punish fat people. Where will the punishment taxes end? That's saying you're free to do it but because some of us don't like it we'll single you out to pay extra for it so that you can't afford it. What's next? Maybe something you enjoy?

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

[Thirties Child]

6. People who buy guns

My thought was you have to be approved by a therapist as mentally healthy before you can buy either a gun ammunition. People who haven't done anything - yet - can slip through the cracks. Maybe a standardized mental health test. I know it would be complicated, and it might be a while before we'd see results, but it would weed out the crazies before they could buy a gun. Or bullets for a gun they already had. Just a thought.

His idea was to help the people who need help and were turned out on the street when Reagan closed all the hospitals.

[DogPawsBiscuitsNGrav]

7. Thanks, I get where you're coming from now. Hopefully then we won't need this tax. Obama care will

make sure these people no longer fall through the cracks. Everyone will have access to health care. Finally...