General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: TAX THE AMMO!!! [View all]backscatter712
(26,355 posts)You'll have a hard time banning firearms, especially given the current rulings from the Roberts Supreme Court.
However, Roberts himself did say that Congress had a hell of a lot of leeway in the power to tax, when he voted to uphold the ACA.
Tax guns.
Low taxes for guns used primarily for sport - 22 caliber rifles, deer rifles, duck-hunting shotguns. For the most part, leave legitimate gun-owners alone. These taxes are designed to make it harder to get a hold of really destructive weapons.
When I say "highly destructive weapons, I mean weapons with high-capacity magazines, accessories like bayonets, firearms that can shoot 30 rounds without reloading right out of the box... (personally, that's how I define an "assault weapon" - a semi-automatic long-gun capable of firing more than 15 rounds of ammo between reloads.)
And make sure the tax applies to private and person-to-person sales. If you want to sell a gun to your buddy, you'd need to go to the gun shop, pay the proper tax on the sale and get what in old days was a tax stamp, but would today be a certificate of legal sale that certifies that the tax was paid.
And anyone who sells guns on the black market gets busted for failure to pay the taxes.
Taxes aren't just for raising revenue, but also for modifying behavior. And the beautiful thing is that we're not making assumptions that guns aren't already in circulation - millions of guns are already in circulation. We're just providing some economic incentives using Congress' taxing power. And maybe those incentives might cause the really destructive weapons to be less available, thus become more expensive, perhaps become collectors items, like legal full-auto weapons are, so they end up in the collections of rich people, and not so often in the hands of murderers.
Just suggesting an approach for discouraging the sale of more destructive firearms.