Not until the day junk food has to pay a tax due to costs on society. Obesity is bad. Car manufacturers produce a product that kills more Americans every year than war. Where is their danger tax?
You forgot to mention swimming pools.
The OP leaves much to criticize, but you missed the mark.
Society taxes cigarettes not because tobacco companies are evil nor because they make excess profits. The purpose of the tax is to reduce demand and to compensate society for the ill effects of tobacco which are borne by the taxpayer.
The same argument applies favorably to taxes on guns.
However I recommend against such a move. In an extreme case, gun nuts would take such a tax as reason to put the 2nd Amendment to use and overthrow tyranny. We know that some local law enforcement agencies are infested with redneck assholes who might join the mob rather than oppose it.
But more realistically, gun suppression measures build very bad will among a large portion of the citizenry, and waste that goodwill with very little to show for it. For increasingly many voters, gun rights guide voting decisions. (Numerous gays have been interviewed and found to support the GOP because of guns!) If Trump does win — keep your fingers crossed — GUNS will be a very major reason why.
Someone is showing ignorance of elementary economics here, but it isn’t OP.
There is a very well-established principle of law that allows the government to impose taxes so that the revenues of said taxes may be used to (among other things) defray the costs imposed on the government by the use of the product in question.
For example, the taxes on a pack of cigarettes in the USA, in several states, sum to nearly half the total price of the pack. Some of these revenues fund programs relating to lung cancer and other costs that would not exist if no one smoked tobacco.
My question/proposal was about the use of excise taxes: a time-honored method of raising revenues from the sale of products that impose costs on a society. I made no suggestions about capping profits via legislative edicts.
About 2.5 years ago, I bought 100 shares of Smith & Wesson in part to mock now-banned user Kable. He sneered at me for investing a mere ~$1250.
Now I kind of regret not throwing $10k or more at it. It’s done extremely well.
The usual answer: the Constitution. It’s an outdated idea in my opinion but the Second Amendment exists. We shouldn’t ignore the law just because it’s inconvenient to follow it and/or change it.
And as long as the Second Amendment is law, I believe a tax like you proposed would be unconstitutional. You can justify normal taxation on firearms and ammo. But a special high tax on firearms and ammo would be infringing people’s right to buy them.
I didn’t know the late Mr Lash. But as noted he had a large inventory of guns and ammunition - and a large amount of currency. And his family is saying they were unaware of all of this and nobody knows where he was getting money from.
These are the kinds of things you’d expect to find in the possession of an illegal gun dealer.
Quote me the part of the Second Amendment which guarantees a right to acquire a firearm at a good price.
Or even just the part of the Second Amendment that references a right to acquire a firearm. Not “keep;’ not 'bear.” Just the part about a right to procure.
Despite the agitation about it, the actual impact is minuscule. Most firearm deaths are suicides, not murders or accidents.
What “huge” costs exactly are you claiming that we need to tax these manufacturers extra for?
I wouldn’t have a problem for an added fee to help pay for better police training and standards with respect to violent encounters, but I think the cost angle is a non-starter- it’s just not that high overall.
To give a tiny indication of the iceberg (of costs), just look at videos of the Dallas incident and the hours and days after it. The extra hours of policing; the burden on the medical establishment (paramedics, ambulances, hospitals, doctors, nurses, etc.); the coming legal entanglements (someone will end up in court); the costs of investigating the crime–personnel, equipment, etc.; the lost wages and also the ongoing medical expenses of those injured. That’s probably just a fraction of the total costs that will ultimately be attributable to that one incident.
None of those costs would have been imposed had the killer been armed with a machete. Sure, a guy with a machete could do some damage–but not at a distance, and not to so many. (And of course if anyone wants to raise the excise taxes on machetes, too, that would be fine.)
And quote me the part of Roe v. Wade which guarantees a right to acquire an abortion at a good price.
Placing an excessively burdensome tax on a product or service in an effort to effectively ban a legal product or service would be open to tremendous abuse. SCOTUS decisions on abortion indicate restrictions that place an undue burden on a woman procuring an abortion do not stand up to Constitutional scrutiny. I suspect the same could be said of backdoor efforts to price guns out of existence.
When estimating the total costs of guns to society, don’t forget that the high incidence of killings of innocent citizens by police is caused by the large number of guns. If the country were less gun-happy, and gun toters less common, cops would in much less fear for their lives when encountering random civilians.
Don’t be an idiot. Just apply this same rule to something you’re in favor of, if you want to see how it works.
Poll tax, anyone?
Let’s levy a $10,000 tax on abortions. There is nothing in the constitution at all about abortions, so why would women have a right to get one at a good price?
The SCOTUS would not allow an arbitrarily high tax on guns, since it would effectively make them unavailable to many citizens.
ETA: Ninja’ed by Iggy!
Works fine for another undesirable product – tobacco. The average of all taxes on tobacco sales are about 57% of the total cost; the excise tax alone in New York state is $4.35. The Constitution is fine with it. And many of those revenues are directed to important causes – the federal excise tax goes to pay for children’s health care. There’s no shortage of societal ills and costs caused by guns that gun taxes could help pay for.
Not a good analogy since access to tobacco is not guaranteed by the constitution. Congress could make it illegal by simply passing a law, as they do with other “drugs”.
Access to guns is not guaranteed by the Constitution.
“Keep” them if you have them, and “bear” them if you have them: yes (assuming you are part of a well-regulated Militia).
Quote the part of the amendment that guarantees “access,” please.
wolfpup answered this well. In addition: note that I have not called for taxation at a level to “price guns out of existence,” as you say.
This very thought was what kept coming to me while watching the Dallas coverage. Would the sniper have been able to hit all twelve of those people if he had been armed with a hunting rifle instead of with an semi-automatic assault weapon?
What exactly – in YOUR opinion – is the difference between the two?
The other poster was trying to claim that for some reason the constitution would prohibit high rates of taxation of any goods or services, and I’m pointing out that this is not so. Nor does the constitution provide for any particular price point or affordability criteria for guns, and nor does it guarantee that some lunatic like the one mentioned above should be entitled to have 1500 of them.
That’s legal sophistry. The Constitution says the government can’t infringe on people keeping or bearing arms. Setting an intentionally high tax on firearms or ammunition would be infringing that right. And denying “access” to firearms is even more clearly an infringement.
Like I said, if you don’t like the law (and I personally don’t) work on changing it. Don’t try to weasel around it.