See how long an excise tax like that would hold up if the Constitution said the government couldn’t infringe on your right to smoke cigarettes.
Some might challenge a gun tax, like they challenged gun laws, and the outcome would largely depend on the makeup of the Court at the time. But the constitution says nothing about the government handing out free guns to those who can’t afford them, or anything else about pricing and sales. If the money curbs demand and is used for good causes related to the terrible costs of gun violence, any court not composed of Scalia/Alito/Thomas type wingnuts should see it as serving a public interest.
Nobody has suggested the government should hand out free guns. And nobody has suggested the government should set low prices on guns. The government doesn’t have any obligation to help people acquire guns. What the law says is that the government cannot hinder people from acquiring guns. That’s what infringement means.
Putting a high tax on guns would be the same as those laws in Texas and Virginia that attempted to close abortion clinics by placing restrictive regulations on them.
Keep and bear. Not acquire.
It seems plausible to me; I’m sure it must have been suggested in places other than this message board.
I would suspect that you’re on pretty shaky ground with those assertions. The Constitution simply doesn’t address the question of acquiring new firearms (as opposed to ownership of firearms). And it doesn’t address the question of pricing, or of “access.”
I suspect, too, that you’d have trouble putting across the idea that this is analogous to the right to abortion. Abortion is medical care; medical care is not an object. The Constitution guarantees the right to make a private decision about one’s medical care; it’s tough to make the case that that’s the same thing as being guaranteed bargain prices on AR-15s.
But aside from all that, it’s also the case that *a tax is not equivalent to “denial of access”. *This is a weakness of right-wing thought: the immediate jump to extremes. If one says “it might make sense to raise the tax on guns,” there is nothing in that statement to justify shrieks about You Are Proposing Pricing Guns Out of Existence. The proposed raise could be any percentage (0.1%, 1%, 10%, or any other number).
The instantaneous assumption that the ONLY possible outcome of a higher excise tax on firearms, is that they will now each cost Ten Billion Dollars is nutty (though typical of the right).
But any gun control law is already an “infringement” in just that sense, and there are plenty of those. A gun tax is arguably a weaker infringement than many gun laws. And even strong laws that were overturned, like in Heller, were overturned by a bare majority with vigorous dissent, and would undoubtedly have been decided differently with a different ideological makeup on the bench. So it’s far from clear that the constitution prohibits these things.
The horse had been led to water…
Not sure you’re right about that. The feds don’t have unlimited powers, and I’m not seeing where in the Constitution it’s granted to power to ban products arbitrarily. Tobacco can be (if it has’t already been) declared a drug and could be made illegal. However, I think that poster meant to refer to constitutionally protected items, such as guns.
But it wouldn’t allow an “undue burden” in acquiring one. At some point, a tax would become prohibitive. If I had to guess (and IANAL, so I could be wrong) I would suspect that a tax designed to limit the sales of guns would be found to be unconstitutional.
True, but it’s unclear the guy was “a lunatic”. I’m not sure the feds could limit the number of guns a person could own-- 20 is OK, but 21 is not?
Please open a GD thread claiming that if you think it’s true.
Or you could try actually reading what it says. :rolleyes: It would be a great relief from your relentless, and useless, above-it-all-ism.
If you’re so sure of yourself, open the GD thread. Go ahead. Debate it out in the open instead of hiding in The Pit.
I seem to recall his fiancée and her assistant believing that he was a secret government agent and part alien, so I assume he was of the same general mindset.
But on 20 vs. 21, this is an issue you’re going to get with any kind of quantitative regulation. That’s just how it is. I think the limit should be whatever a reasonable person could reasonably need for a stated purpose, but I know this is going to raise the hackles of the constitutionalists again.
I like to hear how you’re going to limit the ability of people to acquire guns without limiting the ability of people to own guns.
So do we fine/tax car manufacturers for all the associated costs that go with car ownership? The police presence required to keep drivers in line alone is probably an order of magnitude more (if not 2) than what is involved with firearms.
And that’s not including things like infrastructure like road wear, accidents/injuries, etc… Or not to mention the man-hours lost when people’s cars break down and they can’t work!
Seems to me that if we were serious about fining manufacturers for the consequences of the use of their products, cars would be a great place to start, not guns.
Perhaps the 2nd Amendment is silent on the question of acquisition due to an assumption already made explicit. The rationale for the Amendment is the necessity of citizen mililtia. The Founding Fuckups expected the militia to be well-organized and regulated. Most likely, organized at the level of government appropriate to their situation, population density and threat.
So, they might well have assumed that the well-regulated militias would supply the needed weapons. (Lot of advantages to be had with standard and interchangeable weapons.) Having citizens supply their own weapons is more akin to guerrilla resistance than a well-regulated militia. Doesn’t the very phrase bring to mind men in uniform clothing, with uniform equipment? Uniform weapons, with standardized caliber, shot, powder?
It may never have occurred to them to be concerned about individual access to firearms.
Rather than quote individual responses, I’ll reply generally regarding taxation, acquisition, etc.
I’ll start with the premise: If “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” is to have any force, the people must have a right to acquire the very firearms they are entitled to keep and to bear.
SCOTUS has recognized the principle in Carey v. Population Svcs. Int’l
431 U.S. 678 (1977)
And also Minneapolis Star v. Minnesota Comm’r 460 U.S. 575 (1983) that held that a tax on paper and ink products violated the constitution.
Then there is Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia 448 U.S. 555 (1980):
(my bold in all of the above)
Recently when the Marinara Islands gun control scheme was struck down as unconstitutional, they imposed a $1,000 tax on firearms. Given the low per capita income of the region, this is clearly an infringement and a near ban. This will be litigated so perhaps the tax question will be answered directly.
In any case, the right to acquire firearms is part of the core of the 2nd amendment right in the 9th circuit. See Teixeira v. Alameda County:
Actually, during the Revolutionary War period, it was really dependent on the particular colony as to whether the militia was armed by the state or showed up with their own weapons. Later, with the Militia Act of 1792, the militiamen were required to provide their own arms:
(and some other stuff about cartridges, bayonets, belts, flints, etc…)
And, it wasn’t just a tiny percentage of selected people either. It was pretty much EVERYONE, save slaves and the old.
So in large part, it was indeed an individual right to have militia-type weapons. It’s since been superseded by subsequent militia legislation, but after reading this, I have little doubt they meant the 2nd Amendment to protect individual gun ownership.
An interesting historical tidbit: The individual mandate component of Obamacare was in some part, preceded by this very legislation that literally mandated that people buy guns.
So? Its still about the militia. It could have served the purposes of safe and staid city folk who did not want to be taxed in order to protect frontiersmen. Why would a haberdasher in Boston want to be taxed to buy a weapon for a settler in Kentucky? Enlist them in a militia and let them buy their own damned muskets!
Remember, the USA did not always have the unanimous mutual regard that it enjoys today! Personally, I think the main reason the Constitution has so many checks and balances is that nobody writing the thing trusted each other any further than “Little Jimmy” Madison could throw George Washington!
Am I correct that there is already a 10% or 11% federal excise tax on guns and ammunition? Is anyone here claiming that those taxes (along with added sales tax) are unconstitutional? What if the excise tax were raised to 20%? Or 40%?
(Off-topic: Several decades ago California had no sales tax on newspapers or magazines. I thought of this as a tribute to the First Amendment and the value of a free press, and regretted the exemption’s repeal.)
I wonder too. Have high taxes on a Constitutional right ever been ruled un-Constitutional?
What if there were a 500000% tax on firearms or abortions?
The consequence of cars is transportation. The consequence of guns is someone or something being shot and probably killed. Seems to be what they’re for. Which is why guns in America is such a huge national problem that some seem completely blind to.
I believe 10% for pistols and 11% for rifles and ammo.
Probably just what you might imagine would happen. But not if it was 20% or 40%. And I don’t know how abortions became a standard of comparison other than just being “something conservatives don’t like”, since abortions aren’t requested arbitrarily or on some whim and don’t have price-driven demand.
So profit is a dirty word in America now?