Commentary: The dangerous new threat to gun ownership: ‘Gun Violence Taxes’ – Elko Daily Free Press

Thanks to a tortured ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court, there is a dangerous new threat to gun ownership.

Its called a gun violence tax and Washingtons high court sided with the City of Seattle, which adopted such a tax in 2015 in a gun control strategy to slither around the 34-year-old state preemption law that placed exclusive authority for regulating firearms in the hands of the State Legislature.

This gun tax violates the legislative intent of statewide uniformity by taxing law-abiding gun owners inside the city, and the retailers who cater to them. In Seattles case, the tax is $25 on the sale of each firearm, plus two to five cents for each round of ammunition sold.

This threat takes on even more sinister dimensions when one considers the potential for cities to simply up the fee. Seattle started with $25 per gun, but what if they want to raise that to $100, $500 or even $1,000? It opens the door wide to making gun ownership prohibitively expensive for average citizens. Essentially, Washingtons Supreme Court just handed the gun prohibition lobby and its allies in government a new strategy: If they cant ban or regulate gun ownership out of existence, they will simply tax it into oblivion.

The ruling creates a new battleground for groups like the National Rifle Association, Second Amendment Foundation, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

Count on this: Municipal city and county governments controlled by anti-gun liberal politicians will be eyeballing such taxes in their own communities. They may say the revenue will be used for gun violence research or prevention programs, but in reality this is to finance gun control, and they know it. Such taxes penalize honest gun owners and use their money to conduct questionable research with the ultimate goal of using the findings of such research to support additional restrictions on their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Daniel Webster is credited with observing that The power to tax is the power to destroy. This should alarm any civil rights activist because now there may be nothing to prevent placing similar taxes on the exercise of other rights. If this case were about anything other than firearms, one could certainly wonder if the court would have come down on the citys side.

Why not put a special tax on freedom of speech or the press? How about we slap a special tax on abortions? Once the door is open to government to institute a tax on one right, there is nothing to prevent the same government from pursuing other taxes on other rights. One thing government is good at is levying taxes.

Currently, only Seattle and Cook County, Illinois which encompasses Chicago, have instituted gun violence taxes. Thousands of local governments have been carefully watching this case so that they could use the Washington ruling to launch their own financial infringements on the exercise of a civil right.

The Washington State ruling is a shot fueled by judicial activism across the bow of every American gun owner who has heretofore refrained from voting on local judges and state supreme court candidates. Elections do matter, now more than ever. When the highest court in any state gives the nod to taxing the exercise of a fundamental civil right, it plows dangerous new ground and plants legal landmines in its wake.

Alan Gottlieb is founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation. Dave Workman is senior editor of TheGunMag.com.

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Commentary: The dangerous new threat to gun ownership: 'Gun Violence Taxes' - Elko Daily Free Press