Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-IL) is pushing legislation to place a 20 percent tax on guns and a 50 percent tax on ammunition.
The legislation is titled the “Gun Violence Prevention and Safe Communities Act of 2018.”
The act amends the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, so as to require a 20 percent tax on “pistols,” “revolvers,” “firearms (other than pistols and revolvers),” and “any lower frame or receiver for a firearm, whether for a semiautomatic pistol, rifle, or shotgun that is designed to accommodate interchangeable upper receivers.”
The act places a 50 percent tax on ammunition “shells and cartridges.”
These taxes will only apply to law-abiding citizens, just as similar taxes in Chicago and Seattle only raise the purchase price of firearms and ammunition for law-abiding citizens. Both Chicago and Seattle have a “violence tax” on the retail sale of guns and ammo, but criminals do not participate in the tax because they do not buy their guns at retail.
This ultimately means that such taxes drive up the prices for the tools that law-abiding citizens need for self-defense, even to the point of making firearms cost-prohibitive for poorer residents.
Rep. Davis’s act makes clear that no “department, agency, or instrumentality of the United States shall be subject to any tax imposed on the sale or transfer” of firearms and ammunition. In other words, law-abiding citizens will be taxed on the tools they need for self-defense but the taxpayer-funded security personnel guarding the political class will not have to pay the new taxes.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.