Imagine the screams from the left if, instead of facing a ballot measure to allow for tax-subsidized abortions, Colorado voters instead saw a measure to tax abortions to fund mental health for women dealing with matters pertaining to fertility, pregnancy, and raising children. “This is punishing people for exercising their basic rights,” we would hear. “This is not how we should fund essential services,” the chorus would chant. And the critics would be right.
But, when it comes to new taxes on guns and ammunition, the same people who would don sackcloth and ashes over an abortion tax are all cheers and grins. Why the double standard?
Abortion good, guns bad, is the basic orientation of our dominantly Democratic legislature. We get more of what we subsidize and less of what we tax, says basic economics. So, obviously, Democrats want to subsidize abortion and tax guns and ammunition. The gun tax is just one more instance in the drip-drip-drip of legislation eroding our constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Punishing the innocent
As the Blue Book points out, Proposition KK would impose a new 6.5% tax on guns, gun parts, and ammunition “to fund mental health services, including for military veterans and at-risk youth, school safety and gun violence prevention, and support services for victims of domestic violence and other violent crimes.” “The measure is expected to generate up to $39 million in the first full year.”
To most voters, funding those services will sound like a great idea. But, assuming it is a great idea, the legislature should fund them out of general taxes, not with a tax specific to guns and ammunition. Arguably the legislature should better-prioritize existing tax funds, not try to expand state spending. But, if the legislature is going to expand overall spending, it should do so with general net tax increases, not a punitive tax imposed on a narrow group of people.
But aren’t guns closely linked to the sorts of problems at issue, thereby justifying the specific tax? The referring legislation, House Bill 24-1349, discusses the problems of domestic violence and suicides involving guns. But the overwhelming majority of people who buy guns and ammunition do not use them to commit acts of violence or to kill themselves. So, with respect to crime, the tax in effect punishes the innocent to pay for the crimes of the guilty.
Consider some other details. HB 1349 refers specifically to military veterans “experiencing trauma due to gun and other types of violence.” But, insofar as we are talking about veterans who experienced violent fighting in military campaigns, how does that justify a tax on domestic sales of guns and ammunition? True, some men assault women with a gun. Also true, some men assault women with other weapons, and some women defend themselves against violent men with a gun. Yet this tax punishes the impoverished woman seeking a tool to protect herself against a threatening man, when she knows full well that the police have no legal duty to protect her and probably will show up too late to help her if someone tries to bust through her door.
Maybe we can hear another lecture from Democratic leaders about how they regard women as too stupid to make their own decisions when it comes to defending themselves, even though obviously they are clever enough to decide whether to get a tax-funded abortion.
Demonizing gun owners
HB 1349 mentions some of the problems with guns; somehow, the legislators who drafted the measure forgot to mention, as Jacob Sullum reviewed a couple years ago, that Americans use guns defensively perhaps 1.7 million times per year. Yes, these numbers are controversial. They rely on survey data, and maybe people don’t always tell the truth when replying. If you don’t count scaring away a threatening person by brandishing a firearm, rather than by firing it, the numbers are a lot lower. If you count only instances in which the perpetrator is shot or killed, the numbers are far lower still. But the legislators in question have no interest in debating the nuances of self-defense; they aim to demonize guns and punish those seeking to buy them.
What about the 11% federal tax already placed on guns and ammunition that funds wildlife conservation? As HB 1349 mentions, the National Rifle Association has been positively ecstatic about that tax. I oppose that tax for similar reasons: People who buy guns for purposes other than hunting should not be forced to subsidize hunters.
Those proposing the state tax on guns and ammunition misapply the valid principle that, insofar as possible (or at least in certain contexts), people who benefit from a government program should pay for that program. The gas tax works like this; proceeds from that tax fund road improvement. But that is obviously not what’s going on with the tax at hand. Instead, the purpose of Proposition KK is to force those who use guns responsibly to pay for the problems caused by those who do not, as well as for a bunch of totally unrelated programs. And that’s just basically unfair.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.