BSHII wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2019 3:57 pm
There is already a federal excise tax on firearm sales, not to mention the NFA tax, plus many firearm sales are subject to state sales tax. I don’t know if the more broad-based excise tax has been challenged on constitutional grounds, but the NFA was held not to violate the Second Amendment (at least as applied in that case) in Miller v. United States. And, like the taxes being proposed on the left today, the $200 NFA tax was explicitly intended to make machine guns, short-barrel rifles and shotguns, and silencers prohibitively expensive.
One might hope that a conservative court would either overturn or narrow the effect of the short, poorly reasoned, and virtually uncontested decision in Miller. But I am afraid we are at least one conservative Supreme Court justice away from anything like that.