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Originally Posted by SPEMack618
Your proposal still boils down to a tax on me, a law abiding citizen, who at 20 was entrusted with the ability to call on more firepower than most country's armies, who has never broken a law, never used a gun wrongfully, as punishment for the crimes of some nutjob.
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Reread the part in my post about how
The Enemy Can be Closer than you Think, and how the label of "law-abiding citizen" is essentially a blank check. I don't know your personal criminal record if indeed you have one, but things can get worse much more easily than they can get better. It is not a crime to become an alcoholic, or to develop an anger/impulse control problem, or to develop a mental illness. But combining any of those conditions with easy accessibility to firearms makes the potential for maiming and lethalities all the more likely. That's why we need to start finding out who has and does not have a condition that will likely impair their judgement with a firearm better.
As for taxes, the right ones are the price of a civil society, and one of the best ways to fund a better background checking system (coupled with mental health checking) for firearms would be a tax on ammunition and "higher-class" firearms or firearms accessories (such as high-capacity magazines). Some years back there was a book called
The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes by Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, which found that in 1997, the US government spent $203 million on property records management (just to keep track of things), along with $6.5 billion to protect and enforce those rights. A tax on those aforementioned items, along with mandatory insurance for firearms owners (increasing the more firearms you own or the more "higher-class" firearms you have), could be one good way to fund such an enhanced background-and-mental-health checking system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SPEMack618
And for the 100th time, the NFA wasn't at all about stopping crime, or reducing the ability of criminals to get BARs, it was a gun grab across the board by a Progressive president who had to keep a shit ton of revenue agents employed after the repeal of Prohibition.
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You got evidence for this? Or would you really like to return to Roaring-Twenties-style full-auto drive-by-shootings when full-auto firearms were easier to come by than today? There would have been no lack of things for revenue agents to keep track of even after Prohibition's repeal. In case you mean FBI agents, organized crime by no means collapsed in on itself after Prohibition ended, so I'm sure they still had plenty of work.