About a week ago, we reported that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is proposing a tax holiday for purchasing firearms, ammunition and accessories. Dubbed “Second Amendment Summer,” DeSantis’s initiative would eliminate taxes on these products from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July.
Now, pro-gun lawmakers in neighboring Georgia are working toward a similar tax holiday of their own. Earlier this week, Republicans in the Georgia Senate passed a measure that would waive the sales tax on firearms purchases for 11 days beginning on the second Friday of October.
According to a report at savannahnow.com, Senate Bill 47 passed by a 31-to-21 margin along party lines. While Republicans said the bill was about bolstering gun rights and the Second Amendment, Democrats tried to make the measure about the Sept. 4, 2024, Apalachee High School murders of two teachers and two students.
One such was Democrat Sen. Nan Orrock of Atlanta.
“Are you all tone deaf?” Orrock asked. “It’s like taking a knife and sticking it into the heart of a parent who has lost a child. What is this blood lust for guns?”
Actually, it’s nothing like what Orrock said. Implementing a gun tax holiday has nothing to do with a troubled young person killing fellow students and teachers. Anyone buying a gun during the holiday would still need to pass a background check, just like at any other time. As a result, anyone benefiting from the tax holiday would be a verified law-abiding citizen.
It’s incomprehensible how Orrock and other anti-gun Democrats can equate a mass murderer shooting kids and teachers at a school with a bird hunter buying a new shotgun or a single mom purchasing a handgun for self-defense. The situations are so vastly different from one another that the comparison is absurd.
Regarding the so-called “blood lust for guns,” Orrock clearly either misunderstands or chooses to overlook the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. The Court has also established that the act of purchasing firearms is protected under the Second Amendment.
This bill and the Florida proposal contradict the actions of anti-gun states that have begun proposing and enacting additional excise taxes on guns and ammunition—a type of “sin tax,” even though exercising your Second Amendment rights is not a sin. In recent years, both California (11%) and Colorado (6.5%) have imposed new taxes on guns and ammo.
It’s too early to determine if states proposing a gun sales tax holiday are becoming a trend, but Florida and Georgia’s initiatives certainly represent a positive development. It will be interesting to see if other states follow suit during this session.
Interestingly, the Georgia Senate passed a similar bill last year that proposed a five-day tax holiday, but the GOP-led state House of Representatives did not act on the measure.
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