Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredgrott | Hacker News Reader

I got a stupid question from a stupid American(me):

What would happen if ammo was taxed the same way cigarettes are in the USA?

An example, someone buys a semi-automatic gun or automatic weapon...well than the ammo is taxed at a modest 5000%.

You can have the guns all you want..but if you want to use them you pay the right cost to the degree of dangerous of the gun weapon...ie automatic ammo is taxed higher than say shotgun shells.

State, both local, US states and federal would be exempt from the ammo tax.

View on HN

I'll add to the other commentators that we manufacture more than 12 billion rounds a year, and import quite a few more (especially as of late more .22LR, rimfire production is pretty much fixed at 3 billion per year due to manufacturing dangers and realities, including the reluctance of US manufacturers to buy new capital equipment that can only be used for it).

It would also strong discourage responsible gun ownership, by discouraging people from maintaining their skills. There are, what, way over 12 million who have concealed carry licenses in the US (the number is growing very rapidly and 12 or 12.5 is only the latest and a bit old), more and more states dropping license requirements (it's up to around 10, with Missouri likely to be added this month), and semi-automatic handguns are the overwhelmingly preferred design to carry for many good ergonomic, reliablity and effectiveness reasons.

Legally owned full-auto weapons simply aren't a problem, there's 2 known crimes committed with them, and one of those was by a police officer.... With their numbers limited by a 1986 law to around 200,000, and the inherent cost of firing lots of rounds from them, they're already mostly "a hobby for the rich" as c22 points out. Something you can see echoed in the former Democratic governor of Kansas Kathleen Sebelius signing a law making them legal again after many many decades.

You can't always separate ammo from how it is used. I can fire a 9 mm round from a single shot, semi-automatic, or fully automatic weapon just the same. My hunting shotgun is actually a semi-automatic and that's not uncommon.

On a side note, manufacturing guns and ammo at home is not incredibly hard. Granted, you won't get the same result as if you bought something from the store, but they will function all the same.

Reloading would become an even bigger deal than it already is. Already, anybody that shoots seriously and goes through a lot of ammunition will usually get setup with reloading equipment, because buying the powder, primers and bullets, with reused brass, is at least half as expensive as buying new ammunition.

Also, there isn't a meaningful distinction between ammunition used in semi-automatic vs other types. 9mm is 9mm is 9mm, whether you're shooting it out of a Glock or a revolver or a single-shot target pistol. Same thing with rifle ammunition - NATO 5.56x45 tends to be what a lot of AR-15 variants, the so-called "assault weapons" are chambered in, but there's no reason you couldn't also have a bolt-action hunting rifle in the same caliber.

5.56 NATO was derived from the .223 Remington cartridge developed for the original AR-15, which was derived from the .222 Remington varmint cartridge and intended to be between it and the .222 Remington Magnum.

My father's primary hunting partner when I started hunting had a .222 bolt action rifle; if this had happened later, it would undoubtedly be a .223 due to the reduced costs of the 5.56/.223 ecosystem.

It can be incredibly frustrating to find slightly odd-ball calibers like that. My father has a couple of old lever action deer rifles that he's inherited, and they can be lots of fun to track down ammunition for, since some are larger caliber rimfires that are virtually extinct, and the rest are tend to be odd flat-nosed Winchester cartridges, to accommodate the tubular feeds.

What's the larger caliber rimfires? I've only read about them, and from what I've heard in passing about the dangerousness of making rimfire ammo (in relation to one of the reasons US manufacturers aren't contemplating expanding production), suggests you're out of luck there.

The classic centerfire flat-nosed Winchester cartridges, though, you can of course reload them after getting some modern ammo for it (don't try this with old mercury fulminate primed ammo, I read an article by someone who had an old Browning police semi-auto carbine, he wrecked it because the mercury fatally compromises the strength of the brass). My father has or had one of those, I think it was from the era when you could buy one with the same ammo for your handgun as your rifle, the action certainly wasn't very strong. Octagonal barrel, a really neat piece of history.

Ah, and for those who aren't into this sort of thing, all the "calibers" I mentioned in my above comment use bullets of the same width, it's a confusing "system", if you can call it that, it grew organically.

How would this fix anything? Shooting ranges would just become a hobby for the rich. Meanwhile anyone planning to go shoot up a school or a church can just max out a couple credit cards cause it's not like they're gonna have to worry about the bill.

The end result would be that responsible gun owners who wished to practice at a shooting range could no longer afford to, and criminals would continue uninterrupted because they would just steal the ammo they need.

A variation on this theme already happens with cigarettes, when one state raises tobacco taxes, bootlegging from neighbouring states goes up.

Now the responsible gun owners are no longer a very good shot, criminals are roaming around with plenty of ammo (which they need because they often have terrible aim), what could possibly go wrong?

> You can have the guns all you want..but if you want to use them you pay the right cost to the degree of dangerous of the gun weapon...ie automatic ammo is taxed higher than say shotgun shells.

Personal security isn't a 'hobby', it's a right. A right which isn't acknowledged by most other countries, nor by a significant chunk of our population. Rights shouldn't be prohibited by taxes. Rights shouldn't only be accessible to rich people.

You don't think self-defense is a right, you see guns as a problem (like Cigarette), so your solution is the same (tax).

Don't try to circumvent the real topic here, do you think people have a right to defend themselves using guns or not, if not then try to convince me about it, instead of suggesting 'fixes'.

Suppose a state decides they're spending too much money on their court system. What would you say if they instituted a 5000% tax on criminal defense services?

What would you say if a state decided to impose a 5000% tax on abortion medicines?

What would you expect the courts to say about these taxes?

(Incidentally, this is not so different than the Mariana Islands' $1000 handgun tax. I thought this was currently being litigated, but I can't find anything confirming that.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com