By making a given product more expensive, excise taxes lead people to buy less of it, reducing the harm to society.
A California-legal featureless AR-15 style rifle is displayed for sale at the Orange County Fairgrounds on June 5, 2021 in Costa Mesa, California.
One way to think about the law’s ramifications is to compare state tax policies on firearms with those on alcohol and tobacco products. It’s not for nothing that these all appear in the name of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The ATF focuses on those products because, while legal, they can cause significant harm to society in the form of drunken driving, for example, or cancer-causing addictions.
Additionally, nearly 25,000 Americans die from firearms suicide each year. Moreover, more people suffer nonfatal firearm injuries than die by guns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And what should that tax amount to? There’s an argument to be made that firearms should be taxed at a higher level than alcohol and tobacco, which are consumable products that disappear as soon as they’ve been used — guns stick around. They accumulate and can continue to impose costs long after they’re first sold.
Using these figures, another colleague recently estimated that the California excise tax would reduce gun sales by 30% to 44%. If applied across the country, the tax could generate an additional $1.5 billion to $1.9 billion in government revenue.But a problem may come from surrounding states: It’s already easy to illegally transport guns bought in Nevada, where laws are more lax, to California. But there’s some evidence that suggests our state’s new policy won’t be neutralized by its neighbors.
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