spurgistan wrote:thegreekdog wrote:Baron Von PWN wrote:just slap a 60% tax on all ammunition and amunition products. eventually it will be too prohibitively expensive to go on a shooting rampage. Bam problem solved!
It's worked with tobacco, alcohol, fatty foods, soda, and gasoline... why not guns?
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nat ... 57737774/1I dunno much about the efficacy of the other vice taxes you mentioned (and would argue against gasoline's inclusion based on poor substitutes for gasoline in the American economy), and I imagine that the soda tax is too recent for any real data to have emerged (which is to say my googling was inconclusive) but yeah. Vice taxes work sometimes.
Suppose we implement a 100% tax on all ammunition and ammunition products.
Henry, a disgruntled guy, takes his gun (whichever he already owns) or he takes a gun from a relative.
Instead of spending $10 on 50 bullets, he has to spend $20 because of the tax.
He finds a place where he can maximize his impact (gun-free zone, no security guards, etc.).
Then he kills a bunch of people.
He doesn't need that many bullets to kill people, so even a 100% tax won't curb this particular behavior. If someone really wants to kill a bunch of people, I don't see why they would be sensitive to price changes.
Since he's committing suicide after his task, then he won't be worried about how much of a chunk those bullets will remove from his budget. Furthermore, why not charge it to credit? A $200 spending limit should cover even the most onerous of taxes.
Most importantly, who does this really punish? Normal consumers of bullets, who are not crazy and/or dangerous people. It also punishes producers because the tax may reduce demand--depending on the elasticity of the curves.
So, how is this tax justifiable? It isn't.