Imagine a tax on blacks with the proceeds going to the KKK. Or a tax on homosexuals with the requirement that the money be given via grants to organizations purporting to find a cure for homosexuality. Do you think maybe that might upset some people?
Well, yes. I think it’s pretty clear that would upset a lot of people. And so it is with someone who claims Hunting taxes better spent on gun control:
The Reynolds Game Farm and the Department of Environmental Conservation cater to the most violent members of society – those who derive pleasure from killing helpless birds. Meanwhile, public tax dollars from the state’s general fund are used to subsidize this atrocity.
The DEC and its animal-killing arm, known as the Bureau of Wildlife, should not be given what amounts to welfare payments just so the violent sport of recreational hunting can continue. Instead, the excise taxes affixed to the cost of weapons and ammunition should be spent on programs to fight gun violence, similar to the way a portion of the taxes on tobacco are used to promote anti-smoking campaigns.
Maybe it’s not fair to compare it to taxes on blacks or homosexuals. Maybe a better analogy would be a tax on printing presses, radio and television stations, with the money going to censorship boards. Or taxes on churches with the money spent on evangelical atheist groups. Specific enumerated rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms are justifiably worthy of more protection than things like being a homosexual or black which doesn’t affect as many people.
Hence, take all the perfectly valid outrage you have over the suggestion that blacks and homosexuals should be taxed to fund those that would see them exterminated and multiple it by about a factor of two to approximate my outrage at taxes on guns be used to restriction the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.
Sure, take a program that was designed, and the fees assigned, for the purpose of maintaining game bird populations, and highjack it for other purposes. It was done with Socialist Security, so why not this?
The language in the article reads like something from PETA.
Next I suppose we’ll be told that the time for debate is over– that the issue is “settled”.
AbolishSportHunting.com. And how many times have we been told that no one, no one on Earth, would ever even think of taking away the rights of hunters? Why, even the hunters have told us that we’re a bunch of extremists for suggesting that anyone’s hunting guns would be threatened by the anti gun rights bunch. I wonder if any of them get it yet.
Maybe a better analogy would be a tax on printing presses, radio and television stations, with the money going to censorship boards.
Uuh, they already do, I think its called the FCC
Wasn’t there a study some time back that suggested that youth that were given a proper introduction to firearms were less likely to use them for violence? I doubt that the people calling for the excise taxes to be spent on “reducing gun violence” had in mind programs like say a school marksmanship program/team, but if it is a reasonable approach they shouldn’t complain (they probably will anyway).
In addition to the potential for steering kids away from violence, a program like that would probably increase the amount of guns and ammunition sold thereby increasing the amount of excise taxes collected, so the conservation programs might actually benefit as well instead of having money diverted to do-nothing feel-good programs.
Of course, the gun-grabbers and many school boards would never accept it.