Guns As Cigarettes

Sen C. Murphy is proposing that guns be regulated the same as cigarettes. Stuff like this has been proposed before along the lines of regulating guns like cars. This fell out of favor when people pointed out that a car purchased in Idaho and driven with a license from Arizona, was legal in Wash D.C.

The tobacco industry is currently a set of government run businesses. Every manufacturer must make and market his product the way the government dictates it be done. The dictionary definition of Fascism.

What happened was that the pols got elected pledging to "do something" about the curse of smoking but discovered that there was a lot of money to be made selling an addictive product to the public.
The result was the government becoming a partner to the tobacco companies and demanding a fixed amount of money every year to let them keep selling their product. Partners in the drug trade as it were. The cost to make and market a cigarette remains the same, the companies profit is the same percentage of the costs, and the protection money is added to the cost of a pack of smokes.

If the government thought tobacco was a real threat to the national health, they'd ban the stuff outright. Since there's big money in it, sales are allowed. Government bribing itself to look the other way.

Which brings us to taxation. If gun sales prove to be persistent, the government will not ban the product, but simply apply a tax to it same as cigarettes. For some reason taxing enumerated rights is acceptable, see Nat. Firearms Act of 34. A $200/ea tax on certain items was considered acceptable while poll taxes were not. Tell me, what's the difference? In todays dollars that was equivalent to about $2500 tax. The $1000/ea tax recently imposed on gun sales in Northern Marianas Islands looks cheap by comparison. It remains to be seen if this holds up. Depends on who gets to pick the next supreme court justice. Remember that the Heller ruling specifically stated that no rights were absolute, which implied that all rights are subject to "common sense regulation" which means that you don't actually have any except at the pleasure of the government.