|
Republicans are quietly winning the political fight on guns
Instead of consequential reforms, the debate has narrowed to tax breaks on silencers.
|
| |||||||||||||||
 |
🗣️ Paid subscribers make Public Notice possible. If you appreciate our fiercely independent coverage of American politics, please support us. 👇
Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia — a gun shop owner, election denier, and insurrection defender who rode to Congress on his opposition to covid-era public health measures — believes in freedom. Or one kind of freedom, anyway: the freedom to buy and sell guns and gun accessories of all kinds with the least regulation and taxation possible.
To that end, he persuaded his colleagues to include in their enormous budget bill a provision repealing part of the National Firearms Act, which requires those who purchase a silencer to pay a $200 tax and register their device with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).
 |
|
You might ask if this was something that cried out for a policy change, but to Rep. Clyde, that would make you almost an enemy of the Creator himself.
“The Second Amendment is an inalienable constitutional right — God-given — that governments are required to protect, not to tax,” he said.
Surely you recall the biblical verse in which God says “Lo have I given unto thee the instruments to pump hot lead into thine enemies/No king shall tax thy silencers.” Was that in Leviticus? Deuteronomy? Something like that.
But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and Clyde’s divinely-inspired crusade was dealt a blow last week when the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the silencer provision violated the rules of budget reconciliation and had to be stripped from the bill. Not to be swayed from their mission, GOP senators revised the language and put the silencer provision back into the version of the bill that passed the Senate. (The House was amid a lengthy test vote on the latest version of the reconciliation bill as this newsletter was finalized late Wednesday.)
As a question of both rights and safety, this seems almost meaningless. Nobody’s liberty hinges on whether they can buy a silencer without paying a tax. On the other hand, despite what the movies have led you to believe, silencers don’t actually silence a gunshot; they just make it slightly less loud. It’s a demonstration of how far we’ve come that consequential national gun reforms are barely being debated; now we’re reduced to talking about tax breaks on silencers.
With Republican power at its modern apex, the regulation-free, gun-saturated world they always dreamed of creating has never been closer to realization.
So much winning
Not too long ago, the political story of guns revolved around the power of the National Rifle Association. The group was universally feared for its ability to punish all who opposed it; any member of Congress who supported even the mildest of gun restrictions could expect a flood of money and organizing aimed at booting them from office.
But when was the last time you heard about the NRA flexing its political muscles? The interest group that once had few peers in its influence has become almost irrelevant. That’s partly because it has been mired in scandal and mismanagement, but also because most of its goals have been accomplished.
For that, more than anyone else we can blame the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. In 2022, they decided in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that any state or federal restriction on guns is unconstitutional unless one can find a similar legal restriction from the time of the nation’s founding. Justice Clarence Thomas’s decision took “originalism,” the disingenuous legal methodology in which conservatives search the historical record for justification for whatever outcomes they want to produce, to an absurd degree.