BELLEVUE, WA – In a successful effort largely guided by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), California gun owners have successfully derailed an outrageous attempt to tax every bullet and cartridge sold in the Golden State.
A measure that would have placed the proposed tax on November’s ballot as a constitutional amendment was stopped in committee Wednesday night in Sacramento.
“We’re delighted that the measure died in committee,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said. “This proposal, sponsored by Sen. Don Perata, was a vicious assault on gun owners, and would have amounted to a tax on a constitutional right.”
Perata, an anti-gun Oakland Democrat, was not able to muster the necessary support for his legislation, which had cleared one Senate committee but was stalled in another. The effort failed largely because outraged gun owners put pressure on their representatives. CCRKBA sent letters to 300,000 California gun owners in a grassroots campaign to stop Perata’s bullet tax amendment, and that effort paid off, Gottlieb stated.
“Golden State gun owners stopped a bad idea from becoming bad law,” Gottlieb observed. “Don Perata thinks owning a gun is a sin, when it is actually a civil right. He wanted to punish gun owners by taxing them to pay the medical costs of gang-bangers. That’s not only wrong, it is wrong-headed.”
Sen. Perata, working on behalf of Handgun Control, Inc., which now calls itself the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, is also pushing legislation that would open the floodgates for groundless litigation against gun makers.
“Perata also wants to remove legal barriers that protect firearms manufacturers and retailers from frivolous lawsuits,” Gottlieb added. “These lawsuits, which have been consistently losing in the courts, are nothing more than harassment against legitimate businesses. We can’t allow Perata’s social bigotry against guns and gun owners to be legitimized by legislation.”