There are times when you can tell that the Democrats have simply run out of new ideas that might ram through their progressive agenda and they fall back on recycling some older pages from their playbook. They’ve been trying to renew their “assault weapons” ban that was originally passed in 1994 ever since it expired ten years later. But the will hasn’t existed to do that, so now they are rolling out another of their previously failed schemes. 25 House Democrats have reintroduced a bill that would impose a staggering 1,000% excise tax on “semiautomatic assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines. The theory behind this seems to be that if you can’t convince people to ban something, you instead jack up the price of it to the point of being unaffordable. (Just The News)

House Democrats reintroduced legislation that would impose a 1000% excise tax on “semiautomatic assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., introduced the legislation Friday along with 24 other House Democrats. Beyer had introduced legislation on the same idea last year with 41 cosponsors, and even with a Democratic-controlled House, the bill remained stuck in committee.

It is unclear whether the new bill is the same as the one from 2022, as the text of the new legislation was not published as of Monday.

To be fair, it’s not entirely clear whether or not this is the exact same excise tax bill they tried to pass in 2022 or if there have been changes. But the end effect is the same. There are a variety of AR-15 models on the market, ranging from bare-bones rifles that cost around $400 to top-end models that can run you $2,000 dollars. The proposed tax would jack up the price range to $4,000 to $20,000.

Have any of the Democrats pushing this bill noticed that the country is already very much fed up with the prices of everything increasing because of Joe Biden’s inflationary policies? Is this really a time when you want to take one of the most popular types of sports rifles and make it literally ten times more expensive? Talk about a failure to read the room.

We’ll have to wait and see if the Democrats have done a better job of trying to define what an “assault rifle” is this time and which firearms would qualify for the crippling tax. For a quick review, we can look at the Remington R-15 VTR (that’s one of the “scary looking” rifles) and the 572-BDL. That’s a stereotypical, “normal” hunting rifle. You can click through the links to see pictures of each. So would one of those be subject to the massive excise tax while the other is not? Guess what. They are both semiautomatic rifles that accept detachable magazines. If an “assault rifle” is defined based on nothing other than its cosmetic appearance and various attachments, that’s not much of a definition.

On a more basic level, the Democrats still don’t seem to be grasping the underlying issue here. If there was sufficient support for such a ban across the country, people would have elected enough representatives running on a promise to enact that ban and it would already be in place by now. And if a majority of Americans don’t want to see a product banned, they certainly won’t want to see its price go up by a factor of ten for purely political reasons.

Of course, the entire debate is probably academic anyway. The Democrats clearly know they don’t have the votes to pass this, likely not in either chamber. They’re doing this because we’re heading into the heat of the primary season and they want to show their gun-grabbing base that they’re “doing something.” I’d wish them the best of luck, but I wouldn’t really mean it.