You Want Gun Owners To Pay For WHAT?

Well that didn't take long. A Missouri state legislator named Brandon Ellington (a Democrat, naturally) has found a way to combine his hatred of gun owners and his contempt for the police with bills that mandate that all police officers wear body cameras and that every gun or ammunition purchaser pay for those cameras via a 1% tax on these items.

Missouri lawmaker wants police body cameras paid for by tax on guns, ammo

What a shock, eh?

Now while I like police car dash cams, I'm not a fan of body cams in principle, because I still think that police officers can, by and large, be trusted to tell the truth, and saddling each and every one of them with even more gear don't really address the problem of ferretting out and removing the relative few that aren't trustworthy. However, even if cameras are the way to go, (because we can never spend too much money making sure that violent criminals and crackheads don't get roughed up or "disrespected",) how does anyone, even a Democrat, justify passing the bill on to every law-abiding gun owner and target shooter in the state?

My suggestion to the representative and the Dems in general is that if you want to tax people to pay for police cameras, how about taxing the people that cause most police interactions?

--Put a tax on anyone who is arrested. Heck, what's one more court fine imposed? And it's pretty obvious that these people are "users" of our criminal justice system, and that should work for fans of a "user pays" form of government financing.

--Put a tax on liquor stores in urban neighborhoods. Can we not argue that much of the street crime occurs in or around these places or when their products are consumed to excess?

--Hell, why not put a tax on every store in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods, because that seems to be where 99% of the people who can't get along with the police live. Draconian and overly-broad? Perhaps. But you have to admit that it still makes more sense than taxing some rural farmer, suburban target shooter or a retiree living in a mountain cabin, none of whom are anywhere near as likely to encounter a police officer as as "the usual suspects", many of whom spend much of their lives under the supervision of some court or correctional institution due to their repeated "failure to do right".

Let's just call this what it is: an attempt by those who oppose freedom and law and order by the political party that is beholden to the criminal class and willing to hamstring our police and, in the process, hose lawful gun owners, most of whom typically vote for someone else anyway.