Newsom Signs Bills Doubling Taxes on Guns and Ammunition, Prohibiting Concealed Carry
The taxation law, which goes into effect in July 2024, will impose an eleven percent excise tax on the goods. The revenue raised will go toward “school safety and violence prevention programs, including initiatives to prevent school shootings, bolster firearm investigations, reduce retaliatory violence, and remove guns from domestic abusers,” the governor’s office wrote in a statement.
Multiple gun-rights advocacy organizations have already joined a Second Amendment challenge to the concealed-carry law, which they say flies in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (2022). The 6-3 decision held that a New York state law that had been in effect since 1911 requiring that applicants for concealed-carry licenses demonstrate a need distinguishable from that of the general public was unconstitutional and that the ability to carry a handgun in public was a constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The Court held that “there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a ‘sensitive place’ simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department.”
