At some point, we need to just start recalling these people for violating their Constitutional oaths. And if that doesn’t work, we need en masse simply to refuse to comply with these illegitimate laws. It really is that simple. Fox News:

If you can’t ban ’em, tax ’em.

Lawmakers looking to more tightly regulate firearms in the wake of the Newtown school shooting and other massacres are moving at the state and federal levels to introduce new taxes on firearms and ammunition.

The proposals range from the modest — a proposed 5 percent tax in New Jersey — to the steep — a proposed 50 percent ammo tax in Maryland. The bills follow efforts to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and expand background checks, measures that have had mixed success at the state level.

The taxes — much like so-called “sin taxes,” like those on cigarettes — serve a dual purpose. They can deter buyers, while using the extra revenue for favored programs. In this case, the sponsors want to direct the money toward mental health services, police training and victims’ treatment.

But firearms groups say a “sin tax” on firearms wrongly punishes law-abiding gun owners.

“If anything, gun owners ought to be getting a tax rebate for helping reduce crime,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

He said the purpose of the taxes is to “frustrate and limit the exercise of the Second Amendment.” While noting some of the revenue from these taxes and fees would go to victims’ services, Keane said those paying the tax are mostly not those responsible for gun crime.

[my emphasis]

And there it is. Right there. That’s the nub AND the rub: this is but another example of wealth redistribution, albeit one that has nothing to do with relative wealth, but rather to do with punishing unfavored constituencies (gun owners, who all the great 20th-century “progressives” viewed as potential enemies of the state) to reward, financially, favored constituencies (themselves, government bureaucracies, advocacy groups). The poor, law-abiding gun owner will be adversely affected by what is, as Mr Keane rightly points out, a punitive tax on a fundamental natural right; meanwhile, the rich liberal who sits back and expects the police to act as a first responder for his family — in many cases, meaning they’ll be the ones putting up the crime scene tape and processing the bodies — will not be, but instead will have his favored programs paid for by his political opponents.

Meanwhile, the government grows as it yet again grants itself permission to steal more revenue.

Continues Keane:

“We’re obviously extremely opposed to try to tax the lawful exercise of the Second Amendment rights by law-abiding Americans,” he told FoxNews.com.

Firearms manufacturers already pay a federal tax, which goes toward wildlife conservation. A tax on sales would make firearms costlier.

At the federal level, Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., proposed a bill that would impose a 10 percent tax on “any concealable” firearm. The revenue would be used to help fund a national gun buyback program. The bill is still in committee.

At the state level in California, Democratic state Rep. Roger Dickinson last month introduced a bill to impose a 5-cent tax on every bullet.

“A limited tax on ammunition is a small price to pay for better mental health care for children in our state,” he said in a recent statement. The revenue from the tax would go toward screening young people for mental illness.

If it’s such a small price to pay, take it out of the “budgets” set aside for incarcerated gun crime offenders. Because otherwise, it isn’t a small price to pay: it’s theft, posing as compassion, and it targets those who are exercising a right protected explicitly in the Bill of Rights.

If the government wants to tax ammunition, it should do so by moving to a fair tax system, in which you are taxed on what you purchase. Conservatives have long desired either a flat tax or fair tax system as those that are most “equal” and “fair,” which is what the left tells us is what they stand for.

They don’t. And never have.

In my own state of Colorado, I hope the lockstep Democrats who bent to the threats of DC are removed from office indecorously, and I hope that Colorado — now, sadly, an emblem of a Dem-run state willing to forego representation of its own citizens to follow a centralized, DC and NY-based anti-gun agenda — bounces back with a fury come 2014, and utterly and with extreme prejudice rejects those Democrats who have worked in concert with DC not to make us more safe, but to make us less prosperous, killing jobs and the tourism industry, which relies heavily on destination sportsman who will now head to other states.

Our system of government is broken. It’s time to take the message to the people of each state that when you elect Democrats, who are not the Democrats of old but rather, with rare exceptions, a lockstep ideological extension of the centralized progressive agenda — and as such, are not being elected to represent you but rather to take away the identity of each state they can control by way of conforming with the New Left agenda — you are voting for your own enslavement to DC pols who care about you only as prospective economic units or chess pieces in a long-term game, the end result of which is collectivism, enforced conformity, and the destruction of both individual autonomy and private sector industry.

Or, to put it more precisely, a complete “fundamental transformation” of the American Dream, with industriousness and risk replaced by an all-enveloping “safety net” that, in the final analysis, looks more like a net the government drops to gather up all the tuna.