It’s a pretty safe bet that if there is a bad gun control idea to be pushed, that the radically anti-gun Democrats of the Chicago area will latch on to it. Cook County now appears to be on the edge of adopting a blatantly unconstitutional tax on ammunition modeled after one that has seen Seattle’s city council dragged into court.

Some people just aren’t bright enough to learn from past mistakes:

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle has said she has enough votes to approve a new countywide tax on ammunition for handguns and rifles. Preckwinkle said the ammo tax – first suggested by Commissioner Richard Boykin – would slap a one-cent-per-cartridge levy on less powerful ammunition such as .22 caliber bullets, and a five-cent-per-bullet tax on more powerful ammo, such as 9-mm bullets. “Commissioner Boykin came forward with the idea, and I pointed out to him that we’ve tried this before, and only gotten eight votes. One of the votes that we had hoped for at the time was the vote of his predecessor,” she said. Boykin acknowledged he agreed to support Preckwinkle’s plan for a new 1 percent county hotel tax increase, but said his aim is the bullet tax. “There is no greater issue for us to confront in Cook County and the city of Chicago than this issue of gun violence,” he said.

What Preckwinkle won’t admit is that the goal of the Cook county bullet tax is the same as that of Seattle’s; making ammunition too expensive for the average person to afford, effectively pricing them out of gun ownership.

Seattle has a very left-wing city government that is purposefully levying this tax in order to make firearms ownership and especially shooting a gun much more expensive as a way of disenfranchising those who do not have a significant amount of money to spend in shooting sports or self-defense. The gun and ammunition tax came from exact same sort of thinking the inspired a previous generation of Democrats to create poll taxes as a means to make voting more difficult for minorities in the Jim Crow South. These poll taxes imposed a tax to register to vote, just as Seattle would impose a heavy tax of $25 for every firearms transfer and a per-bullet tax that would drive up the cost of a brick of .22LR by $10.00, or the cost of an standard case of 9mm up $50.00. That’s extra money that the city’s working poor don’t have to spend, putting firearms ownership out of their reach… and we have to believe that was specifically the point of the tax.

Once again, an anti-liberty liberal government is making things far more difficult on the law-abiding, and doing nothing whatsoever when it comes to ensuring that violent criminals are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law so that they remain in prison and off the streets.

If Preckwinkle was serious about stopping violent crime in Cook County, she’d file a bill stripping county prosecutors of the ability to plea away charges resulting from the criminal use of a firearms.

Someone should ask Cook County why it cares more about protecting criminals than law-abiding citizens.