Anti-gunners have a bee in their bonnet over semi-auto guns lately. Despite the technology being more than a century old at this point and these weapons not being a supposedly horrid problem until now, the anti-gunners have issued a hit on semi-automatics.

Luckily, they just haven’t been able to do a whole lot on that front.

A California lawmaker, however, has a proposal that will likely be the first step along those lines.

A California lawmaker will push for a new tax on sales of semi-automatic firearms, with the proceeds going to support community violence prevention programs. “The gun tax will support the kind of interventions that make gun violence less likely in the first place which is exactly what we need to do,” Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-Greenbrae, said in a statement Wednesday. The new tax revenue would be routed through the existing California Violence Intervention and Prevention Program, overseen by the Board of State and Community Corrections, which send grants to cities and community-based organizations. Will Shuck, Levine’s chief of staff, said that the amount of the excise tax is to be determined, but that the state could look to Chicago or Seattle, which impose a $25 tax on most firearm sales, as a model. “And that amount per firearm sale will certainly be considered in the discussion with stakeholders to ultimately determine the appropriate tax for California,” Shuck said. While the anticipated revenue is yet to be calculated, Shuck said it should be in the millions of dollars.

Let’s be honest for a moment here. This is going to be a thing in California.

The state is both anti-gun and cash-strapped due to their excessive social programs. They’re going to pass this unless the actual bill is just an absolute crap-storm. In other words, so long as Levine doesn’t screw up the writing of this bill, Californians are going to be taxed for semi-auto gun purchases.

However, don’t expect anything to happen beyond creating revenue for the state.

While anti-violence efforts can be useful if done correctly, the state of California tends to have blinders on when it comes to anything approaching the roots of violence. They don’t want to look at cultural factors or anything that doesn’t strictly adhere to the liberal orthodoxy they hold so dear.

Instead, they’re going to tax gun buyers for purchasing effective, proven, centuries-old mechanisms as their means of personal defense. They’re going to take that money and funnel it into programs that will likely do nothing, and pretend that they’re the serious ones here.

California gun owners, I wish you well. I sincerely hope I’m wrong and this is defeated. I’ll happily do what I can to assist in that fight, but at some point, you have to ask yourself how much more are you going to put up with? I’m sorry, but is the weather that nice?

While I’m pretty sure that while Texans and other western states are sick of Californians in general, they’d welcome refugees from the land of socialism and gun control.