California legislators narrowly passed an 11-percent excise tax on guns and ammunition Sept. 7 despite bipartisan opposition.
State Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) provided the final vote Democrats needed to pass Assembly Bill 28—the Gun Violence Prevention and Schools Act—passed with the two-thirds margin it required. The bill now awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature before becoming law.
The final tally was 27–9 after Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil (D-Jackson) joined with Senate Republicans to vote against it. Four senators abstained.
The bill’s author, Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Los Angeles), stressed the importance of paying for gun violence prevention programs with funds generated by the new tax.
The measure passed the Assembly along party lines with a vote of 56–17. Seven additional members—six Democrats and one Republican—did not vote.
“It’s shameful that gun manufacturers are reaping record profits at the same time that gun violence has become the leading cause of death for kids in the United States,” Mr. Gabriel said in a July statement. “This bill will fund critical school safety measures and proven violence prevention programs that will save lives and protect communities across California.”
The bill now awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature before becoming law. If signed, California would become the first state to impose such a tax, though some municipalities—such as Seattle and Pennsylvania—collect fees on gun sales and ammunition.
The federal government charges a similar tax on gun and ammunition sales. The United States began taxing guns and ammunition over 100 years ago and now charges 10 percent on the wholesale price of handguns and an 11 percent tax on long guns and ammunition to pay for wildlife restoration projects.
California already charges fees of $31 on gun sales to cover background checks.
The state’s tax and fee department estimates the new tax would generate $159 million from July 2024 to July 2025. If dealers pass the tax onto customers, it would generate another $14 million in state and local sales and tax revenue—$6.3 million of which would go to the state’s General Fund, according to a legislative analysis.
The bill would also establish a fund to pay for school safety and gun-violence reduction programs, counseling and support programs for victims, firearm violence research, and a court-based program to seize firearms from subjects named in domestic violence protective orders.
Former Democratic Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011, applauded the measure’s passage.
“California just made history – again,” Giffords said in a statement posted on her website Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence. “The state continues to take on the gun lobby and pave the way for effective methods to reduce gun violence.”
Additionally, the gun-control activist organization Moms Demand Action was grateful to legislators who approved the measure.
“This bill is an innovative approach to tackling gun violence and a crucial step to improve the safety of all California families,” Cassandra Whetstone, a volunteer with the group’s California chapter, said in a Sept. 7 statement. “We are grateful to gun sense champions in the [Legislature] and community partners who worked so hard to pass this comprehensive bill that seeks to make our communities safer and target the root causes of gun violence.”
However, the National Rifle Association (NRA) opposed the new tax, saying it was not fair.
“It is unjust to saddle law-abiding gun owners with special taxes,” the NRA said on its website. “Such a measure makes it more expensive for law-abiding citizens to exercise a constitutional right and discourages them from practicing to be safe and proficient with their firearms for purposes such as self-defense, competition, and hunting.”
Sales to active or retired law enforcement officers or any law enforcement agency would be exempt from the tax.
Among the lawmakers who opposed the measure, Ms. Alvarado-Gil told colleagues on the Senate floor Thursday she researched gun violence statistics, and her findings didn’t match data included in the bill. She said her data showed drug overdose deaths far outnumbered firearm deaths in the state.
She said she also discovered that California had the lowest mass-shooting victimization rate among the most populous states.
“For me, I tend to analyze the legislation before us,” Ms. Alvarado-Gil said. “When I look at this very sensitive issue, I feel that we have a duty to legislate through facts, and not fear.”
Sen. Brian Dahle (R-Bieber) also highlighted drug overdose deaths compared to those from gun violence when arguing against the bill.
According to Mr. Newsom’s office, California’s gun death rate is 43 percent lower than the rest of the nation’s and the state is ranked No. 1 for gun safety by the gun-control advocacy organization Giffords Law Center, also associated with the former Arizona congresswoman.
The state’s gun homicide rate is also 33 percent lower than the national average, the governor’s office said in a press release Aug. 29.
Meanwhile, California saw nearly 6,000 deaths from fentanyl in 2021, according to the California Department of Public Health.
“You want to do something about deaths in California, why don’t we focus on fentanyl?” Mr. Dahle asked senators. “Why don’t we focus on fentanyl more than we focus on taxing young folks and people who enjoy their Second Amendment rights?”
Sen. Kelly Seyarto (R-Murrieta) additionally called the bill “ineffective.” He also noted that some initiatives, such as gun buyback programs, can backfire and allow people to turn firearms into being destroyed after the guns are used in crimes.
“That gun gets destroyed and there goes the evidence,” Mr. Seyarto said. “Until we start going after where those illegal guns are coming from, and holding the people who have those illegal guns accountable, you are not going to do anything.”
Democrat Sen. Bill Dodd, of Napa, also opposed the bill, he said, because duck hunters were left out of the process.
“I think there is a way to exclude these 70,000 duck hunters [from paying the tax],” Mr. Dodd said. “Frankly, I look at this as something, when you add another 11 percent [tax], all it’s going to do is decrease the number of young hunters and sooner.”
Sen. Anna Caballero (D-Merced) agreed, saying duck hunters have contributed greatly to a large wetland conservation area in her district, and placing another fee on that kind of activity was an unfair burden.
Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose) also refrained from voting because he did not agree with passing the tax onto consumers. He also said everyone should be paying for gun violence programs, not just firearm owners.
“It is a pass-through to the consumer and, frankly, it’s disingenuous to say it’s anything other than that. It’s not equitable,” Mr. Cortese said. “Why aren’t all of us paying for these programs?”
The California Rifle and Pistol Association opposed the bill for the same reason.
“All of California’s law-abiding citizens benefit from efforts to implement programs which remediate the impacts of illegal gun violence upon our public, and all should equally help to fund their implementation,” the organization said in a statement. “Yet, AB 28 would unjustifiably place the entire burden of funding efforts to address illegal gun violence on the backs of law-abiding citizens who legally purchase and lawfully use firearms and ammunition.”
If approved, the firearm excise tax would begin in July 2024.
About the Author
Jill McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist covering politics, environment, and statewide issues. She has been a reporter and editor for newspapers in Oregon, Nevada, and New Mexico. Jill was born in Yosemite National Park and enjoys the majestic outdoors, traveling, golfing, and hiking.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.