You Are Welcome American Gun Nuts

I have often stuck my nose into American bizarre gun laws and always thought that as the screwy gun nuts won't allow a ban on guns and offering thoughts and prayers after another loony shoots a bunch of school children, why not just make it exorbitantly expensive to buy a gun and the bullets in the first place which would shift them out of the hands of anyone but the most dedicated of people fond of propelling a bullet into someone.     
Appears that someone in California read my blog and decided that English woman may be on to something and from July, California will be whacking an extra 11% tax on guns and ammunition to reduce gun sales which immediately got the National Rifle Association squeaking in protest which means they know this would have an impact on gun sales.
It is a well worn path they are treading which is that by making a given product more expensive, cigarettes and alcohol for example, such a tax leads people to buy less of it, reducing the harm to society and with the annual gun death rate hitting 40,000 in America and 120,000 injured, that is a lot of harm to society being done right there.
Economists are estimating that the Californian gun tax should be highly effective and consider that for every 1% increase in price, demand decreases by 2.6% and the the California tax would reduce gun sales by between 30% to 44%.
If applied across the country, a drop of a third of guns sold would do wonders to reduce the amount of people attending funerals or praying next to hospital beds of loved ones but the obvious problem is anyone wanting a cheaper gun or bullets would just pop over the border to buy it but other states struggling against gun related deaths would be watching closely how things work out in California and replicate it themselves and reducing the opportunity for the sort of deranged people who like to quote their rights under the second amendment after each shooting.
Relax gun nuts, you can still compensate for whatever inadequacies you feel owning a gun makes up for, you will just have to pay through the nose for it. You are very welcome.