A Republican member of Tennessee’s General Assembly is critical of a Democrat colleague’s new bill.
HB 2193, introduced by State Representative Bo Mitchell (D-Nashville), “imposes an additional 15-percent tax on the retail sale of firearms [and] requires revenue from the firearms tax to be deposited into the K-12 mental health counselor fund to be administered by the department of education and used exclusively to provide school counselors in elementary and secondary public schools and public charter schools in this state and for mental health assessments and services for students pursuant to a school counselor’s referral.”
Mitchell (pictured above, left) said in an interview with WKRN that his legislation is unlikely to be passed but explained his reasoning for the name of the bill and the 15 percent tax.
“Tongue in cheek, I made it AR-15 percent,” he said. “I call it the ‘Thoughts and Prayers Tax.’ If we’re going to do nothing else in this state, we’re going to put this taxation into a fund to fund K through 12 mental health counselors for our children. If we don’t solve this problem, we’re going to need a lot more mental health counselors in our schools, either for the school shooting or for the children who go home, and the guns are unsecured at home, and they either shoot themselves or their neighbors’ children. It’s either we act and do something, or we’re going to have to start taxing to pay for the other problem it’s causing.”
State Representative Jeremy Faison (R-Cosby) said Mitchell’s bill is a bad idea.
“I offer ‘thoughts and prayers’ for his ill-conceived bill,” he told The Tennessee Star Wednesday. “I am not sorry for its inevitable demise, though.
“This is yet another attempt by Democrats to further tax hard-working Tennesseans,” he said. “Why would a good government make it even harder and more expensive for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves?”
“Additional taxes like this would obviously increase private sales of guns which would be counterproductive to the Left’s agenda. Taxing a constitutional right is the very reason America exists. Imagine if you had to pay a tax just to be able to speak freely? This is no different,” Faison (pictured above, right) added.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on X / Twitter.
Background Photo “Tennessee House of Representatives Chamber” by Antony-22. CC BY-SA 4.0.
