Alabama House bill would create sales tax holiday for guns

A bill to create a new tax weekend for guns advanced out of an Alabama House committee last week.

HB 360, sponsored by Rep. Chris Sells, R-Greenville, would create the Second Amendment Sales Tax Holiday during the last week in August.

“It would be the last weekend in August including Friday, Saturday and Sunday in August and it would be firearms and related items,” Sells said to the House Ways and Means Education committee Wednesday.

Under the bill, cartridge cases, bullets, primer, gunpowder shotguns, rifles, pistols, revolvers, silencers, holsters, belts, hearing protection and cases would be  eligible to be tax exempt.

The bill passed the committee with Rep. Barbara Drummond, D-Mobile, being the sole no vote.

“Firearms are the number one killer among young people,” Drummond said during the meeting. “When you look at the number of people and how much violence is happening throughout the entire state of Alabama, it is just unfathomable to me that we would do this and do something to even store, say the storage of our young people so the guns won’t make it on our campuses.”

The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions reported that in 2023, Alabama had the third highest gun death rate in the country and the ninth highest gun death rate among Black people in the country.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2023 more people in Alabama died at the hands of firearms (1,292) than New York State (943), which has four times the population of Alabama. 

Sells said many of the guns Drummond talked about were “not bought legally.”

In 2024, Drummond sponsored HB 414, the bill would criminally penalize parents who do not safely store firearms so children cannot access them. The bill failed to make it out of the House.

Last year, Gov. Kay Ivey signed SB 116, sponsored by Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, into law. The bill bans Glock switches, or devices that can turn semi-automatic handguns into fully automatic weapons. The bill was signed after a mass shooting took place in Five Points South Birmingham at Hush Hookah/Cigar Lounge.

If passed, Sells’ bill would go into effect immediately. The bill would decrease taxes going into the Education Trust Fund by $360,000 and would decrease taxes going into county and municipal funds by $506,000, according to a fiscal note with the bill. The bill moves to the House.

Updated at 10 a.m. to correct a word in Drummond’s quote. It was “unfathomable,” not “infallible.”