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South Carolina shoots holes in gun battle by peddling tax-free weapons for Black Friday

Michael Daly
New York Daily News
Tuesday, November 24th 2009


Arlyn T. Pendergast, president of A.T.P. Gun Shop & Indoor Range in Summerville, S.C. shows off a 50-caliber Desert Eagle handgun in his store on Monday.


Top cop Raymond Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg display weapons recovered in Monday's bust of Florida-to-N.Y.C. gun-trafficking gang.

The great state of South Carolina is putting its own sick twist on Black Friday with a tax holiday on firearm purchases.

The great state of South Carolina is putting its own sick twist on Black Friday with a tax holiday on firearm purchases.

Not cars.

Not clothes.

Certainly not books.

Just guns.

For the 48 hours following Thanksgiving, gun buyers will enjoy a break of up to 9% in state and local taxes.

Firearms traffickers are not expected to pass the savings on to New York criminals, but what is called "the extrava-gun-za" and "Second Amendment Weekend" is sure to help South Carolina stay among the top five states that provide 85% of the illegal handguns recovered in New York City.

One of the other top states is Florida, believed to be the source of at least 40 guns city undercover cops bought in the last three months, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes said.

The tax holiday for firearms in South Carolina was first tacked onto a 2008 bill that provided similar breaks for energy efficient appliances.

Gov. Mark Sanford vetoed the legislation, though not because he disapproves of guns. He recently repealed the state's one-gun-a-month restriction.

Sanford disapproves of tax holidays, though he subsequently slipped away on a holiday of another kind, this with his mistress in Argentina.

The legislature overrode the tax holiday veto thanks to the efforts of Rep. Mike Pitts, the gun amendment's sponsor. The South Carolina Supreme Court then ruled the bill violated the "one subject rule" of the state's constitution, which bars multiple matters in a single bill.

The legislature solved the problem by dropping the energy efficiency part and keeping the firearms in time for this year's Black Friday. That was no doubt welcome news to the state's gun shops, which outnumber McDonald's in the Palmetto State by four to one.

Even without a tax holiday, South Carolina gun shops sold a half-million handguns in a 10-year period. The state's population is only 4.5 million.

The number of gun sales is expected to grow ever higher thanks to Pitts, who also sponsored a bill that reduced the age for possessing a handgun in South Carolina from 21 to 18.

"If my daughter were driving, as a 19- or 20-year-old, to Charleston," Pitts said the other day, "I could put my handgun in the glove compartment of my car and she could drive to Charleston without being a felon."

Pitts also is pushing the "South Carolina Firearms Freedom Act," which proposes to exempt guns manufactured in South Carolina from all federal restrictions.

Pitts is untroubled by statistics showing South Carolina is a leading supplier of illegal guns to New York and other cities. He applies what apparently passes for logic down there.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/natio ... _holes_in_gun_battle.html