We all know what Black Friday is about. No, it's not a racist term. It's when stores start seeing their sales records go from red (bad/in debt) and finally go in the black with a major boost in Holiday sales. Well, the fine folks of South Carolina decided to make Guns a major gift this holiday season....
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 He recently repealed the state's one-gun-a-month restriction.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.
"It's not our lax gun laws. It's our high crime-rate that causes the problems," he said the other day.
Pitts sought to illustrate his position by noting that a burglar had recently broken into his home and stolen "about a dozen guns."
"What's happening is people break into my home, steal my guns and get a premium price by taking it to other states and selling them," Pitts said.
Meanwhile, in Pitts' big extrava-gun-za, firearms traffickers will be able to enjoy a Black Friday tax holiday at gun shops across South Carolina, from Dead Bang Guns & Automatics to Freedom Guns and Pawn, The Gun Doctor and Pappy's Guns.
Monday, I gave a call to Woody's Pawn & Jewelry in Orangeburg, one of 15 gun shops Mayor Bloomberg cited in 2006 for making an illegal sale to an undercover. At the time, Woody's sold 98 guns that were connected to crimes in New York City.
I got as far as saying I was from the New York Daily News.
"I don't care to comment to anything in New York," owner Chan Holman said.
This is what Mayor Bloomberg had to say about the tax-free gun sale: "Law-abiding citizens have every right to buy a gun, but South Carolina is a top exporter of guns used in crimes. First we'd like to see South Carolina repair and enforce its lax gun laws."
Holman obviously disagrees. He told another reporter he expects a big jump in business come Black Friday.
"I'm even thinking about tearing down a building next to the store and using it for parking," Holman said. "We'll be open an hour early and staying open later depending on the crush of business. ... We have a lot of inventory to get rid of."
So... we have a black Friday sale on guns. Literally, this is modern America summed up in a single idea. The worse part of all this is they acknowledge that their guns are being connected to crimes in major cities. at a disproportionately high rate. Way to go and help the rest of the nation, South Carolina. Being the source of 85% of illegal firearms in a major US city sounds like a pretty big deal.
I suppose we should all gas up the car and get your credit cards out, cause we're gonna need some assault weapons to prevent Obama's ground troops from forcing their MARXIST HEALTH CARE on us Teabaggers!
I know what you're thinking.. What is South Carolina like? Well, there's really only two options. Savannah and Charleston. The rest is a complete lost cause.
Savannah still has homes that were built in the late 1600's still standing. Which means that Savannah is full of tourist. In the old manors south of Broad you can still see the iron spikes rising from court yard walls that were placed to keep the slaves in, and the little stone steps people used when getting out of horsedrawn carriages. It's a lot of antique shops and moss and shit. It's tiny compared to Charleston and is somehow surrounded by more ghetto. I suppose you should come here if you liked the novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Charleston, on the other hand is completely awesome if you're a drunk.. or you like culture. A trip there does provide you with some pretty good culturally enriching moments when, if you're like me, you end up wandering drunkenly through Charleston at 4 am and just have to piss, only to realize that you are letting loose all over a prerevolution brick wall. Really, the only redeeming thing about Charleston is that it's designed around drunken wandering/pissing on things you'll never afford. Yeah, whenever I travel I make sure to get drunk and wander (a hobby) and Charleston is one of the more interesting cities to be drunk in.
But enough about my clearly inappropriate behavior. Let's look at this situation again. Because while I placed in bold a lot of it, there's an even bigger part that I missed out in first reading it that I glanced back at and just wondered what the hell was wrong with society. You see, the legislature solved the problem by dropping the energy efficieny part and keeping the firearms in time to make it pass for Black Friday.
If you're not getting what I'm saying let me quote it again because it's amazing.
The tax holiday for firearms in South Carolina was first tacked onto a 2008 bill that provided similar breaks for energy efficient appliances.
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.
Who cares about the climate, we need guns! I like to think I'm usually joking about the south being so god damn backwards, but good fuck, that is some onion level shit right there. No way would I believe that we're in America and this shit flies.
So this Black Friday, try not to shoot someone while waiting in line at the Wal*mart...
consumerism (n.): other people buying stuff they don't need and/or I don't want
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