Proposed S.C. bill would make guns tax holiday permanent

COLUMBIA -- South Carolina’s Second Amendment Sales Tax Holiday would be made permanent if two state lawmakers have their way.

Reps. Michael Pitts, R-Laurens, and W. Brian White, R-Anderson, prefiled a bill, H. 4220, this week to make the two-day sales-tax holiday for firearms as automatic as the yearly sales-tax break for back-to-school shopping.

In May the state Supreme Court threw out the firearms sales-tax holiday, along with a month-long sales-tax break for energy efficient appliances. The court said the act that created the two unrelated holidays violated the state constitution's "one subject rule."

So the Legislature passed a one-time budget provision to reinstate the guns portion so that this year shoppers this year could able to buy guns without sales tax on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving.

No similar effort was made to bring back the tax holiday for energy-efficient appliances.

“The gun shop owners are ecstatic about what it did last year, especially to mom-and-pop operations,” said Pitts, who led the original effort to enact the sales-tax holiday on guns.

“Several of those told me it saved their business during these bad economic times.”

Poverty experts have attacked the tax holiday as a misguided priority, and tax-reform advocates have called it political pandering that complicates the tax code. Fiscal analysts estimated the holiday would deprive the state of about $15,000 per year. A spokeswoman for the S.C. Department of Revenue said exact totals were unavailable.

But Pitts said his idea is based on principle: Just as he supports the First amendment and the state’s exemption for sales tax on newspapers, the Second amendment should also be recognized.

Reach Sarita Chourey at sarita.chourey@morris.com or (803) 727-4257