Rahul Bali
,
Meimei Xu
| WABE
February 12th, 2025
The Georgia State Senate passed legislation Wednesday to create an 11-day sales tax holiday for guns, ammunition, gun safes and accessories.
The proposed holiday would start on the second Friday of October every year, around deer hunting season, and would waive both state and local sales taxes. The Senate voted 31 to 21 to pass Senate Bill 47, which now goes to the House.
Wednesday’s 90-minute floor debate turned into one about gun rights and gun violence. Democratic State Sen. Nan Orrock of Atlanta questioned the timing of the legislation in the aftermath of the Apalachee High School shooting in September, during which a 14-year-old student allegedly shot and killed four people at the school.
“Are you all tone deaf? It’s like taking a knife and sticking it right into the very heart of a parent who’s lost a child, of a family who’s lost a teacher,” Orrock said.
Republican State Sen. Randy Robertson of Columbus, one of the 19 Republican co-sponsors of the bill, fired back.
“Don’t go stand on the bodies of children because you don’t like the Second Amendment. That’s disgusting,” Robertson said.
Democrats have proposed a number of bills that would regulate the storage of firearms Democratic State Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes of Duluth said Georgians did not want the sales tax holiday.
“The Republican Party’s priorities are jacked up, to be honest,” she said. “Nobody’s asking for this. Working families in Georgia are not asking for this.”
Majority Caucus Chair State Sen. Jason Anavitarte, who is the lead sponsor of the bill, told reporters that he believes recent school shootings or gun violence incidents should not translate into stricter gun ownership laws.
“I think our caucus Republicans, I think we feel the way we do just to protect our rights,” he said. “I don’t think that what happened at Apalachee or these other school shootings has anything to do with the Second Amendment or people wanting to keep themselves safe or trying to legislate their way out of what we saw with school shootings, and I know there’s a lot of families I’ve talked to even in Barrow County and other communities about that issue that feel as we do.”
Anavitarte introduced a similar bill last legislative session, SB 344, but amendments to the bill stripped it of its provision for the gun sales tax holiday and replaced it with a tax exemption for broadband investments instead by the time Gov. Brian Kemp signed it into law.
The Georgia State University Fiscal Research Center projects the holiday would cost the state between $1.7 million and $7 million a year of state and local sales taxes. The center estimates there are about $1.2 billion in annual sales of firearms, ammo, safes and related items in Georgia.
