[BlueTrain]

I'm not a hunter but don't you have to buy stamps sometime for hunting?

In any event, the Stamp Act was in no way intended to restrict any right. It was intended to raise money, as all taxes are. Often taxes are designed in such a way, so to say, that it has little effect on residents in the taxing district but instead tends to tax visitors. Hotel taxes are like that. Other taxes are just the opposite. They are designed to capitalize on what might be called premium or highly desirable, luxary items. Those include excise taxes. Around here in Northern Virginia, property taxes are higher along Route 28, that runs north from Centreville to Route 7, if you know the area. That is hardly designed to prevent people, mostly all businesses, from locating along Rt. 28 but merely to pay for the road and the maintenance of it. It's a sort of special use tax, you might say. It's listed separately on the real estate tax bill.

So basically, the Stamp Act, which was clearly controversial and unpopular (can't think of any popular tax) and also one of the underlying causes of the revolution, is not a good example. In the case of a special tax on firearm and ammunition purchases, it becomes a question of does the tax really amount to a real restriction on the right or not, depending entirely on how much the tax actually is.

The poll tax was not exactly all that unpopular where it existed, except among those who couldn't pay it. I suppose that's a better example but I don't know how much the tax actually was. Some people have trouble paying their property taxes (ours is about $100 a week, paid twice a year) and you don't receive any particular privilege for having paid the tax either. In the case of the poll tax, effectively, it meant that mostly well-off people paid the tax, elected the officials and pretty much ran the county, but they paid for everything, too.