If you’ve been considering picking up a Bushmaster or other AR-15 style rifle, you might want to move it up on your shopping list because it could become more expensive if some House Democrats have their way. And we mean way more expensive. Business Insider is reporting that Democrat Donald Beyer of Virginia is cooking up a plan to impose a 1,000% tax increase on the sale of all scary-looking “assault weapons” in the United States. Since he’s on the House Ways and Means Committee, he’s positioned to be able to craft and push forward such a bill. Some of his colleagues believe they could push it through via reconciliation, avoiding a filibuster in the Senate. Despite the many problems with such a proposal, congressional Democrats appear to believe they could get away with this as a form of de facto gun control, making one of the most popular styles of firearms unaffordable to the vast majority of Americans.

The recent violence is prompting one House Democrat to draft a measure aimed at severely restricting access to the AR-15-style weapons used by different gunmen in the carnage. Rep. Donald Beyer of Virginia, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means panel, wants to impose a 1,000% excise tax on assault weapons.

“What it’s intended to do is provide another creative pathway to actually make some sensible gun control happen,” Beyer told Insider. “We think that a 1,000% fee on assault weapons is just the kind of restrictive measure that creates enough fiscal impact to qualify for reconciliation.”

New AR-15-style guns range from $500 to over $2,000 depending on location, NBC News reported. That means a 1,000% tax on the weapon would add $5,000 to $20,000 to their final sales price — and would probably keep it out of reach from many younger Americans.

Because the proposed bill involves increased revenue for the federal government, Beyer claims that it would qualify for passage through the reconciliation process. That’s a dubious proposal at best, and the Senate Parliamentarian would almost certainly want to examine it. If it fails that test, the bill would be doomed to die in the Senate even if it manages to make it out of the House in one piece.

Beyond the intricacies of congressional procedural rules, this proposal is virtually unheard of in legal history. Using a tax as a way to prevent people from purchasing legal merchandise with no stated purpose for that revenue is preposterous. The badness of the proposal is compounded when you consider that they aren’t even talking about a tax on all firearms or even all rifles. They are narrowing it down in a way that would serve as a government tool to harm specific manufacturers who are – again – marketing a product that is not illegal to sell. The courts should be able to shoot this bill down on that basis alone since it would not be applied evenly across the entire industry being affected.

The brazen nature of such a tax as indicated by its size is also obscene. When governments impose sales taxes, it is a fee that’s added on top of the sale price of the item. It becomes a portion of the cost. This would represent a “tax” that would quadruple the cost of the product in question. The only other area where we see such legislative shenanigans is in the sin taxes applied to tobacco products. A pack of cigarettes in New York currently costs roughly ten dollars. $5.35 of that is state and federal taxes, comprising a little more than half of the total cost. But they at least have the excuse of applying that tax money to healthcare costs and smoking cessation programs. And the proposed AR-15 tax would still be massive by comparison.

The other point to remember is that the passage of a bill like this in the Senate would still require Joe Manchin to go along with the idea. He has consistently come out against major tax hikes and he’s traditionally been a fairly solid Second Amendment supporter. Would he really sign off on this and have to go home to West Virginia, a “shall issue” state with the third-highest gun ownership rate (58.5%) in the country, and explain it to his voters?

I believe the Democrats are attempting to vastly overplay their hand here. And their motives should be called out. If you want to ban guns or anything else in this country, then build support for your proposal and pass legislation making the products illegal. Don’t try to use the tax code to weasel your way around the process.