Washington State Announces Cost for Privilege of Buying A Gun

The right to keep and bear arms has always implied the right to obtain a firearm. Thus far, various roadblocks that slow the process have survived legal challenge, but there’s only so much friction that’s tolerable before things get stupid.

In Illinois, you have to have a FOID card in order to buy a gun. It’s dumb, but it’s also only $10. It started at $5 back in 1968, so accounting for inflation, that’s something like $45 or so today. Not great, but not insurmountable.

It’s unconstitutional friction, in my book, but it only slows down the process. It doesn’t become the Great Wall of China of hurdles to gun ownership. No, that’s reserved for Washington state.

The state just announced how much you get to pay for the privilege of buying a firearm.

Washington state launched a website telling citizens how much it will cost them to get permission to buy firearms for a five-year period.

Democratic Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed the bill creating the permit-to-purchase scheme in May 2025, the Seattle Times reported. The permit price will be $90 for application, plus another $36 to cover fingerprinting by a law enforcement agency, according to the website the state created.

[“]Gun violence in Washington state breaks apart too many families and kills too many children,” Ferguson said upon signing House Bill 1163, which takes effect on May 1, 2027. “We must put commonsense reforms into place that save lives.”

However, Ferguson doesn’t seem to realize just how little this does, since criminals aren’t exactly getting special purchase ID cards before buying on the black market or stealing a firearm.

But as bad as the $126 price tag is, it gets worse.

The permit will be valid for five years, but anyone seeking it must first take a firearms safety course from an instructor certified by the Washington State Patrol. The site had no information on how much such a course would cost.

That’s right. That’s the baseline.

The cost will increase once you add in the price of instruction, whatever that will be. I doubt many instructors are going to do this on the cheap. They’ve got time and expenses themselves. The cheapest similar one I can find right now is Maryland, where it can be as low as $50, if you’re fortunate.

So now we’ve driven up the cost of a firearm to another $176, at a minimum, all before you actually buy the bloody thing.

Meanwhile, you don’t find a whole lot of Chicago gang-bangers with FOID cards. The card is no barrier to criminals getting firearms, and it never has been. The FOID card has been a thing in Illinois for almost 60 years at this point, and Chicago still has a reputation for some of the most violent crime you’re going to see in a city.

Brilliant.

That’s because this isn’t about public safety. Ferguson can call this a “commonsense reform,” but that assumes there’s actual common sense being applied, and there isn’t.

And now we’ve got a barrier to entry for gun ownership that will price a lot of people out completely. No one is spending Hi-Point money just to buy a Hi-Point, but that’s all many Americans can actually afford, especially since prices are so ridiculous even now.

That’s the point, though, isn’t it?

See, the problem has never been gun ownership among the elites. Kamala Harris famously owns a Glock, but she supported a handgun ban in San Francisco. Tim Walz has a number of guns — not that he can operate them, mind you, but he has them — but he supports every gun control measure that rolls across his field of vision.

This is the same thing. It’s about making sure the well-off can have guns, but the people who might have even more reason to own one for self-defense won’t be able to get one. It’s about creating a system where the elites get to enjoy the totality of their rights, but everyone else has to make a choice between protecting and feeding their family.

While it’s a right no matter what Washington state does, it’s clear what lawmakers see it as. They see it as a privilege, and one that you have to pay to enjoy.