There’s now an official government website where you can look up exactly what your constitutional rights cost. Not a gun — the permission to buy one. Washington State just posted the price: $126, plus a mandatory training class, plus your fingerprints on file with the state police.
And here we thought “shall not be infringed” was the one line in the Bill of Rights that didn’t come with a checkout page.
The Permission Slip Industry Comes to Olympia
Here’s the deal Washington’s ruling class cooked up. House Bill 1163, signed by Governor Bob Ferguson back in May 2025, creates a “permit to purchase” — a permission slip you’ll need before any gun store in the state can sell you so much as a bolt-action .22. It kicks in May 1, 2027, and the state just launched a shiny new website spelling out the tab.
The application runs $90. Fingerprinting adds another $36. That’s $126 before you’ve touched a firearm — and in classic government fashion, the state’s own site admits the agency taking your fingerprints “may charge a nominal fee” on top of the fingerprint fee. A fee for the fee. Ka-ching!
Then comes the class. You can’t get the permit without completing a firearms safety course certified by the Washington State Patrol — live-fire, at a range, where you demonstrate proficiency by burning through dozens of rounds on your own dime. The state doesn’t list what the course costs, because of course it doesn’t. Comparable mandatory courses in other permit states run $50 and up, which puts the realistic entry price somewhere north of $175. To ask permission. For a right you already have.
And your permission slip expires. It’s good for five years, then you’re back at the counter with another $90.
“Commonsense Reforms”
Governor Ferguson says gun violence “breaks apart too many families and kills too many children,” and that “we must put commonsense reforms into place that save lives.”
Notice what the reform actually does. The gang member with a stolen Glock is not filling out the $90 application. He is not scheduling his live-fire proficiency demonstration with a state-certified instructor. The only people standing in that line are the people who were never the problem — retirees, single moms, first-time buyers who watched their city defund the police and decided to stop outsourcing their safety.
We used to have a word for charging Americans money to exercise a constitutional right. It was called a poll tax, and it was so obviously rotten that we amended the Constitution to kill it. Now the same idea is back, rebranded as public safety — with fingerprinting.
The Fee Wall Moves North
If this playbook looks familiar, it should. We just watched the Justice Department put San Jose on a six-day clock over its $1,591 carry-permit fee — the highest in the nation — with a 5 p.m. deadline today to knock it off or get sued. Same scheme, different coast: when the courts say you can’t ban the right, you price it instead.
The Supreme Court saw this coming. The Bruen decision — the one that’s been wrecking gun-control schemes since 2022 — specifically warned that “exorbitant fees” could sink even an otherwise legal permit system. The blue states apparently read that footnote as a suggestion. Maybe a dare.
So follow the trajectory here, because it’s not subtle. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division now has a Second Amendment Section, and San Jose is its test case. Whatever comes out of today’s deadline — a surrender, a consent decree, or a federal lawsuit — becomes the template, and Washington’s permit scheme is exactly the kind of pay-to-exercise operation that template was built for. Olympia gave everyone until May 2027 before the law bites. That’s nineteen months of runway for the gun-rights groups — including the Second Amendment Foundation, which happens to be headquartered right there in Bellevue, Washington. This law has a real shot at seeing the inside of a courtroom before it sells its first permission slip.
And if it doesn’t get struck down? Then every blue-state legislature learns the lesson: you don’t need to ban guns anymore. You just need a fee schedule, a mandatory class, a renewal cycle, and a website. Raise the price a little every session. Call it commonsense. Wait for the line to get shorter.
You — the citizen who’s never so much as jaywalked — are the revenue stream in that plan. Nobody else is paying it.
Washington says the Second Amendment now costs $126, plus ammo, plus the class, renewable every five years. The Constitution says it’s already paid for. Sometime soon, a federal judge is going to pick one — and San Jose just showed us which way that’s starting to break.
