(This is a re-post of an entry I put up in December 2012 on what I’m afraid is an evergreen topic.)
In the wake of these tragic mass murders, firearm advocates, reacting to calls for gun bans, point out that lots of things kill people. Cars, for example, kill lots of people.
We mandate liability insurance for cars. Why not for firearms? Bring market forces to bear on this issue. More firearms make things safer? Insurance rates will go down (if true).
Anyway, what I envision is a requirement that a firearm owner obtain liability insurance that covers injuries caused by that particular firearm. (Runs with the weapon – provides an incentive for people to secure the weapon in a way that ensures, for example, kids don’t have access to the weapon.) I would also envision a policy surcharge used to subsidize coverage for uninsured losses, treatment of mental illness, enforcement of existing regulations, and safety education efforts.
Firearm advocates promote guns as critical for liberty and personal safety. Seems like the price of an insurance policy is a small price to pay for life and liberty. If, on the other hand, your attachment to your guns is more of a cultural affectation, the cost may make you re-evaluate your priorities.
It won’t happen, but it struck me as a compromise position that avoids confiscating weapons on the one hand or continuing, on the other hand, to sit on our hands while mass murderers with firearms gun down the innocent as we idly wonder why this keeps happening to us.
(An additional idea, not in the 2012 entry, is some kind of dealer’s experience account where the dealer has to pay in a certain percentage of the sale. The percentage goes into a firearm victim compensation fund which would pay out some capped amount for individuals injured by firearms. The amount of the percentage for any particular dealer would go up when the dealer’s firearm is found to have injured someone and go down when they have a below average incident-to-transaction ratio. The idea being to create a market incentive for dealers to sell responsibly and penalize those dealers whose transactions are most likely to lead to firearm injuries.)
This is surely an idea whose time has come. Go ahead. Fill your pickup with weapons and pay the insurance. Can’t afford the insurance? Your uninsured gun kills someone? Maybe you could trade places with a guy who owned a couple of reefers, but you would deserve it.
Insurance should also, I presume, have a factor tying the cost to the potential lethality (or mass lethality) of the weapon.
I think it would also make sense to add a tax surcharge to certain types of ammunition or accessories based on their uses & potential for mayhem. You want 10 billets? Fine. You want 50 at once? Pay a quantity surcharge. A thousand? Pay a massive surcharge. Oh, you want armor piercing, too? That will be a 1000% surcharge.
At best, this will work comparably to mandatory insurance for automobiles – that is, the responsible people will obtain the insurance and the irresponsible people will find ways around it. I suggest that it’s not the responsible people who are causing the shooting issues (if we are dividing the world into “responsible” and “irresponsible” people).
Indiana statistics show that approximately 14% of drivers are uninsured, despite Indiana’s mandatory insurance law. (Source – Insurance Resource Council).
40% of vehicles over 15 years old are not insured (Source – Statistic Brain Research Institute). How will you supervise the insurance for the already-owned guns?
Your “dealer-pays” suggestion has similar limitations, and pre-supposes that (some? most? all?) guns used in violent crimes were procured from a reputable (i.e. “insurance-carrying”) dealer.
At least with auto insurance, “responsible” people have the the modest protection of un- and under-insured motorist coverage. How will people who don’t have guns (responsible or not) have that protection? In Indiana, uninsured motorist coverage is mandatory. Should the same requirement be extended to gun ownership (and how would that work?)
I’m not saying that your suggestion is not worth consideration; If you extrapolate from mandatory auto-insurance statistics, it appears that there is at least some success from such a mandate. (I didn’t dig into historic statistics to compare numbers from the “pre-mandatory insurance” days).
However, I submit that it’s a far more complex issue, and “mandatory insurance” will likely make little impact on the costly (in terms of lives lost) events that have become far too common.
The more I think about it, the more I’m leaning toward a common victim compensation fund that any victim of firearm violence can draw from regardless of whether they were injured by an insured or uninsured gun. So, maybe it’s not “insurance” exactly. User fee? Excise?
If gun advocates are correct that most firearm owners are responsible and that the utility of firearm ownership outweighs the damage caused by firearms — that gun control advocates are overreacting to the amount of damage actually caused by firearms — then it should be possible to amply fund compensation for victims with a very small premium.
I would want the dealer end of things to work a little more on fault. I think there are probably a relatively small number of irresponsible dealers who are probably responsible for a higher percentage of guns used in criminal activity.
An interesting question would be whether you’d want to look more at fault when the person injured by a firearm was, themselves, involved in criminal activity. Or say that a person injured by a firearm while, themselves, using a firearm, would only be eligible to draw from the fund if the injured person in that situation had, themselves, insured their firearm.
Dog, your idea of a common fund that it experienced rated based upon the dealers sales of firearms that subsequently kill of individual people has merit. At first blush, the proximity from the dealer’s sale to a gun resold three times and then stolen is a risk a dealer cannot control. However, dealers that operate in high crime rates can assume that a higher percentage of their sales will result in injuries, while a seller in Evanston, IL might count on a lower percentage of sales to incidents.
I can imagine the NRA being hysterical about how insuring firearms would somehow be unconstitutional, like nobody should be responsible for contributing to a violent society where open season on innocent people is somehow exercising personal liberty. I guess it would be something else if 99% of gun deaths were “good” people protecting themselves from “bad” people– even 70%, 30%, 10% or even 1%–but 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides and almost all the rest are accidents and foolishness. Something like .1% of gun deaths are “good people protecting themselves from bad people”, and many of those are provoked by the “good guy with the gun”. Many deaths qualify for Darwin Awards (like the bad guy who decided to shoot some people he just robbed, and when the gun failed to go off, he aimed it at his face to look down the barrel and pulled the trigger. Oops.). Insurance is the way to go. Let the actuaries make the gun advocates come to terms with reality. It’s funny how money is where the rubber meets the road.