Please welcome guest author Mike S. on the increasingly widely discussed topic of requiring liability insurance for all firearms. I hope you will read and make intelligent comments (those of you who are banned for misconduct, like K-rod or Thomas, also will not be allowed to comment on any guest author's posts; those just go directly to the spam file, thanks to my new favorite technogeek).
A National Insurance Mandate for Gun Ownership
In the aftermath of the recent mass killings in Connecticut the knee jerk reactions from both sides of the gun control argument are all things that we’ve heard before and which are routinely rejected by the other side. The positions are intractable and, it seems, to me that no one is really listening to each other anymore. I find myself in a position of having friends and family on both sides of the argument. And, as a former gun owner (living in Brooklyn precludes me from legally owning a firearm even if I was inclined to do so) I feel like I have a more comprehensive understanding of what both sides of the argument would like. We have a tremendous problem with gun crime in this country. It’s not just the incidents like Sandy Hook or Aurora. According to the Brady Campaign, we’re looking at over 95,000 incidents of gun violence every year. That’s a lot of people getting shot. The president and many others are using this latest incident as a vehicle to enact gun reform. Since we are making an effort at a national discussion, I would like to propose an idea that I’ve been working on that would be an effective compromise for both parties - a nationally mandated program of gun owner liability insurance.
While mass killings are devastating to the victims and their families, and the damage they do to the psyches of the communities in which they occur, as well as the country as a whole, is incalculable, they are not the largest component of gun violence in this country. Most incidents have casualty counts of one or two and don’t make a big enough impact to show up on the radar of our national news media. Most of these crimes are committed with handguns and most of those guns are obtained from legal vendors through the use of straw buyers. Another (not insignificant) amount are obtained through gun shows and swap meets. Our current laws do very little to prevent criminals from buying guns this way. There is no requirement to keep transaction records. There is no permanent record of background checks. There are no registration or licensing requirements. This effectively protects the privacy of the gun owner, but also protects the privacy of the criminal as well. Law enforcement has no way to track weapons purchased by criminals. There’s no way to know if a criminal has a gun. It’s even difficult for them to determine who is selling guns to criminals. Most dealers are legitimate, but when one decides to start selling to criminals, there’s no paper trail for law enforcement to follow back to the dealer.
Currently, the most popular gun control idea is to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines. The efficacy of these plans notwithstanding, gun rights activists have no interest in supporting those plans and will sabotage any attempt to enact legislation of that sort. Some sort of compromise has to be reached.
We need a plan that effectively controls firearms while maintaining the rights of gun owners. We need to create a method of accountability. We need to know who the good guys are. We need to be able to record all gun related transactions, close the gun show loophole, put and end to straw sales and stop the unregulated distribution of ammunition. We also need to prevent the mentally ill from having access to guns. And, we need to do all of these things while allowing the average law abiding gun owner the ability to still own assault style weapons, high capacity magazines and have privacy from government oversight. If we can achieve that, a real compromise between the left and right can be reached. I think mandatory liability insurance could do this.
By creating an insurance mandate, private insurance companies would be required to assess the risk of gun owners and issue proof of insurance to them. No transaction involving a weapon, magazine, ammunition or replacement part would be legal without proof of insurance. All transactions would be brokered by a third party dealer. Records of all these transactions would be kept in a database, but because they’re held by a private company, the information in the database would be protected under the same sort of privacy laws as our health records. The government would need a warrant to access them and they could only get a warrant if they could demonstrate probable cause. An insurance program creates a very easy method of demonstrating who’s a “Good Guy” and who’s a “Bad Guy”. And, by design, any transaction that takes place outside of a licensed dealer is illegal. This prevents the ability of straw buyers from making repeated purchases. It creates a system that can track a gun used in crime back to its source. It prevents the ability of criminals to buy ammunition by mail order. It gives police the ability to confiscate any weapon that is not insured. And it creates a obstacle to the mentally ill accessing firearms (as an aside, in all fairness, this probably wouldn’t have prevented the Newtown killings, but it could have gone a long way to prevent Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson and Aurora). The plan also encourages gun owners to make sure their guns are not being misused. It provides financial incentives, in the form of lower insurance rates, for gun safes, gun locks, and safety classes. It also creates a financial incentive to the gun owning community to police itself. Less gun violence will result in lower rates for all.
So far, the biggest argument against the plan I’ve encountered is the financial cost to gun owners. It’s true, an insurance policy will cost gun owners money. Not being an insurance underwriter I cannot say definitively what the cost would be. Insurance, by its very nature, is a gamble you make against yourself. If you don’t pose a risk, then there’s little to insure. A low-risk, law abiding gun owner could be expected to pay little more than administrative costs. Additionally, there’s no reason the insurance cannot be offered with homeowner’s or renter’s insurance. We do enjoy a constitutional right to bear arms, but there’s nothing in the constitution that says those weapons should be cheap or that we shouldn’t have to bear the liability of owning them. The cost of gun ownership now is entirely dependent on the budget of the purchaser, and that won’t change. The prospective owner will just have to consider the financial impact of owning weapons; it will remain a discretionary spending habit.
We have a constitutional right to own property yet we are regularly required to insure that property. A mandate to insure our home, apartment or car does not limit or take away the right of ownership but it does serve to protect us and others from liability. Likewise, mandating liability insurance for gun ownership does not infringe upon a persons right to bear arms, it only serves to protect the health and safety of our country.
Statistics from
mayorsagainstillegalguns.org
bradycampaign.org
A National Insurance Mandate for Gun Ownership
In the aftermath of the recent mass killings in Connecticut the knee jerk reactions from both sides of the gun control argument are all things that we’ve heard before and which are routinely rejected by the other side. The positions are intractable and, it seems, to me that no one is really listening to each other anymore. I find myself in a position of having friends and family on both sides of the argument. And, as a former gun owner (living in Brooklyn precludes me from legally owning a firearm even if I was inclined to do so) I feel like I have a more comprehensive understanding of what both sides of the argument would like. We have a tremendous problem with gun crime in this country. It’s not just the incidents like Sandy Hook or Aurora. According to the Brady Campaign, we’re looking at over 95,000 incidents of gun violence every year. That’s a lot of people getting shot. The president and many others are using this latest incident as a vehicle to enact gun reform. Since we are making an effort at a national discussion, I would like to propose an idea that I’ve been working on that would be an effective compromise for both parties - a nationally mandated program of gun owner liability insurance.
While mass killings are devastating to the victims and their families, and the damage they do to the psyches of the communities in which they occur, as well as the country as a whole, is incalculable, they are not the largest component of gun violence in this country. Most incidents have casualty counts of one or two and don’t make a big enough impact to show up on the radar of our national news media. Most of these crimes are committed with handguns and most of those guns are obtained from legal vendors through the use of straw buyers. Another (not insignificant) amount are obtained through gun shows and swap meets. Our current laws do very little to prevent criminals from buying guns this way. There is no requirement to keep transaction records. There is no permanent record of background checks. There are no registration or licensing requirements. This effectively protects the privacy of the gun owner, but also protects the privacy of the criminal as well. Law enforcement has no way to track weapons purchased by criminals. There’s no way to know if a criminal has a gun. It’s even difficult for them to determine who is selling guns to criminals. Most dealers are legitimate, but when one decides to start selling to criminals, there’s no paper trail for law enforcement to follow back to the dealer.
Currently, the most popular gun control idea is to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines. The efficacy of these plans notwithstanding, gun rights activists have no interest in supporting those plans and will sabotage any attempt to enact legislation of that sort. Some sort of compromise has to be reached.
We need a plan that effectively controls firearms while maintaining the rights of gun owners. We need to create a method of accountability. We need to know who the good guys are. We need to be able to record all gun related transactions, close the gun show loophole, put and end to straw sales and stop the unregulated distribution of ammunition. We also need to prevent the mentally ill from having access to guns. And, we need to do all of these things while allowing the average law abiding gun owner the ability to still own assault style weapons, high capacity magazines and have privacy from government oversight. If we can achieve that, a real compromise between the left and right can be reached. I think mandatory liability insurance could do this.
By creating an insurance mandate, private insurance companies would be required to assess the risk of gun owners and issue proof of insurance to them. No transaction involving a weapon, magazine, ammunition or replacement part would be legal without proof of insurance. All transactions would be brokered by a third party dealer. Records of all these transactions would be kept in a database, but because they’re held by a private company, the information in the database would be protected under the same sort of privacy laws as our health records. The government would need a warrant to access them and they could only get a warrant if they could demonstrate probable cause. An insurance program creates a very easy method of demonstrating who’s a “Good Guy” and who’s a “Bad Guy”. And, by design, any transaction that takes place outside of a licensed dealer is illegal. This prevents the ability of straw buyers from making repeated purchases. It creates a system that can track a gun used in crime back to its source. It prevents the ability of criminals to buy ammunition by mail order. It gives police the ability to confiscate any weapon that is not insured. And it creates a obstacle to the mentally ill accessing firearms (as an aside, in all fairness, this probably wouldn’t have prevented the Newtown killings, but it could have gone a long way to prevent Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson and Aurora). The plan also encourages gun owners to make sure their guns are not being misused. It provides financial incentives, in the form of lower insurance rates, for gun safes, gun locks, and safety classes. It also creates a financial incentive to the gun owning community to police itself. Less gun violence will result in lower rates for all.
So far, the biggest argument against the plan I’ve encountered is the financial cost to gun owners. It’s true, an insurance policy will cost gun owners money. Not being an insurance underwriter I cannot say definitively what the cost would be. Insurance, by its very nature, is a gamble you make against yourself. If you don’t pose a risk, then there’s little to insure. A low-risk, law abiding gun owner could be expected to pay little more than administrative costs. Additionally, there’s no reason the insurance cannot be offered with homeowner’s or renter’s insurance. We do enjoy a constitutional right to bear arms, but there’s nothing in the constitution that says those weapons should be cheap or that we shouldn’t have to bear the liability of owning them. The cost of gun ownership now is entirely dependent on the budget of the purchaser, and that won’t change. The prospective owner will just have to consider the financial impact of owning weapons; it will remain a discretionary spending habit.
We have a constitutional right to own property yet we are regularly required to insure that property. A mandate to insure our home, apartment or car does not limit or take away the right of ownership but it does serve to protect us and others from liability. Likewise, mandating liability insurance for gun ownership does not infringe upon a persons right to bear arms, it only serves to protect the health and safety of our country.
Statistics from
mayorsagainstillegalguns.org
bradycampaign.org
To our commenter Daily Split - please reframe your comment to address liability insurance and/or mandatory insurance rather than optional legal firearm insurance in another country. The reason is that we do not publish links to commercial sites; thanks.
ReplyDeleteOne of the problems with regulating firearms in the US is that politicians refuse to address the issue. This is one method to address the issue which seems to have support.
ReplyDeleteMike,
ReplyDeleteI very much liked your article. I DO see, however, some points which could be issues and which I'd ask you to answer.
First, you are compelled not by the government, but by your lien holder to own insurance on your home. If you owned your home outright, you could conceivably drop your insurance. You'd be dumb to do so, but you could. The government is not compelling you to keep insurance so the comparison to gun ownership/liability insurance does not seem to be the same. Do you agree?
Second, the above notwithstanding, I believe the government could regulate/require liability ownership regardless for the same reason it could require health insurance or impose a tax. It could do so under taxing authority saying, "That's fine, own a firearm, now either pay for liability insurance and prove you have it OR, at the time of purchase, pay a steep tax, such tax to be imposed by the seller, including identification of the buyer given to the government." It seems, though, that this is the only route the government could use as the recent HCRA decision showed SCOTUS to be opposed to forcing people to do business where they do not desire to do so and only allowed HCRA under taxing authority. Again, do you agree, how do you feel about this?
With those two points, I think requiring liability insurance would be a fantastic idea. I own a firearm and would be fine with either paying for insurance against it's improper use (it would doubtless take time to establish actuarial tables for such liability, but that is a time-solved problem), or I'm happy to give up my pistol. I have not fired it in at least 15 years, I've never felt more safe with it in that time or less safe when it wasn't in my presence. If people want to feel safe, that's fine, but then they should be ready to cover the financial impacts if their firearm is improperly used.
To the first point, in that context, I agree with you - It's not exactly the same. By enacting this sort of insurance mandate I feel we're entering a new territory and it's difficult to find perfect analogies. I would like to say, in counterpoint, that while the government doesn't mandate home owner's insurance, it doesn't do anything to prevent the lien holder from insisting on it. Isn't that effectively a mandate? Also, if a gun owner holds an insurance policy for thirty years with no incident, I would think that their premium would fall to the point of insignificance.
DeleteTo the second, this would have to be similar to the HCRA in that it's really a tax administered by a private organization. The purpose of the tax is to create and maintain a database of authorized gun owners, to make payments to the victims of gun violence, to provide firearm training, safety and awareness, and to pay for it's own existence. The tax is determined by the risk of the gun owner. A good analogy may be the cigarette taxes: Cigarettes are a know health hazard, so people who smoke pay a premium when the buy them. I don't agree with a flat tax up front when purchasing a firearm or ammunition. I feel that would be too easy to manipulate.
Thanks for your arguments. I wish I had better answers for you.
I will make one further comment, though, and that is that undoubtedly the NRA (and by that we really mean the gun manufacturers for the NRA is truly nothing other than their political arm), will be solidly and decidedly against this. Not because it will cost gun owners a bit more to own guns, but quite simply becuase it WILL stop straw purchases and unregulated buys at gun shows. In short, it will likely GREATLY curtail gun sales because it will make it far harder for criminals to use straw men to buy guns. The gun lobby doesn't give a damn about stopping straw purchases in fact they oppose it, for the oldest of reasons, and that is because it makes them far richer.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree on this. However, my feeling is that the insurance corporations have much deeper pockets than the NRA and the gun manufacturers, and that this is a new, untapped revenue stream that would be worth a lot to the insurance corps. No other gun control legislation has had the backing of a major industry. That could be a game changer. That's all speculation on my part, but worth consideration.
DeleteThanks for writing about guns and insurance. To get a system which protects everyone and puts a minimal burden on gunowners is complex. There is a lot of discussion and information about gun insurance system possibilities at http://GunInsuranceBlog.com It will take a thought out and carefully designed system. The biggest differences from regular liability insurance are the need to cover lost/stolen/straw purchased guns and have the insurance be a kind of no fault to eliminate lawsuites.
ReplyDelete