What are the odds of this legislation passing, and if passed, making it through the Supreme Court.
What does Oppose - Referred to rules committee mean?
For debate, is the intention of this law to eliminate guns? It looks like a Jim Crow gun law to me.
AFAICT, it means that
The Illinois State Rifle Association opposes the proposed bill;
The proposed bill has reached the third stage in its legislative history within the Illinois General Assembly. First a bill’s gotta be filed by an Assembly member, then it gets its “First Reading” on the floor of the legislature, then it goes to the Rules Committee which decides which committee within the General Assembly will consider the bill.
If the Rules Committee never actually assigns any committee to consider a bill, and it hangs around in limbo for the full two-year legislative session, it dies. It can also die in committee after being assigned.
Don’t know. Certainly makes owning them more expensive. Puts an burden on the poor to own a gun. Not going to call it unconstitutional.
Kind of interesting that it folds in ‘If it’s stolen, anything done with it is your fault till you report it’ and the ‘you can own them but it’ll cause you’ meme. The burden, though, it’s a separate policy for each gun, not all guns. So it’ll add up, making it very expensive to own more than one book. I mean gun. So you have to get the policy before you get the gun. For the specific gun you get.
Makes gun buying a lot more difficult.
Thanks. How does the Illinois State Rifle Association get the nod in this situation?
I don’t think it’s fair to conclude that the intention of such a bill must be to eliminate gun ownership. Is the intention of mandatory car insurance to eliminate car ownership? We might conclude that the bill is intended to prevent all gun ownership if the cost of the insurance were unduly severe, but do we have reason to think that would be so? Seems like it would be pretty hard to know that given the fact that the market would be very much altered by a statewide requirement for such insurance.
As to the constitutionality…
Since it is not clear from Heller whether the Second Amendment will be incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment or even what the standard of review is, comments about the constitutionality of this bill are pure speculation.
To speculate a bit, I think most courts are deciding that the test is not quite strict scrutiny, which I think means an insurance requirement could potentially be constitutional even if the Second Amendment applies to the states.
AFAICT, they don’t have an official role in the process; they’re just putting up on their own website information about the bill and about their own position on it. Other entries in the table on that page contain similar information about a bunch of other gun-related bills in the Illinois Lege.
(I dunno what the table at that webpage looked like in your browser, so it may have appeared that the “Oppose” and “Referred to Rules Committee” data items were actually one single datum. But they’re not; it’s just the ISRA telling viewers both (a) their own position on the bill and (b) what its current legislative status is.)
Interesting. It seems as though the IL legislature is in effect transferring the responsibility to screen potential gun owners to the private sector - the insurance companies.
That’s… oddly conservative.
Hmm. This is actually an interesting proposal. I’m a Democrat but I’m pretty opposed to gun control. I’ve always been of the opinion that gun control as it’s been applied here is ineffective and succeeds in leaving only the criminals armed. I’m not sure how much this would improve the situation, but if this new tactic supplants gun bans and forces owners to be more responsible I suppose it could be a good thing.
My issues are this.
Anything that incorporates the Insurance Industry is almost certainly going to be a complete and utter scam. It’ll probably be poorly managed and companies will probably just get richer and richer off innocent law abiding people.
What does it do to prevent illegal gun trafficking? Probably nothing that I can tell.
Why create a law that costs people money as opposed to simply passing laws which make not reporting a gun theft a more serious crime?
Does this make it even less risky to own a gun and handle it carelessly? Normally if a person is injured by a gun the owner can be sued for damages. If the owner has insurance will that remove the penalty since the insurance company will be footing the cost?
Isn’t this already factored into home owners insurance? If someone gets shot in a gun owners house accidentally is it any different than them being injured from some other form of negligence from the homeowner?
The car insurance comparison is a decent one, but I’m just left wondering what problem this will solve. Are gun injuries common enough to justify this? If they aren’t this seems like it amounts to another quasi-sin tax.
Is car insurance mandatory to even own a car, not just for using it on public property? Do members of the government have a history of trying to ban racing stripes, or any vehicle that is physically capable of doing 90 MPH? Has the President of the United States declared his support of any law uses cosmetic features to decide whether to ban a car or not?
Depends on the state. In New Jersey it is not legal to park an unregistered car on public or private property. In order to have a vehicle registered you have to have proof of insurance. In practice this does not mean that they are going into your garage to tow away your vehicles. I have seen it used to against people with three cars on blocks in their front yard.
ETA: There are separate rules for things like farm and construction equipment. I am speaking primarily about passenger vehicles.
I also tend to oppose gun control efforts as unconstitutional. However I might think of gun ownership (I don’t own any and have little interest in such) I always thought the 2nd amendment was clear enough for an honest interpretation.
However, from a constitutional angle this is interesting. It might well pass muster with the courts as it can be spun as promoting responsible gun ownership though the inclusion of coverage.
It’ll also allow us to effectively monitor the relative hazards of gun ownership and I wouldn’t mind seeing the insurance industry’s equation on that one. If $1MM worth of insurance ends up costing $1.95 per year we’ll know they consider, though rigorous statistical measure, the risk of any particular gun being exposed to liability to be minimal.
Hrm.
If the costs of other policies are any guide, it will cost $40-60 per year just in the rating and administrative costs to maintain a policy.
Insurance markets are weird. I, too, would be interested to see what dollar value they come up with.
You’ve never heard of Ralph Nader? 
In seriousness, I think you’re correct to look more skeptically at gun regulation than car regulation. But I don’t think you can safely conclude from the mere fact of an insurance obligation that this is an effort to ban guns. Presume until shown otherwise, maybe. But not conclude.
Does IL have a problem with legal gun owners doing one million dollars worth of damage in their communities?
My guess is that they don’t, and as such, I can see no possible reason for this law other than to do discourage gun ownership by people who can least afford it…
Doesn’t seem so obvious to me. How many accidental or unlawful shootings are performed by lawful owners or involve guns not reported stolen from lawful owners? A very brief perusal of IL news suggests it is quite common. Nationally there are thousands of accidental shootings per year. I don’t know how many unreported stolen guns are used in shootings every year, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the number is significant.
And one million dollars doesn’t seem unreasonably high. If you accidentally shoot someone, or a gangbanger steals your gun and you fail to report it, and he intentionally shoots someone, how much do you think is at stake in the lawsuit? Both the average and median wrongful death verdict exceeds one million dollars.
Having done a little more research, it looks like unreported stolen guns are a pretty big problem. A few state legislatures have passed mandatory reporting requirements for stolen guns, recognizing the problem of gun owners failing to report lost or stolen firearms. The ATF notes that “[f]irearms taken in residential and industrial burglaries, stolen from shipments, and otherwise taken illegally or simply lost, frequently go unreported.” ATF, Safety and Security Information for Federal Firearm Licensees (2004).
Studies vary, but most suggest that stolen guns play a big role in crime.
Robert W. Helsley & Arthur O’Sullivan, Stolen Gun Control, 50 J. of Urban Econ 436 (2001) (internal citiations omitted).
This law would seem to provide significant incentives to secure guns, and to report them if stolen. So that would be another source of justification.
How? By making the gun owner responsible for the actions criminals may take with their gun after it is stolen? Is that a just liability to levy against a gun owner who has been victimized that way?
If a person’s car is stolen, and then that car is used by the thief in a hit and run, do we hold the original car owner liable for the hit and run? (Actually an honest question, on the off chance the answer isn’t the intuitive ‘no’.)
No, the mechanism here is to create incentives. Assuming a properly-functioning insurance market, owners who present less risk of failing to report stolen guns will have to pay less for insurance (i.e. secure their guns better, report them when stolen, etc.).
In order to avoid liability, the owner simply needs to secure and keep track of his guns and report stolen guns missing. That doesn’t strike me as a very large burden considering the social impact of stolen guns.
What benefit is there to knowing that a gun was stolen? At that point the horse is already out of the barn.