No insurance company sells gun liability insurance, as noted here.
So, since insurance is required, and that insurance is impossible to get, then all guns in San Jose will become illegal, except those owned by Police.
The “gun insurance” that has been sometimes sold before has generally been insurance to cover expenses derived from a lawful use of the firearm but that required a court case to adjudicate as lawful or where there were no charges but you got sued anyway.
But help me here, San Jose would expect an insurance for any illegal use? Or in case a gun stolen from you is used illegally? Or just for any damages associated with the gun no matter how, and the idea that it be paid and evidenced separately from your general liability insurance?
That’s the question that is apparent. If someone steals your car and then intentionally runs over the high school band at a local parade, then you are not responsible. These proposals for “gun insurance” don’t really define how they want to change 800 years of common law.
And it really is to fuck with a recognized constitutional right to own a gun. In other threads they argue that a law that says you have to drive to the correct precinct is a terrible restriction on the right to vote, or mail it back in the right time, but a tax on guns is okay.
Other articles however suggest that it would potentially kick in as a secondary enforcement at any time that in a police intervention there is a firearm encountered.
Quoting the police chief:
“During our normal course of duty, if we come across a firearm we will ask the owner if they have insurance,” said San Jose Police Chief Anthony Mata. “We are not going to go door to door inspecting guns to see if they have insurance.”
(emphasis mine)
Just like that it does leave the impression it can activate during a Terry stop or a traffic intervention unrelated to the gun or even a well-being check. Does anyone have a link to the actual ordinance?
Mind you, and lest people on either side think I’m all the way to one or the other – the idea of there being a sensible, low-burden excise for the sake of mitigating societal externalities (while still leaving open the recourse of additional proportionate restitution from those who are actually criminal or negligent), is an interesting idea that can be explored. It would have to be very carefully laid down first, though, so it does not become confiscatory or arbitrary. (I am not a fan of unconditional unrestricted carry, but I am cool with “shall issue” permits so I would not object to that the renewal of the permit include a reasonable, not-unduly-burdensome fee for that purpose. But the rub of course is in what is “not unduly burdensome”.)
Even the San José officials themselves indicated that they’ll have to first figure what will be that tax/fee and what will they base it on before they start enforcing. So it may take a while.
And oh, yeah: I pay taxes and fees that Big Bro goes on to use for heaps of things and services that I don’t use or don’t like or even oppose or that don’t affect me. So “I don’t want to pay for the irresponsibility of others” gets a “meh…” from me.
If taxing and mandating insurance for constitutional rights with no care about their disproportional effect on the poor is OK now, let’s try a poll tax. Maybe we can have voters for certain candidates pay for some of the costs to society created by the people they elect. And take out an insurance policy in case they elect a candidate that gets us into a war or economic recession.
It’s Orwellian. Of course the police can’t go door to door and search your home for firearms in violation of the Fourth Amendment. But he says they will “ask” if the owner has gun insurance. I’m sure that a negative answer to that, or silence, will have consequences. And again, this is supposed to be “reasonable” regulations on guns? That I have to pay for criminals?
My concealed carry instructor insisted on insurance if you carry a weapon. Assumed legal use of the weapon is likely to result in litigation.
What insurance did you get and where did you get it from. I’ve never bothered to look into the insurance piece but there seem to be a lot of people who don’t think insurance is offered if you shoot someone outside of your home.
Property?
Being insured is important if you own a gun at all, IMO. But that leads to another concern: if we create a requirement for a distinct gun-specific rider, insurance companies may come around to excluding any firearms-related damages from your general liability insurance even at home and make you pay more for the extra coverage; and it would not surprise me if that even if you’re not an owner, they’d do as with cars and still require an added charge for protection in case of “uninsured other person”.
I wouldn’t tell anyone not to have general liability insurance/homeowners insurance. I stand to be corrected, but what people in these threads (perhaps San Jose?) are talking about when they talk about “gun insurance” is a sort of a strict liability policy. That if your gun is stolen and then used to shoot a bank teller, that your insurance would pay. That is an unheard of policy as you are not liable in the first place. These laws would now make you liable.
Others can chime in, but if you are just talking about protecting yourself against negligence, perhaps a bad judgment call when shooting a burglar, sure, but I doubt that is what people who are against guns in the first place are talking about and not what prior threads have talked about.
While I feel the legislation under discussion will fail the previously mentioned legal tests, I actually objected to it on other grounds: the increasing balkanization of gun control laws.
Our hodge-podge of state laws on firearms is already insanely anti-intuitive, if you live 5 miles from the border of two different states, you could drive into town for groceries across said state line and commit a felony. Yes, overall, I believe if you carry a firearm, you have a responsibility to understand the laws of your local, but if it gets to the point where every time you hit a different city or county in the same state the laws vary, complete with different tax/insurance/criminal laws, then I see no way to expect a legal owner to survive the various challenges, and therefor no reason for a legal owner to want to cooperate in any way with any legal or rational gun laws.
Now that’s assuming the law applies to people active in San Jose, rather than just residents of San Jose. If just residents, then are cops going to just let you go if you show an out-of-state (or city) ID, or that your residence of record is a PO Box just over the city line?
If I give benefit of the doubt to the proposed writers of the legislation, it’s more ‘feel good, do nothing’ legislation that often passes in the wake of a shooting, and when it fails the inevitable legal challenges they blame the evil gun huggers and pass the responsibility, something which is already happening in this and (most) other gun threads.
And in the same threads (and here’s where I have pissed off many fellow gun-owners although mostly on other boards) I keep saying what we need is an organized political movement that stands for creating a set of non-burdensome but complete set of gun safety and regulation laws that are federal in nature. I think while incredibly difficult to accomplish, it is much more likely than seeing a repeal of the 2nd Amendment, and having a national registration, safety standards, carry laws and the like will eliminate some (not all) of the problems both for legal owners and those who are injured by gun violence, intentional and not.
According to the cite, the details are fuzzy:One challenge to enforce the law will be in determining how to administer the new liability insurance and fee requirements.
Your first part- “cover expenses derived from a lawful use of the firearm” was sold at one time, through the NRA. I do not know if it still is.
As far as the second part- that sort of insurance does not exist.
Which is why when my home state of Minnesota passed it’s “Shall Issue” carry permit law, it specified that the law preempted any and all local gun laws to the contrary. The Twin Cities Metropolitan Area consists of seven counties and no fewer than 218 incorporated municipalities (lotta’ little postage-stamp suburbs/former country towns). Legal carry would be impossible without state preemption.
Hmm… could the federal Congress actually do this under its constitutional authority “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia,”, since every able-bodied man (and presumably now woman) of military age not otherwise enrolled is by law part of the “unorganized militia”? We even have an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing that this authority can’t be used as a pretext to disarm the populace. 
I took the course for information and chose not to carry a concealed weapon. The insurance policies cover the costs of litigation that are likely to result from use of the weapon.
Thanks for that. $20/month to cover legal expenses and bail seems like a pretty decent deal if you’re going to carry. I don’t think that’s the insurance that San Jose is looking for though.
Yes, certainly not.
You seem reasonable about this, but I really want to try to understand what you feel this will accomplish. I’m not sure about your specifics so I can’t say whether I would support them or not (very likely not) but do you really think that you are going to get anywhere even if your proposal passes? You think Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden will just say that is enough and leave us alone with our guns?
I think not, but I would love to be corrected. I mean, we have a proposal in this thread that would require us to pay for “social costs” that we didn’t cause, other than through some ephemeral idea that our guns floated into another gun and caused the possessor of the other gun to use it to commit a crime, buy an insurance product that has never existed, but if it did would only serve to protect an intentional criminal, and acts as a direct tax on a fundamental right. And this proposal is advertised as “rational” and actually “enabling” gun ownership.
So, do you feel that your proposal will: 1) keep the wolves at bay, or 2) do much of anything to solve intentional gun violence? I’m not trying to be a dick, but after stating my initial skepticism, maybe you can try to sell me on it?