Perhaps the concept is new to you. As citizens we pay for a vast infrastructure of social costs that “we” didn’t cause - military, police, reclamation, CDC etc.
The San Jose action will not solve anything, but it is a step in the right direction.
Isn’t this an argument for continuing to have any social cost born by the greater society since that’s how we do it in general?
I’m only going to go at this shortly because it would be a hijack, but I will address it in the context of the OP, so forgive me if I’m excessively general and skirting the long term chances for future politicians to abuse such and the like.
Okay - so fundamentally we would need a movement on par with the one that lead to prohibition (and I use that advisedly). And we’d need more bipartisianship than I think likely in the political climate of the last decade or so. The goal is to largely remove the current regulatory power over firearms on the state level (which will not be popular to say the least) and fold it into the federal regulation. The legislation would have to both regulate firearms as a whole - national registration (which isn’t done yet), control of sale (largely already done excepting small scale exceptions which have been abused), safety requirements (standards and regulation for safety such as safes and the likes but with, you know, actual security experts weighing in, not just politician saying it looks good) -AND- federal regulation on carry, which should be on the level of ‘shall issue’ (with reasonable, non-burdensome requirements (I’ve suggested online pre-recorded carry classes, after which you pay a small amount to take an ‘in-person test’ and the same sort of registration fees already paid on the local level for the background check, as well as replacing the hodgepodge of existing arbitrary magazine and ‘style’ based legislation around the nebulously termed ‘assault weapons’ by people with an appropriate backing. As my personal pet peeve mentioned in other threads my Ruger Ranch is functionally equivalent to an AR, but no one worries about it the way they worry about an AR platform 
Okay, that’s the short, short version, and it’s important to realize just how hard it would be to get the backing, and that like any legislation, it could be subject to abuse in the long term to either weaken protections so much as to make gun grabbers feel it’s worse than the existing state regulations in certain states, or for gun-huggers feel that they’ve had their rights unfairly abrogated in states that are very (and increasingly) unrestrictive.
The advantage (and back to the OP and Ultravires questions, is that we are no longer subject to the risk of literally crossing the street and seeing a different law enforced. Or driving to a different state, or moving, or having each and every single jurisdiction decided to level their own taxes, fees and insurance. I don’t want to be in say, CA (again back to the OP) and have a city, county, and state tax/insurance/fee added to each purchase of a firearm, ammunition, as well as monthly ‘upkeep’ fees. Even if they were benign in nature, and small individually, the cumulative effect would be be a burdensome or prohibitive cost to any but the wealthy. Not to mention the potential for targeted abuse discussed upthread.
Specifically to UV’s points 1) I don’t see the gun-grabber side of the debate as ‘wolves’, (although there are extremists there that need to stop trying to legislate and get the votes to remove the second amendment, otherwise they’re being intellectually dishonest) but having a common set of laws including registration and firearm safety requirements (such as in our recent thread on gun owner’s liability with regards to children) should make them happy in general - less deaths due to kids getting firearms in the house and being able to track stolen or lost weapons is a common demand. 2) it will do little to stop intentional gun violence, because it isn’t supposed to. The point of the legislation is to apply uniformity to gun ownership across the nation as well as the safety mentioned in question one. It protects the rights of gun owners to travel with their weapons, to permit legal carry across the nation (with appropriate training), and stamp down on excessive local (city/state) regulation intended to excessively restrict the right to ownership. The only thing it will likely do regarding illegal gun use is clear up a few loopholes where we have non-licensed ‘dealers’ who sell 50+ firearms a year as a ‘side business’ get caught, but that’s going to be a minimal change.
IN other words, like most effective politics, it’s going to slightly please a lot of people, and slightly piss off a lot of people, and in the long run be slightly better than the current standards without fully pleasing anyone.
I would not reject Northern European levels of general taxation in exchange for having comprehensive addressing of all kinds of general social costs.
Lotsa luck getting that passed in the USA.
Meanwhile UV’s objection points to how the standoff on how to cover the social costs of guns would line up:
Problem: social costs of gun accidents and wrongful gun use
Solution 1: tax participants in the gun economy to cover that
Cue participants in the gun economy: “No Fair! WE are NOT the ones actually DOING the wrong thing! We take responsibility, if you can show we caused damages, sue us! Why should we pay for costs caused by someone else?”
Solution 2: tax the whole society to cover that
2(a) – cue a whole lot of citizens: “No Fair! WE DON’T own guns! We don’t even live where there’s that much crime! That’s socializing a private externality! Why should we pay for costs caused by someone else?”
2(b) – cue a whole lot of OTHER citizens: “No Fair! You are using everyone’s taxpayer dollars to enforce these policies whether or not they are in agreement or think it’s a priority! Why should anyone pay for costs caused by someone else?”
Policymakers are often derided and mocked for taking half-arsed measures but they have to live with these people burning up their phone lines all day. So in the end as mentioned in the post immediately above this, if you’re lucky you end up with something that will “slightly please a lot of people, and slightly piss off a lot of people, and in the long run be slightly better than the current standards without fully pleasing anyone”. And everyone then gets mad it did not completely solve the matter and see it as proof they should have gone all the way their way.
Not popular and as far as I can tell damn near impossible in the short term.
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But part of the problem that we must realize, in the eyes of a whole lot of people in this society it’s those who ARE armed who are the “wolves” and need at least muzzling and tagging. They can’t conceive of being armed in a civilized society unless you have a very good justification and prove you can be trusted. And then you have a bunch of 2A ultrafundamentalists who claim they want to undo all existing restrictions all the way back to the 1934 NFA and all state carry regulations, so everyone can own and pack whatever weaponry they want with no restriction and no paper trail whatsoever.
Reasonableness gets buried somewhere in the middle of all the shouting.
Sure we do. All of us pay for it. We don’t do it by only taxing certain people with these costs based on a false and politically charged reason. Gun owners are not the problem. To my ears this proposal makes no more sense than taxing people who have children to pay for CPS or child abuse prosecutions.
This policy screams that you as a hunter are responsible for drive by shootings. It is targeting (hehe) the wrong people and I fail to see how it is any step in the right direction. It is demonstrably in the wrong direction as most gun owners are responsible and law abiding people.
Exactly, then why do gun owners have to pay triple? Gun owners already pay a steep Federal Excise tax.
It is just the opposite. Requiring gun owners to have insurance that no one sells or will sell is flat out confiscation.
And people wonder why gun owners turn reactionary Republican. Stupid fucking crap like this, and the three cities that tried to ban handguns is why. This sort of backhanded gun confiscation law is exactly why gun owners are drawn to the NRA etc. This is why we can’t have a reasonable debate.
This is gun confiscation pure and simple.
Solution 1 : pass a law that backhandedly confiscates all guns.
2(a) – cue a whole lot of citizens: “No Fair! WE DON’T have kids, drive cars, so we shouldn’t pay for schools or highways, and we don’t want a hug military so no taxes for the Military.
No one is asking all citizens to pay a a special tax for guns- that 'cost" is already a sunk cost subsumed into the Police dept. They are already paying the cost for criminals- who won’t have to pay the tax or register their guns or have insurance. Lawful owners of guns do not add any extra cost to the tax payers.
Exactly. Let us add a special tax of say $12,000 per child per year if you want to have kids. That is what they cost just to school them. Can’t pay the tax? We will confiscate the kids. Workhouses you know. I don’t have kids, so this sounds pretty fair to me. And you know a lot of those kids go on to become criminals. See how crazy this sounds?
OK, now you’re just giving ammunition (ha!) to those who say we’ll right off the bat never accept anything as reasonable.
If you would explain to someone as dumb as me how this even approaches “reasonable” then I might be on board with other “reasonable” proposals.
Oh, the impossible insurance (because not a product that exists) requirement is surely unreasonable. I thought we had settled that.
But there are those who object to even thinking or talking of ANY burden of the social cost of gun proliferation being borne by the gun economy. Dismiss it right off the bat, do not pass go, do not collect $200 or even $2. Well, no, I am willing to discuss and consider that.
Lots of things are reasonable.
Tighter controls on gun sales, get rid of the the “strawman dealers”.
stop the proliferation of “ghost guns.”
Red flag laws- as long as they are good according to the ACLU. They need due process.
The American Civil Liberties Union firmly believes that legislatures can, consistent with the Constitution, impose reasonable limits on firearms sale, ownership, and use, without raising civil liberties concerns. We recognize, as the Supreme Court has stated, that the Constitution does not confer a “right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” But some proposed reforms encroach unnecessarily on civil liberties.
When analyzing gun control measures from a civil liberties perspective, we place them into one of three categories. First are laws that regulate or restrict particular types of guns or ammunition, regardless of the purchaser. These sorts of regulations generally raise few, if any, civil liberties issues. Second are proposals that regulate how people acquire guns, again regardless of the identity of the purchaser. These sorts of regulations may raise due process and privacy concerns, but can, if carefully crafted, respect civil liberties. Third are measures that restrict categories of purchasers — such as immigrants or people with mental disabilities — from owning or buying a gun. These sorts of provisions too often are not evidence-based, reinforce negative stereotypes, and raise significant equal protection, due process, and privacy issues.
Many of the options now being considered raise no civil liberties concerns. That includes bans on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and bump stocks. Raising the minimum age for all gun ownership to 21, currently the legal age for purchasing a handgun, also raises no civil liberties issues, as research on brain development shows that young people’s impulse control differs from that of adults.
So-called “red flag laws,” which provide for protective orders to remove guns from people who pose a significant risk to themselves or others, can also be a reasonable way to further public safety. To be constitutional, however, they must at a minimum have clear, nondiscriminatory criteria for defining persons as dangerous and a fair process for those affected to object and be heard by a court.
community violence intervention
Nonsense. Gun owners pay taxes, thus they pay their fair share of police, etc. They also pay Federal Excise taxes.
Should families with children pay $12K per kid per year in extra taxes?
But say we think a tax of $10 per gun per year is reasonable. Many people won’t pay it, and San Jose, and Chicago, and San Francisco and DC is why.
You are Joe Honest citizen, you live in Springfield, anystate. You have two duck guns, a deer rifle, and a handgun. You pay your $40 per year. After two years your town passes the Impossible Insurance law, just like San Jose did. The town knows you have guns and how many. They send a letter demanding proof of impossible insurance. You do not send them the impossible document. They confiscate your guns and melt them down, and fine you. Two years later, SCOTUS rules that the Impossible Insurance law is unconstitutional. Springfield invites you to sue them to get the value of your guns back, fines, etc. You can’t sue in Small claims, you have to hire a lawyer. If the town is beset with claims, they file for bankruptcy.
Now, see why those “reasonable taxes” are not so reasonable?
Ok, let us double the Federal Excise tax on new guns sales, fine.
Y’see, that is a well-expressed explanation of how someone can fear those in power at a given time will abuse the reasonable part to then try to sneak in the unreasonable part and achieve their goals de-facto while the litigation works its way through.
(And really, so, “Springfield” does this, independently of their citizens and of their state… that’s a whole other mess. I am in agreement upthread that really things like these should be statewide and not municipal. Or at least that you don’t pass a law first and then figure out how or if it’ll work.)
But if people will be assuming up front that any possible proposal is just a smokescreen for the real goal of mass confiscation, then it’s going to be far, far harder to get to any reasonable agreement. If we begin from the premise that one of the sides is acting in bad faith from the start, there’s nothing to be done.
And Scenario 2 was meant to represent that if we say “but we already all pay taxes” , there will be those yelling “but don’t use MY taxes to cover THIS”. To which I am not sympathetic.
BTW, quite agree with your reasonable-proposals list above.
I listed several reasonable proposals, including ones from the ACLU. Most of Bidens proposals are reasonable. So there are many.
We just have to stay away from laws without due process and laws that could lead to mass confiscation, such as “reasonable” taxes, “insurance”, etc.
This San Jose law is really fucking bad.
Yes, I think we can agree on many ideas as reasonable.
One could wonder if this local ordinance is partly an attempt of San Jose to establish they can create such a tax/user fee source. That they only will start figuring out how much to charge and how after the ordinance is passed suggests they are not clear on exactly what are they going to do with it, which is really bad legislating.
They have to know that in CA, the State has authority over all gun control laws. This law will be struck down. They likely want to have some gun group be forced to spend $, and to make themselves look good, as the OP suggested.
Minor nitpick, the OP didn’t not suggest that this would make politicians look good, they feel this is good legislation on the face of it. I (and many, many others) have suggested it’s about feel good/look good optics, but don’t want to mischaracterize the OP’s initial statement.
True, what he said was that it did look good to him, a “positive first step”
The Fee is one thing, the insurance is another.
It’s funny how the Supreme Court allows all sorts of restrictions on abortion, a constitutionally protected practice, yet seems shy about restrictions on guns.
I think the anti-abortionists have shown the way. Just pile on restrictive gun laws and make the NRA defend them all. See what sticks. Things like mandating all gun shops have a vault to store their guns at night. And they need a minimum security system. All sorts of ropes to pile on. Clearly the court thinks such things are ok. The state has a rational basis…good enough.
My objection is that any agreement with that, even a 2 cent tax, is conceding the false equivalence between gun ownership and gun violence. No different than equating parenthood with child abuse.
It has surface appeal, but any real analysis makes it fall apart. Of course I can’t abuse my children unless I have children in the first place but the act of having children doesn’t in any way imply that I am abusing them or should be more responsible for combating child abuse than anyone else.
Likewise because I have a gun at home for deer hunting or I carry a pistol for personal protection, how does that make me more responsible than anyone else because some other dude, who I don’t even know and would stop him if I could, shoots a convenience store clerk?
It is simply unreasonable on its face.