Just as the title says-should people that own guns be required to carry liability insurance for the weapons they own?
Not sure making it mandatory would be a good idea, but if expenses could be made steep enough (i.e., if your gun gets stolen and the thief uses it to carry out a killing spree, you get hit with a million-dollar lawsuit,) then gun owners might voluntarily opt for it out of legal liability’s sake.
If it’s not mandatory, someone steals your gun and carry out a shooting spree, you get hit with a million-dollar lawsuit, you declare bankruptcy and the victims get nothing.
No such lawsuit against the gun owner would likely succeed. It would be the same as suing a car owner should their car be stolen and the thief committed vehicular homicide. If you mean liability insurance that would pay should the gun owner themselves kill or injure an innocent person with their weapon, it would likely only cover accidents. I can’t imagine any insurance company writing a policy that basically says “Kill or injure who you want, we’ll pay the damages”. Given that, I’m not sure that insurance would do a lot of good.
Yes. Guns cause societal harm and externalities. Mandatory insurance covering the costs of those externalities is one way to internalize those costs and make people consider them before they buy guns. This is a market solution to find the ideal level of guns in society.
If car insurance companies had their druthers, they’d love to exclude liability claims from misuse like driving drunk or speeding. Under state insurance law, they can’t because drivers must have insurance that covers their liability even when they do these things.
If you make gun owners effectively strictly liable for injuries or deaths caused by their guns and if insurance companies must cover that liability, insurance companies will manage their risk accordingly. That will mean doing things like:
- Charging higher rates to people with violent histories. Seems like a good way to discourage them from buying guns to begin with. If given the freedom, insurance companies will probably get very good at distinguishing who is going to be violent and who won’t. This should not allow discriminating against people based on their gender, race or religion. Perhaps it should allow discrimination based on age.
- Charging higher rates to people with histories of careless or negligent behavior. Bad driving record? Constant falls because you’re always drunk?
- Charging lower rates to people who better secure firearms against loss or theft, e.g., requiring people to buy and use safes.
- Charging higher rates for more guns, which are all guns that can be stolen or misused.
- Charging different rates for guns that have different levels of risk. If AR-15s are as unlikely to be used in crime and havoc as their owners suggest, their insurance rates will be low. Rates on handguns, which seem to kill a lot more people than AR-15s, would likely be high. Let insurance companies sort out who is low risk and who is high.
- Perhaps charging different rates to people based on their proposed use. You have a .22 short bolt action rifle for biathlon competition? You’re probably low risk. A shotgun for pheasant hunting? Low risk. You have want a double-stack .45 ACP for “personal protection” in your “nightclub security business”? You’re higher risk.
I would allow insurance companies to exclude liability for suicides.
Guns are durable. The insurance policy should essentially amount to a mandatory bond at purchase that insures against the harm the gun may cause over its expected lifetime. The insurer’s liability would end only when a subsequent owner purchases a policy on the gun. Thus, even if the gun is later lost or stolen, the original insurer will be on the hook for damage it may cause even years later. Insurance companies would then have the incentive to take measures to prevent illegal trafficking of lawfully-purchased firearms.
The biggest problem might be that the costs of such an insurance system would be so high that it would just drive gun sales to the unaccountable black market. The irony might be that to prevent that from happening, we’d have to allow caps on liability to lower gun insurance rates without a good public policy justification.
This. “Intentional Acts” are never covered under normal liability policies. And your homeowners insurance already covers liability damages if you accidentally shoot someone (probably not during a bank robbery, but like if you’re cleaning your gun on the back porch and it goes off due to an act of negligence). How would a special Firearms Liability Insurance policy be different?
In Spain they’re different: homeowners’ insurance does not cover weapons (items designed for other uses yes, weapons no) and a weapons license isn’t valid without insurance. For starters, homeowners’ insurance only covers things which happen in or to the house: they don’t cover stuff that happens involving your scissors outside the house, any more than they cover whatever happens to your car outside the garage. The weaponry insurance involves all instances of unintended damages caused by using the weapon, wherever they happen.
You may be covered for theft and liability in case of accident(not all homeowners insurance covers these), but is it an accident if you deliberately shoot at that shadow thinking it was a burglar/rapist/terrorist…and it turns out to be a son, daughter or wife? Also, there is no coverage of what happens with the weapon that you carelessly lose/misplace.
There’s a lot of daylight in “normal” so this statement is effectively unfalsifiable. I’ll try anyway. Lots of insurance policies that people consider “normal” cover intentional acts.
It would sure help insurance companies’ bottom line. Legal guns have a tiny fraction of a percent chance in being used in a crime. There are hundreds of millions out there. The chances go up if it is not legally owned, in which case you’re not getting insurance, and any legal penalties for not getting it just pile on top of the penalties of actually committing a crime.
If you think it’s a good idea, can I interest you in meteor insurance? Maybe volcano insurance? We don’t offer in in Hawaii or Washington.
How many meteors harmed or killed people last year?
Interesting. In the USA the liability part of your homeowners policy follows you worldwide, as well as covering events on the premises. There are no exclusions pertaining to firearms. At least, not on my policy. Given hundreds of companies writing insurance policy contracts in 50 different states there might be an exception, but I’d be surprised to see one.
What percentage of those aren’t stored away in a collection?
What is the rationale for limiting this only to guns? Am I liable for someone else’s bad acts in other circumstances?
Someone steals my wallet, uses the money in it to buy drugs, and dies of an overdose. Should his family be allowed to recover from me, or from my insurance company?
Also, this will offer a perverse incentive to steal a gun from someone else rather than buy it myself. If I buy it, I am liable; if I steal it, or get it from a friend who stole it, the original owner is liable.
Regards,
Shodan
Perhaps one of the board’s lawyers can weigh in on this, but I would suggest “Intent” of the shooter is going to be the determining factor. If I can reasonably explain why I thought that shadow was a threat (success = The State believes and doesn’t arrest me or file charges) then I would also probably not be negligent, and would owe the victim nothing. If I am mistaken (resulting in charges of general dumbassery, but not attempted murder) then I AM negligent, as I have not acted as a reasonably prudent person, and I would owe damages to the bullet catcher. If I wander into the local Starbucks and start punching holes in people well, that’d be pretty tough for me to call “accidental” and would be excluded as an intentional act.
Thanks for that. I notice the torts involved are generally not those associated with bodily injury which, can we agree, is what this thread is really about. Also, things like defamation or other contract breaches rarely involve the use of firearms so they would be entirely different perils. I think. Again, I believe “Intent” is what would trigger or exclude coverage. If I shoot at someone meaning only to scare them but instead I turn their brain into a stain on the fence, that’d be a different sort of action from a wanton shooting spree that is pretty clearly intended to end a few lives.
Because that is what this poll/thread is about. I look forward to seeing your thread about wallet stealing, though.
Which has nothing to do with the scenario described in the posts to which I was referring. I specifically said that accidental injury/death would be all it would cover - exactly what auto insurance covers in the case of DUI/speeding.
Like they are very good today at determining who is more likely to have a DUI accident and charge higher accordingly? Oh, wait, they can’t and don’t - even though they have had many years to figure it out.
Care to point out how that would work, exactly? Higher rates once you’ve accidentally killed someone? And an example would be appreciated of higher rates for any insurance because someone has fallen down while drunk.
And I suppose the Insurance company would have the right to enter your house and inspect it for compliance?
Like auto insurers charge more to owners of multiple cars? Oh, wait, they actually give discounts for that…
Again, intentional acts would not likely be covered so we’re only talking about accidental injury or death.
Because people always tell the insurance company the truth when it will cost them more money to do so.
Most life insurance policies do. Besides, liability policies cover costs/damages incurred by others due to an accident or negligence on the part of he insured. It doesn’t cover costs/damages incurred by the insured.
You are proposing a level of gun registration that does not exist in the US. Absent that, your idea is unworkable. There is no legal way to hold someone accountable for something they do not own.
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I’m not saying that offering additional insurance to gun owners to specifically cover damages related to accidental injury or death to others is a bad idea as a voluntary measure, but making it mandatory solves nothing.
Probably the vast majority. Personal defense, target, and hunting are far and away the vast majority of firearms currently in civilian hands from the various things I have read and seen. While some may amount to a “collection” that is far from how their owners view or use them. My Krag carbine, for example, was out for deer season just a couple weeks back and my one P-08 is going to the range for a competition on Thursday.
Again it is like trying to define an “assault weapon” – often it (collection) is in the eyes of the beholder.
It’s pretty obvious that when people propose this they aren’t trying to cover any actual liability issue; the people proposing ‘mandate liability insurance’ never seem to point to actual statistics or existing policies, which one would expect if they were sincere. As far as I can tell, people either want an additional inconvenience for gun owners, or want to mandate ‘liability insurance’ that’s actually just a fee that’s set too high for ordinary people to afford. It’s noteworthy that a number of people on this board referred to actual functional insurance for gun owners as ‘murder insurance’ https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=839358&
Please look at my proposal and see if you still believe that insurance on guns wouldn’t help to address the externalities created by guns. My proposal works on even the existing stock of guns if you mandate that people get a policy even on their existing guns. The tough part with requiring insurance on existing guns is enforcing the requirement.
We don’t limit mandatory liability insurance to guns. We also require it for cars, which kill roughly the same order of magnitude of people each year that guns kill.
If wallets start being implicated in 14,000 homicides per year, I will suggest that we consider requiring insurance on wallets. It’s already true that stolen guns are cheaper than guns bought at gun stores. That people have a “perverse incentive” to steal things rather than buy them is true for essentially everything in the world.
I acknowledge that imposing insurance costs on the purchase of guns will drive some transactions to the black market. The question shouldn’t be whether requiring insurance on guns is a perfect solution - there is no such thing. The question should be whether it is better for America or [insert country here] overall. I think it is.