We can require existing guns to be insured too, as I’ve noted several times. I have also acknowledged that existing guns will be imperfectly covered. You seem to think that if we can’t solve every problem in every case of gun violence, we should do nothing instead. I disagree.
The insurance I’ve described doesn’t exist today. At one time, no insurance existed at all. Then, someone invented it, it existed, and people bought it. Gun liability insurance like that which I have described can also be invented and then people can buy it.
I’ve already explained that this isn’t a tax. The rate is set by the insurance company of your choice, not by the government. The money is paid to the insurance company and the government has nothing to do with setting the rates. I’ve questioned every proposal to tax guns because I don’t think the government will do a very good job of setting the rate. I will further say that if it were a tax, the government may decide to reallocate the funds for another purpose rather than helping crime victims. They have already capped payments on the crime victimization fund that you pointed me to, which suggests they are just keeping the rest of the money in their coffers. That’s just another crappy way to charge crime victims.
As for the amount of the insurance policy, if one insurance company quotes you a billion for insurance and another quotes you a million, and a third quotes you $4500 (my best guess at the average cost), my pro tip is to go with the $4500 option. You can manage your costs, subject to the fundamental market restriction that insurers won’t be able to sustainably offer rates that are lower than their cost of making restitution to victims.
Ok, are we talking a bond, or insurance? The two, in my state anyway, are not the same.
If I want to be a self-insured driver I pay a bond of (last time I looked) $150,000 to the state. Or I can (and do) do what most people do, buy insurance at a monthly rate.
If you mean bond in the sense that I understand it, your proposal will fail. Agree or not, many (most?) gun owners (myself included) will say that is gun ownership suppression akin to the voter-suppression that some on the left like to complain about when the idea of voter ID is raised. Except worse because the hurtle to overcome in order to exercise my right to own a gun is much much harder to overcome than the requirement to get and show a picture ID at the polls at voting time.
If you were to say guestchaz, we want you to have liability insurance on your guns, I would be much more amenable to that. A monthly policy at the rate of, well I don’t really know what the common rate is, while not welcome perhaps, not the offense that additional thousands of dollars on the purchase of a gun is.
guestchaz, it’s insurance but paid in one lump sum upfront to cover all the insurance over the life of the gun (i.e., forever).
This means there is a cost of thousands due upfront when you buy a new gun. The idea isn’t to punish gun owners or to make it unduly expensive to own a gun even though I understand it might appear that way based on the numbers I’m kicking around. The problem is that you can’t insure the risk of a gun as cheaply as you or I might want because, surprisingly or not, the average gun causes an awful lot of damage and the cost of insurance is accordingly high.
I don’t think you can mandate term (i.e., monthly or annual) insurance as an alternative because:
Irresponsible gun owners will fail to pay a monthly insurance policy, so insurers would cancel the policies, leaving gun victims in the same position they are in now.
Unscrupulous gun buyers will sell their guns on the black market and then let their insurance lapse or report the gun stolen and cancel the policy, once again leaving gun victims in the lurch.
Covering guns purchased by unscrupulous and irresponsible gun owners should be the priority of a gun insurance liability scheme.
You have real concerns that insurance as I’ve proposed it would push effective gun prices out of reach of many. I suspect many people won’t believe this, but I share that concern. I want responsible gun owners to continue to be able to own guns.
I anticipate that creditworthy gun owners would be able to finance their insurance policies with monthly payments, thereby simulating monthly insurance payments. Under my proposal, a gun buyer must secure a very expensive insurance policy up front, and the insurer is bound to honor that policy forever. However, as I’ve already explained, an insured gun is worth a lot more than an uninsured gun. The value of the insurance policy also tracks the likelihood of injury and the cost to provide restitution for those injuries. Thus, the value of an insurance policy would likely go up over time as the cost to treat gun injuries and the cost to pay lost wages increases. Banks are generally willing to make secured loans on appreciating assets. This is the foundation of the mortgage industry. Gun insurance loans should be little different.
I expect that creditworthy gun owners would overlap with safe and responsible gun owners, so responsible gun owners would be the people getting the lowest rates on gun insurance loans. Thus, we have a market-based system that makes it cheaper for the safest gun owners to buy guns at the most affordable prices while making it relatively more expensive for less responsible gun owners to buy guns.
I presume lenders would keep a security interest in the gun and the insurance policy. Guns wear out and depreciate more slowly than cars, and the insurance component might even appreciate, so the security interest in this appreciating combination of assets should tend to make gun/insurance loans less risky than car loans. Offsetting that, cars are generally easy to track and repossess, whereas guns are small and easy to sell, so the security underlying a gun/insurance loan might be at greater risk. On balance then, I think that gun/insurance loans would likely be at rates similar to car loans for the same term. Today, you can get a 72 month car loan for a 4.09% interest rate. If you could get a gun insurance loan at the same rate, you would have a monthly payment of $78.43 on a $5000 policy. Is that closer to what you were imagining monthly gun liability insurance might cost? The good news is that after the six years were up, you would never make another loan payment but your gun liability insurance would continue forever. You could even get most or all of that premium back from the insurance policy if you sold the gun. Few people who take out car loans manage that trick.
I don’t think my proposal is likely to win the support of a majority of gun owners but I still think it’s a worthwhile proposal that would provide restitution for gun injuries.
It only applies to new guns, or am I misunderstanding? Guns aren’t like electronics or cars, they don’t depreciate much. So everybody will just buy used, except for the very rich who can be early adopters. In the longer term, it would artificially drive up used prices to scarcity, but none of that money will make it to your fund, just the seller.
so an actual bond as I understand them, and in my state, that would be self-insuring and would require a deposit of $150,000 in a lump sum up front with the state if we use car insurance as a starting point.
And yet that is exactly what your proposal does, as well as criminalizes the exercise of a constitutional right for many.
And yet, the other very common deadly weapon is insured for anywhere from $60 to $200 a month depending on a variety of factors. I realize that there are some problems with this comparison as far more people own and use cars than guns, but the obvious problems with your statement(to me anyway) seem to be physics
You might be surprised at how wrong you are about this, or are you suggesting that only people of higher income and socio-economic class be allowed to own guns?
I’m not opposed to requiring liability insurance for guns even if I don’t like the idea. Me not liking it doesn’t make it a bad one. But it has to be reasonable and feasible, and I just don’t see that with the way you want it to happen.
It could apply to: (1) new guns, (2) to any gun sold through a gun dealer (new or used), or (3) to any gun. Option (1) is the easiest to enforce and covers at least some gun injuries but leaves the stock of existing guns uncovered. It’s an imperfect solution but it has the effect of discouraging the stockpiling of arms that we have now. At least the too many guns problem would stop getting worse. Compliance with option (2) would also probably be very good, since gun dealers are subject to close regulatory scrutiny, but the likely outcome is that used guns would just be sold in private transactions rather than through gun dealers as an intermediary. I recognize that compliance would be lowest for the stock of existing guns with option (3), so I haven’t focused on it.
You could modify the option (3) proposal to increase compliance, such as by allowing current gun owners to elect to use term insurance rather than an upfront prepaid policy that would be required for new guns. If gun owners are diligent enough to come forward and insure their guns, perhaps we could rely on them to continue to pay their premiums. You could optionally allow term insurance only if the gun is registered so you could track who is responsible for it and seize the gun if the insurance isn’t kept up to date. But then you are promoting a gun registration scheme and requiring law enforcement to intervene in gun owners’ lives untold numbers of times. I recognize that resistance to gun registration in the gun owning community is strong and deep. Their concerns are even rooted in some historical events, so I have a hard time proposing gun registration.
It’s prepaid insurance and a little like whole life insurance in that you pay a lot of money early in exchange for coverage that continues after you cease payments and that gives you some residual value. The bond you are describing requires you to put up cash to serve as a pool of assets solely for injuries you may cause. It’s also fully refundable to you if you de-register the car. The key difference is that with a car bond to self-insure, you have to put up the whole amount of minimum liability limits in your state.
I’m proposing insurance which creates a group of people who are forced to pool together a much smaller amount of assets from which all claims will be paid. It makes gun liability insurance much more affordable, although, if you would prefer, I would not object to permitting gun owners to post a bond for the full amount of damages their gun might cause.
But, if you think that my proposal is unbearably expensive for gun owners, a bond as you are describing would be unfathomably worse. I mention the Pulse Nightclub shooting above as the edge case. Forty-nine people were killed, and if we assume that they were all killed with one gun and the value of each life was $5 million, it leads to a maximum claim in a single incident of over $245 million. If you wanted to self-bond a .223 semi-automatic rifle, should you be required to post a cash bond equal to $245 million? That’s obviously preposterous. I’m proposing a system that tries to manage that cost as reasonably as I can. The numbers seem unreasonable only because the amount of uncompensated gun injuries in the country is unreasonable.
My proposal is about restitution, not punishment. They are distinct legal and moral concepts. I’m not going to belabor the point but you are free to disagree.
My numbers are at best estimates and I’m offering them in good faith. I could pretend that the cost of prepaid insurance for gun liability like I’m proposing would only cost a couple hundred dollars but that would be disingenuous of me.
The fact that it is cheaper to insure cars is irrelevant. It would be really cheap to insure whipped cream under a similar system but that has nothing to do with what it would take to manage the externalities of gun ownership.
In truth, I think that the actual cost of insurance would prove to be lower than I’ve estimated. Claims would be lower than the outer bound because we can’t always find the gun used to injure. Furthermore, insurers could recover some portion of the damages from criminals. I don’t know how to estimate how much those factors would drop premiums. I suspect the first would be significant and the second not so much.
To further lower the cost, we could also do what we do with car insurance - we impose minimum insurance limits that are much less than the potential harm that a car can cause, but (hopefully) higher than the amount a car usually causes when there is an accident. I mentioned the possibility of limiting liability to reduce insurance rates above. Requiring insurance at less than the whole amount of potential injuries tries to balance affordability and accessibility of insurance with at least partially compensating injuries. Limiting the liability on gun insurers would probably be necessary to reduce the cost of gun insurance even though it would lead to uncompensated injuries imposed on innocent people, which I maintain is suboptimal. Determining where the liability limit should be is an exercise in arbitrary line drawing that I don’t want to engage in for the purposes of discussion. I don’t have the statistics necessary to say how much premiums would drop if we limited liability to, let’s say, $5 million per incident or how many people would have uncovered injuries. These are important policy considerations but I am simply ill equipped to make those judgments.
Another problem with limiting liability under my proposal is that I intend to create a form of forever insurance. Guns last essentially forever so I believe the insurance should too. If we were to limit liability at the outset of the policy, we would have no way to increase those limits later as the costs of gun injuries rise.
I’m not proposing that but, as Anatole France once said, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” I recognize that there is some similar sentiment embedded in my proposal. Under the current regime, almost anyone can afford a gun because they don’t really pay the full price for it. Under my proposal, fewer people will be able to afford guns. I haven’t been shy about that.
This proposal isn’t intended to solve the problem of wealth inequality in America. However, if the poor are disproportionately affected by uncompensated gun injuries in America, this proposal helps to improve equity by helping to reduce how much the poor have to pay for those injuries.
I respect your recognizing that you not liking an idea doesn’t make it a bad one, and I appreciate your discussing this in a thoughtful way.
I do think it’s reasonable. It appears unreasonable only because gun injuries seem so rare and so remote to gun owners that they think they round to almost zero. I think there is an availability bias problem here - gun owners don’t know a lot of people hurt by gun injuries so they mentally discount the possibility. Even if their guns have been stolen or if they’ve sold a gun in a shady transaction, no one is coming back to them to tell them later about whether their gun was later used to kill or injure someone. And what gun owner spends their time worrying about whether their guns will kill someone after they die? But gun injury costs don’t round to zero; they round to a tremendous and seemingly unreasonable amount per gun once you do the math.
I also think it’s implementable, particularly with new guns. Covering new guns would be an improvement. I believe that we have too many guns in America right now because the externalities they impose aren’t priced into people’s decisions to buy them. If they were, people would buy fewer guns. They might turn to used guns for some time, but eventually that stock would wear out, be lost, or be destroyed, and the overall stock of guns would drop slowly over time to the ideal level, whatever that might be.
Even I doubt that it’s politically practical. I suspect that if gun liability insurance in whatever form can’t get something like 80% support in this very liberal crowd, then there is little chance it could get 50% support in the voting public or 60% support in the U.S. Senate. The fact that it’s an unpopular policy doesn’t mean that it’s a bad policy.
You are correct to say that the majority of people who use guns in the commision of a crime did not buy them legally from a dealer. However, most of those guns were originally bought from a dealer, then stolen or “stolen”, and got intot he hands of criminals.
Bumping this thread because there were repeated assertions that only some tiny percentage of criminals’ guns in America are bought from gun stores and the rest are stolen. This is completely wrong, as I noted above, but here is a real world example.
A mentally ill person’s firearms were seized by the Secret Service after he was arrested for trying to enter the White House without authorization to meet the president. His Illinois firearms authorization was subsequently revoked. His father reclaimed his guns and purportedly gave the firearms back to his son. His son used one of them to kill four people in a Waffle House and injure two others.
Note that the shooter neither stole these guns nor bought them from a licensed gun dealer.
If my recommended insurance scheme were adopted and covered used guns, all the victims of the shooting would be able to recover their injuries from the guns. The police would not have returned uninsured guns to the father.
I can see it succeed if one can make the case that the owner did not properly secure it. For instance leaving it visible on the front seat of a unlocked car with windows down, as opposed to leaving the car keys visible on the front seat of a unlocked car with windows down. It is reasonable to assume that either item (gun or car) could be stolen and used for it’s intended purposes (the gun to kill or sell, or the car to drive or sell). It’s that killing part of a gun’s intended purpose that could open up the owner to liability.
In fact that type of set up is so obvious to be stolen the police can not use it to catch the bad guys, because it usually falls under entrapment, which is a situation were a generally non-bad guy may be tempted enough in the moment to do something they normally would not. So leaving the gun in a position where it would be entrapment if the police did it should open the person up for liability & possibly criminal charges beyond leaving the weapon in a publicly accessible place, but what his actions reasonably lead to (someone taking and using the gun - reasonable expected outcome). That reasonable expected outcome of killing someone is not present with stealing a car.
I think a bigger problem is that doctors in America are free-riders. Therefore, what we need is an insurance policy that says “if a patient under your care dies, you have to pay for all the expenses he incurred before death.” It doesn’t matter if the doctor is at fault, or not. If he dies, you pay.
Actually, it wouldn’t matter if the patient was under the doctor’s care, or not. If the doctor ever treated him, the doctor still has to pay, even if the patient went to a quack clinic for Laetrile.
If the doctor doesn’t want to do this, then he is not a responsible doctor.
I* think it’s safe to say that a low percentage of criminal assaults and robberies are committed with guns that were acquired by legal purchase from a gun store,"*
Then you try to refute that cited FACT with a single anecdote. :rolleyes:
What happened here is that he asked one question, and you answered another question that favored your position. It’s as if someone said that there were approximately 7.6 billion people on earth, and you “corrected” that person by saying “No-There are over 150 billion mammals on earth.”
He stated "Bumping this thread because there were repeated assertions that only some tiny percentage of criminals’ guns in America are bought from gun stores and the rest are stolen." No such assertions were made. The assertion he is trying to attack was that only a tiny % of criminal’s guns are purchased legally.