Vast majority of acts of stupidity has no or negligible consequences. I have a rather large share of my own ones.
And it’s good that way. Imagine if everything was policed in such detail that every time you were negligent you had to go in front of a judge and possibly to jail. Nobody could afford to be sleep-deprived or distracted even for a while.
Apparently responsible parents and responsible drivers do stupid shit all the time too. Likewise we only find out about it when things go badly wrong. Should we be watched at all times to ensure we don’t fail?
Maybe a legal system that reacts to consequences (and shows leniency if the natural consequences of an irresponsible act outweigh anything the court could inflict) is actually a sensible compromise?
Under such a system there would be no traffic laws. We’d just prosecute people for property damage and manslaughter. I posit that such a system would be undesirable, as it literally waits until people are dead or injured.
Yeah. Crime happens. Even in the UK. Randomly getting shot in a crime is still pretty rare, even if it happens more in the US than it does in the UK. If you’re legitimately scared of getting shot visiting the US, you have an irrational fear.
Mexico’s murder rate is nearly FIVE TIMES that of the US. Does that mean I should be scared when I go visit there? Am I exceptionally brave as I felt no fear snorkeling and drinking (not at the same time) in Mexico? Or was I just armed with the knowledge that murders of tourists are rare and I am not invovled in illicit activities that lead to murders.
Unless there are natural consequences to an act of driving stupidity, the odds of being caught are pretty small. Society relies on licensed drivers to do the right thing on the whole. It’s possible to go a month in rural NZ without seeing a police highway patrol vehicle. And yet, somehow, most of us don’t play ‘Death Race 2000’ on the way to work …
No, but we shouldn’t just ignore the ones that we are aware of either.
Probably. There are lots of places in Mexico you really should stay out of.
By that argument, would you say that the requirement for car insurance is also a Jim Crow-style law? If not, why is it only a classist or racist law when it involves insuring guns but not when it involves insuring cars?
As much as I love to disagree with @Mister44 on the topic of firearms, he’s only wrong because he understated things drastically. Drunk driving accounts for about 10K deaths in a good year here in the US, and handgun homicides generally aren’t much more than half that (with long guns closer to 80%) In addition the non-fatal injury statistics skew even more heavily towards drunk driving and the impact on lives overall is much higher.
Source: It used to be my job. I worked with Wisconsin’s Medicaid and Medicare programs as an analyst and we got most of the fallout. Also: the CDC.
For more fun ways to die:
https://public.tableau.com/profile/will.holz#!/vizhome/InitialZoomableBubbleTest/Text_Drilldown
I’m with you philosophically (I’m completely opposed to firearms in the home myself, but would admittedly love to chop down a dead tree with a chaingun), but data is data.
The reason it is different than cars is two fold:
Insurance for cars really is a protection for the OWNER. Even a minor fender bender can cause hundreds to thousands in damages and leave the owner with out a way to get to work. A typical Accidental discharge or negligent one will leave a small hole in the dirt or maybe a wall. Simply put, it doesn’t occur enough to make it worth a separate policy.
Because, like it or not, in the US gun ownership is a right. That includes poor blacks. So I don’t think forcing people to buy unneeded insurance is constitutional. If you did make it mandatory, you are putting an undo burden on the poor.
Next - how you going to enforce such a law? You probably aren’t unless they get caught doing something else and then they add it on to charges. But this is the same police force that nationally has an issue with racist tendencies, and uneven application with the law. Can you say with a straight face that poor minorities WOULDN’T be unfairly targeted with such a law? They already are with drug possession. They already are with many other minor infractions that whites get off with a warning and they are stuck with fines.
Mexico is a big country, just like the US. Like I said, there are some areas in the US I would avoid. But statistically I am still safer than in the worst areas of Mexico. But - there are many , many lovely, safe areas in Mexico as well. AND many areas where tourists are perfectly safe because the areas depend on the tourist trade.
Anyway - still my point stands - fearing being shot visiting the US is irrational.
I’m with you, but I’m a little short of the $5,000 or more they used up on ammo (though it might have been donated by Dillon - the mini gun people.)
True!
I’ll make a bet though…if we have a contest where the person who plants the most trees gets to do exactly that (with prizes for the runner-ups), then a whole bunch of rednecks will pretty much reforest America.
(I’m more of a ‘let’s exploit our flaws for awesomeness’ sort rather than the type to pretend we’re something that we’re not) 
Actually the real risk is that of personal injury to a 3rd Party. Healthcare costs can spiral rapidly out of control and last a lifetime. If your car accident turns someone into a vegetable needing life-long care in the US, you’ll wish that you’d written the car off instead of the poor schmuck who got in the way if you have to foot the bill yourself.
That’s the reason why car insurance isn’t mandatory in New Zealand and is really pretty cheap if you choose to purchase. Accident [Edit: personal injury] costs here are covered for everyone by ACC, which is funded from employer levies, PAYE taxation, motor vehicle licensing and petrol taxes and you’re covered the instant you step into the country.
Since you don’t seem to consider any amount of deaths or injury by guns to warrant any new actions whatsoever to prevent such occurrences, I’m not going to trust your estimation that not enough gun accidents occur to warrant having insurance. I recall having asked you what number you would consider too high a human cost for death or injury to warrant restricting gun ownership more in this country and I don’t believe you ever answered that question.
Gun ownership isn’t the inviolable right that it’s interpreted to be, in my opinion. The Supreme Court got it wrong. It would be nice to have a more liberal set of justices to overturn DC v. Heller.
We could enforce insurance at the point of purchase by requiring verification by the seller. We could require gun insurance companies to report lapses in coverage to the ATF, which should then require the seller to provide evidence of a sale of the firearm or the owner faces a fine for failure to carry coverage. Yes, this would require gun registration. God forbid we track all sales and purchases and better trace where all the guns go. No, this wouldn’t stop all gun violence, but laws against murder or rape don’t stop those crimes from happening either so saying a law won’t stop a crime from happening isn’t a legitimate reason not to have such a law.
Insurance would increase the cost of owning a gun, but if you’re going to take it upon yourself to own something that expressly exists for its ability to cause severe injury or death of a fellow human being, you shouldn’t be able to obtain and keep it easier than you would a more well-regulated vehicle. Insurance doesn’t necessarily reduce gun violence, but it does create a better situation for dealing with the seemingly inevitable irresponsibility of some gun owners.
That is certainly the WORST case scenarios, but even more common are non-injury accidents. ETA - Wait I see your point, you and someone else made. Yes the reason it is required is to make someone else you hit whole. But at the same time it protects the owner as well from themselves and others.
[quote=“CarlMud, post:194, topic:75521”]
Since you don’t seem to consider any amount of deaths or injury by guns to warrant any new actions whatsoever to prevent such occurrences, [/quote]
You act like we don’t have hundreds if not thousands of gun laws in the books. Including background checks the vast majority of them. People don’t commit crimes just because they have access to a gun. They commit crimes for a variety of other reasons. People murder for petty, stupid reasons. If you waved a magic wand and got rid of the guns you could hope to maybe keep guns out of the hands of criminals. But the reality is if guns are out there, criminals will get them. I mean my god, we are finally starting to wake up that just making drugs super duper illegal hasn’t done anything to curb drug use. Throwing people in prison hasn’t stopped it. Have you all not figured out that the way to curb crime or drugs is to attack the reasons people engage in crime and drugs? Making it more and more prohibited has done nothing.
Anyway - show me a law that would really work and not just be easily circumvented and I may support it. But the fact is we have a ton of laws on the books already. People just break them. Maybe tell me specifically what you want changed.
You don’t have to take my estimation, look up the FBI and CDC numbers. The gun accidental deaths are ~600-800 year. Non fatal accidental injuries are only 14,000-19,000 a year. Now lets just round this up to 20K, and even ignore some of these are suicide attempts. 20k. Out of an estimated 80million gun owners, that is .025%
Now - can you honestly tell me insurance is something needed with such a low rate?
I don’t know what to call this. Like… naivety? Over active optimism? Some convoluted scheme? Right now you are supposed to have insurance on your car - do you think State Farm alerts the government when your policy lapses? Do they then come to your house because they found out you are uninsured? Have you dealt directly with government run bureaucracy before? Hell have you called the cops before, because when you have a REAL CRIME like your car stolen, they don’t have time to come out half the time.
So you want to make a huge convoluted mess for 80 million people because 20k a year hurt themselves or others accidentally?
CRIMINALS won’t even use your system. 80% of guns criminals get go through the black market, or a network of friends/family. Many of these sales are ALREADY ILLEGAL. They won’t be registering. They won’t be buying this insurance.
Baloney. You are making statements based in a tiny fraction of the population.
That’s completely incorrect, and can be shown by the simple fact that collision insurance (which is insurance for the owner in case of self-inflicted or no-fault damage) is not legally mandatory, while liability insurance (which protects the third party in the case of an at-fault accident) is (except in New Hampshire, where instead they legislate that a driver must prove they can pay for, again, third party damages in case of an at-fault accident).
Hey - speaking of reducing homicides, check out the decreases in the last 30 years. How did that happen with out sweeping reform?
Hey - look at the UK, its going own too. Hmm where do you think they passed their gun laws to reduce homicides? Did it work? Also, why did the UK never have as high of a Murder rate as the US?
rather than decomposing and parsing his statement, I’ll bow to your knowledge. I still say his analysis is bullshit though.
Looking at the dates, clearly it was the result of Reagan and Bush The Elder leaving office.
It is noted that you still refuse to answer the question.
That’s a nice way of not answering the question. How many deaths does it take for you to consider any stricter form of gun control to be valid?
The fact that you don’t know what’s causing the decline is concerning. And you have to cite the decline from 30 years ago because the last 15 haven’t seen a significant decrease. What caused the original decline and what caused the last 15 years of not much change?
You seem to consider that the existing number of gun violence incidents is acceptable. What is not acceptable to you?
