And the first sentence in your link - Suicides drove an increase in gun deaths from 2016 to 2017. Insurance won’t cover your suicide no matter what method you use.
We are talking about INSURANCE and the risks warranting extra insurance. Actual accidental deaths per year has been <500 lately.
LOL - right? 80 million gun owners are so stupid they don’t even know how to properly user their guns. Learn to gun, losers.
i don’t think you’re looking at things rationally.
first, take two numbers suicides and accidents, decrease one and the total drops. more lives saved? yes, win.
second, insurance should be ranked on things like: do i store my guns at home ( or keep them at the range ), do i keep them locked, is ammo separate… as you well know those steps will absolutely reduce suicide ( kids getting guns for instance ) and accidents… so also, more lives saved? yes. also, win.
the invisible hand can encourage good behavior in certain cases, and this is definitely one of those cases.
Encouraging good behavior isn’t the same as mandating insurance for something that actually has a very small accidental death rate. Insurance isn’t a touchy feely “do the right thing” it is cold hard actuary tables. When there are risks which throw off those tables, they may enact penalties/rewards like BMI or being a smoker. But when the numbers don’t show a significant increase in risk, then it isn’t going to warrant a reward/penalty.
When it comes to accidental deaths, Falls make up ~35k a year, motor vehicles ~40K a year, and poisoning ~58K a year - vs ~500 for firearms. Yet we aren’t charged more for having stairs, ladders, or household chemicals around the house. Even though promotion of good practices would reduce these numbers as well.
The bulk of gun deaths from suicide or crime isn’t something one gets insurance for.
Except that’s just not true, by any measure.
The only reason anyone starts talking about gun insurance is because gun control just ends up getting people irrationally pissed. So let’s just replace gun insurance with gun control. Guns kill tens of thousands of people in the US each year, and have very little practical utility for anything redeeming. It would be nice to have a rational conversation about, hey, maybe some rifles would be cool for hunting or limited police use for policing and some location-limited target shooting. But then the OMG 2nd Amendment!! and there’s no more conversation.
Like this firearms instructor who handed a Uzi to a 9 year old?
Who are they going to “learn to gun” from when an instructor can make such a fatal mistake?
except that isn’t even true.
you need permits and safety checks to install stairs precisely because poorly built stairs increase accidents. fire codes absolutely talk about what kinds of chemicals you can keep in your house. and you can absolutely lose your insurance or be asked to pay more for having certain types of equipment, for failing to properly maintain your property or structure.
what it seems you’re really concerned about are rules and regulations impinging on your hobby. internally you appear to have created a cost benefit ratio of your own: lives lost vs. being asked to license, insure, and limit guns.
your metric seems to be that no changes are worth the lives they (might) save. it’s not a credible stance because obviously some changes will save lives ( and have been shown to. )
if that’s not how you feel, you might consider what changes you would support – and say things like “okay, not (a) but how about (b) because (x).”
we’re basically the only otherwise stable country with these problems. and it’s not credible to say we can’t apply lessons learned elsewhere and make them work here.
that’s my take anyway.
Based on that comment I’m not sure you get the whole picture as to the purpose and benefits of requiring insurance. It’s not just to cover things like accidental deaths. If an insurance actuary believed you were at an elevated risk of using your vehicle to commit a crime resulting in an insurance payout, or illegally transfer it to someone else who would, they would price your insurance rates accordingly. No difference for gun buyers. A “straw buyer” who had to obtain insurance against any of his purchased guns being used in a crime would have to pay a lot more, or perhaps be denied insurance at all, if he could not demonstrate that the guns were for his own use and that he would store them securely. And even if somehow these insurance rates didn’t discourage a single illegal gun transfer or prevent a single crime, at least the many thousands of gun violence victims and their families would be able to get some financial compensation for their suffering.
Great. Look… If you want to regulate guns slap a vagina on it or start selling them with the morning after pill. Just put it in a nice pink bubble pack with the pills. Men wanting to regulate guns will pour out of the woodwork.
Maybe there really aren’t any?
These men will be re-elected. People just don’t care enough to go to the polls. These men know that and subsequently they don’t care.
Gun use has far more likelihood of deadly peril from accidental use than a car. Guns are far harder to recover when stolen. A gun’s primary function is a weapon, not a tool of general utility and transportation. When used correctly a death may be intended by the user.
More importantly mandatory liability insurance is:
I don’t have to solve every problem involving firearm ownership, but it would be nice to address the ones which have a huge impact and are hardly addressed. The “iron pipeline” is a menace to our nation. One with a solution I have suggested which does not involve potential government overstretch. Creating a market solution to a societal problem.
More importantly, it serves a vital and necessary law enforcement function. It creates documentation on ownership which must be available throughout the country and would be accessible to law enforcement under 4th Amendment conditions. This is absolutely necessary for flagging down straw buyers who make up the main driver to the illegal gun trade in the US.
As of now the ATF does not have searchable databases on gun owners and the NRA actively lobbies against such data collection by the government. By putting it in the hands of private industries with a vested interest in maintaining ownership, law enforcement gets its data and owners get their ownership rights protected.
Insurance won’t pay out. That’s literally murder insurance. Insurance not only won’t payout for a crime, but can’t pay out. Essentially every state’s insurance laws ban paying out for intentional torts (with some exceptions like slander).
Gun insurance probably won’t payout for suicides, and can’t payout for homicides. So what’s left is just accidents.
An interesting podcast today, for if you feel like adding some left-wing nuance to your gun debates:
Reps. Daryl Abbas, Scott Wallace and David Welch,
Rep Scott Wallace sure got a pretty mouth. I’m so glad he came out. I wonder if he has a web page where I can congratulate him? I’d like to congratulate them all. Who knew voters in New Hampshire were so open minded.
This may not be true. I have certainly heard of life insurance policies that pay out in case of suicide as long as you have held the policy for a certain length of time- because people are unlikely to buy life insurance with the intention of killing themselves several years later so their family get the payout, and even less likely to actually go through with such a plan.
this is true. the life insurance policy i have will pay off in case of suicide if i’ve maintained the policy for longer than 5 years.
I mean… I should be able to have one, at least.
It used to be the fact in the UK that you could have a tank with a smoothbore main gun on a shotgun licence (and a track-laying vehicle licence for the tank part.)
However the killjoys made a maximum calibre rule and spoilt everyone’s fun.
Well, it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be anyway.
