I always appreciate your counterpoints in these gun control debates but this one has to go, at least phrased in this way. If everyone had to shoot their way to work or the grocery store. you’d definitely see a LOT more deaths from guns than from cars. The death/injury per use/hour has got to be MUCH higher.
This is disingenuous. You can loan a car to someone, but only if they are also insured and licensed. Also, if someone else crashes your car, YOUR insurance and premiums take the hit. You are financially responsible.
Not entirely true. Insurance companies have to pay for claims related to people’s illegal acts all the time, such as if you drive drunk and kill someone. There’s nothing in existing laws or regulations saying you couldn’t be insured against liability for negligently enabling a criminal to obtain a weapon by being their straw buyer unless it was proven that you fully intended for that criminal to kill someone.
Besides, we’re talking about a new type of federally mandated insurance that, if enacted, would supersede all state insurance laws. So it could potentially require payouts whether the person who pulled the trigger intended to kill someone or not.
OK, Fair enough. That used to not be the case, I believe. In that case, if gun ownership effected the payouts for suicides on life insurance policies, then I would expect an extra fee. If they don’t charge an extra fee, it means it still happens rarely enough to not warrant the extra costs.
Like I said, insurance companies are cold, calculating machines. They give zero fucks about you. If they are losing money in some vector, they will do something to compensate that.
It will go as soon as the whole “we need mandatory insurance for gun owners” goes. I’d love to never have to make this point again.
I mean, your point that if we had to shoot our way to grocery stores there would be more gun injury/death is a valid one. But it also supports mine. Because unlike what TV, movies, and video games would have you believe, nearly all gun use is at a range, on a private land, or perhaps in the field hunting. Obviously there is SOME risk involved. But that risk doesn’t pan out to the point where extra insurance is necessary. But since we use cars way more often and around other cars which tend to hit each other, insurance IS prudent, but also affordably so.
I was corrected that life insurance may pay out for suicides. In that case if the company did tack on a fee due to gun ownership, that would be OK. I see that as like when I get a discount for my BMI and being a non-smoker - I am removed from certain risk vectors. But I don’t believe they do charge an extra fee because that risk vector is actually very small. You have ~23,000 gun suicides compared to 161,000 accidental deaths - among the ~2.7 million total deaths per year. But that’s up to the insurance companies. They don’t like losing money, so if gun ownership was a risk vector losing them money, they would be charging more.
Like I said, they do charge more for insurance against theft.
If this were de jure reality instead of de facto, I’d be pretty happy with the gun laws we had…would gun owners be happy? (and in that second one, you’d have to have enough land, or a high-enough bullet proof wall to guarantee bullets can’t exit your property…) I’d be perfectly fine if concealed carry insurance were exorbitant, but “hunting rifle, on your own land or designated ranges/hunting grounds” insurance was basically covered by homeowners insurance. .
I call nonsense. Even an avid gun user probably spends more time behind the wheel than behind a trigger, yet gun deaths in America are almost on par with car deaths in America. On a per-use or per-owner basis guns are ASTRONOMICALLY more dangerous than cars.
So you don’t believe that there is a difference between ACCIDENTAL injury and INTENTIONAL suicide or homicide?
From an INSURANCE stand point, they usually insure against ACCIDENTS. At least when we are comparing them to cars, which we are.
As someone corrected me, at least some Life Insurance policies pay out for suicides. In that case if firearm ownership put one in a risk vector that warranted an extra fee, then fine. I can see the logic in that. They may even add a fee if one is on anti-depressants or something. Though it doesn’t appear firearm ownership is enough of an indicator of an increased risk vector to warrant an additional fee. If it was, then they would be giving discounts to non-gun owners (that’s how fees work, they don’t penalize you for being fat, they just reward you for your BMI within a range.)
Anyway, as I said, there is risk involved in using and owning a firearm, but it isn’t that high that mandatory insurance would be required. Especially when it penalizes “the average gun owner”, when a significant number of criminals caught with guns shouldn’t own a gun, and aren’t caught with a gun they own. They aren’t going to be buying insurance for something they shouldn’t’ have.
I believe if you’re going to compare the danger of cars vs. guns then the only reasonable way to do so is to compare how those things are used in the real world, not how they are “meant” to be used in a world where everyone practices some idealized notion of personal responsibility.
In actual practice, guns kill about the same number of Americans as cars even though the number of Americans who regularly use a car is orders of magnitude higher than the number of Americans who regularly use a gun. Ergo; guns are more dangerous devices than cars.
Cars kill when they are used incorrectly or when the users are negligent. They kill when the users do something the car was not designed to do. It’s a hell of a lot easier to do something wrong than to do something right.
Whereas guns frequently kill people when they are used correctly (that is, for the thing they were designed to do) AND when they are used incorrectly (accident and negligence).
I got to climb inside one back in the '90s when I was about 25 kilos lighter. I tried getting inside one in 2015 in Finland, and it was a bit more cramped. I can only assume the tanks shrink over time.
I suppose I have to concede your point if we are looking at it from just a general view of what is more dangerous and deaths caused.
But we are looking at it from a view of whether insurance is prudent or not. Because the vast majority of gun deaths and injuries are from intentional misuse, those aren’t what one buys insurance for. Insurance for cars is for accidents, and when compared to the number gun accidents, there are far more car accidents. There are 6 million car accidents per year with 222 million drivers, So 2.7% of drivers will be needing insurance for their accidents per year. And remember most are not fatal accidents.
The stat I see for accidental shootings is about 73.5K a year. So that is .0918% of gun owners per year.
Clearly from an insurance stand point, the risk vectors are vastly different.
