Originally published at: San Jose, California becomes first U.S. city to require gun owner insurance | Boing Boing
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[Quoting myself from an earlier discussion…]
I’m sure the pseudo-progressive crocodile tears from ammosexuals about this rule being unfair to PoC and poor people who want to own firearms will not be far behind.
Strange how they don’t get worked up in the same way about mandatory insurance on cars (which are not purpose-designed to wound and kill mammals).
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If there was a national mandate on gun owner insurance as there is for car owner insurance, it would drastically curtail much of the illegal gun trade in the US.
If all guns purchased had to be insured, it creates electronic paper trails which get around the NRA inspired prohibition collection of national level gun ownership records. It means law enforcement has access to names of who is buying guns and how many at a time. Plus it creates a cost disincentive for hoarding.
Also insurance requirements are useful for coercing safer behavior. More people will be willing to buy gun safes/locks for lower premiums.
I have yet to see an argument against gun owner insurance that showed any knowledge as to how Property/Casualty insurance works or its effects.
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That’s because the people who try to make those BS arguments are just worried that they’ll have to she’ll out to keep their own precious armories and collections of deadly weapons.
If they put a quarter as much effort into examining how insurance works as they do into the technical minutiae of firearms they use to fuel their gunwanking distractions they might at least acknowledge the validity of your points.
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I don’t see how the party of personal responsibility can object to this.
It ensures that victims of those “few bad actors” are compensated & don’t have to end up being dependent on the gubmint.
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They can always do what people who hoard cars do when they don’t have insurance for them. Leave them rusting away on their property and never take them out.
Insurance requirements are only enforceable when you take your item outside or something happens with it affecting others.
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Even better, the party of privatization. It is gun control in the hands of corporations as opposed to government. Free market solutions.
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The last happens far too often with firearms, both outdoors and inside. This kind of law might make the environment caused by “responsible gun owners” a lot less prone to deadly accidents.
It’s also worth noting that mandatory insurance is not a 100% solution to the problems caused by American gun culture (ammosexuals love their Nirvana fallacy) but it’s going to be a very effective measure none-the-less.
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“San Jose, California becomes first U.S. city to require gun owner insurance”
Somehow (maybe cuz of the accompanying photo) I misread this as “…first U.S. city to require gun ownership” which…is probably not far off in some southern town.
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Already tried, a small-ish town in I think Texas & I think in the 1990s. Every household(?) had to have a gun or file an objection.
The crime rates after the law was passed were modestly lower, and no notable increase in suicide rate. I never saw any follow up to see if the effects lasted, nor if the lower crime rates in that town were offset by higher ones in nearby towns.
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Six months ago: “But what about the women of Afghanistan!?!?!?”
Today: “Who’s Afghanistan.”
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I fucking hate that argument. It is so boneheaded. Attacking something for being effective and rational because it isn’t unrealistically foolproof.
But the silliest is, “This is just an attempt to drive gun ownership costs up so its prohibitive”. It shows a fundamental ignorance as to how insurance works. Property/Casualty insurers want to cover as many people as possible to spread their own risk. Making something too expensive to buy means fewer buyers, fewer policies written and lower reserves for handling claims.
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In my experience, all they have left in the face of mass shootings are bad-faith and fallacious arguments. The only change I’ve seen in recent years is that those BS talking points are no longer being fed to them by the now thoroughly disgraced NRA (which during its heyday never much cared for the idea of armed PoC).
Still, I can’t deny that their bogus arguments have traction with Americans who aren’t critical thinkers. And toxic gun culture is so entrenched in this country that even a bunch of dead kindergarten kids didn’t move the needle toward reasonable laws like this.
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Not at all far off, since it happened.
It was Kennesaw, Georgia in 1982. The law was written such that basically everyone had to have a gun - unless they couldn’t (expense, felon), or… didn’t want to. (It was both unenforced and unenforceable, and there’s no indicator it had any impact on gun ownership whatsoever.) The crime rate in the (very small) town before the law was so low that it’s really hard to say if it changed afterwards, but as the town grew, it seems to have had comparable crime rates to other, similar towns in the state. But since the law is entirely symbolic, so are the effects…
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There should be a pool on how long it will take for the fast-tracked lawsuit to hit the Supreme Court and be overturned by snap injunction.
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The pool might have to be based on hours to be fair. Plenty of friendly Federalist Society judges to move things along and plenty of the late Scalia’s colleagues and admirers on the SCOTUS bench willing accept his ersatz “originalist” interpretation of the Second Amendment.
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But then we have the right wing SCOTUS dilemma:
Who do you bend over to the most: The Gun Lobby or Big Business?
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Good point. If it’s a choice between big business and anything else, Roberts will always go with the former and swing the decision that way. However, in this case the personal weapons industry is big business so – absent real lobbying from the insurance industry – he’ll likely side with the ammosexuals and get a 2fer on pleasing Wall Street and the ammosexuals.
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