New Zealand has a general workers comp / liability insurance that covers all residents and visitors to the country. It’s called the ACC (Accident Compensation Corporation) and it centralizes that risk and avoids the needs for endless injury lawsuits.
One of the reasons that you can go bungy jumping, paragliding, jet boating and all of the other risky activities that make life fun without signing eleventy million waiver forms and paying twice the price to cover liability insurance.
Not sure if that covers negligent discharge of firearms, but my understanding is that NZ has somewhat more sensible management of weapons than the US.
[quote=“Mister44, post:39, topic:97085, full:true”]
Yes, but the reason for separate car insurance is partly for the high cost of car replacement, and how common injury, even minor injury, accidents are.[/quote]
Liability insurance is not only about covering car replacement or repair. Frequently only one motor vehicle is involved in a liability payout to a victim.
The number of people accidentally or deliberately injuring others with their guns in America is still much higher on a per-capita basis than it is in other Western OECD countries (unless you count Mexico as a Western OECD country).
As to purpose and outcomes, the mandatory liability insurance for firearms owners would be there officially to compensate victims of accidental and deliberate shootings by the owner of the firearm. Secondarily but more importantly, it would be there to act as a means of promoting training and safe handling and storage of the firearms. Finally, it would be a free-market and Constitutional means for helping to prevent people who shouldn’t have guns (felons, mentally ill people with a history of violence, degenerate drug addicts, people captured on video acting recklessly, etc.) from owning them.
Before you say it, no, it wouldn’t be 100% effective and wouldn’t eliminate the black market, but it would be better than the current situation, without impinging on the Second Amendment.
And yes, right on schedule here come the expected crocodile tears for the poor urban minorities, who won’t have the means to protect themselves. These discussions about mandatory firearms insurance are about the only time your typical rugged individualist Second Amendment advocate will bemoan the state of social and economic justice for minorities in this country.
I was genuinely hoping he’d be an exception and not bring it up, but there it is again. I should really start bunging it in there pre-emptively since it happens in every.single.one of these discussions as a “yes, but…”
From what I’ve seen of his posts, Mister44 is a Second Amendment advocate with a libertarian political orientation, who in most other discussions here (e.g. those about welfare or police violence) has exhibited little sympathy for remedying the economic issues affecting minorities.
Regardless of how it gets trotted out, it’s actually true. You can’t argue that something that increases costs won’t decrease availability for the poor, or that the poor are disproportionately minorities. Rather than calling it a specious argument (which you didn’t exactly, but you questioned the genuineness of it), why not counter it with an argument about the same is true of car insurance, and while that is far more necessary to get work than a gun permit, we don’t see Republicans advocating for car insurance subsidies for the poor…
EDIT: BTW I don’t question your right to call a herring red. Just pointing out that it’s not always the most constructive way to advance conversation around the main point of the argument.
EDIT 2: Maybe we should propose a red herring carry permit law?
I suppose that liability insurance would be fairly cheap for the responsible gun owner, right? Automobiles kill plenty of people but a poor but safe driver can still afford the insurance. Auto insurance is mandatory. If they can’t afford car insurance most people decide to stop driving. I don’t think the argument that gun liability insurance dis-proportionally affects the poor is valid. Or does Mister 44 think that mandatory liability insurance for anything is just plain wrong?
It is true in a base economic sense: it would be a regressive cost for the poor, just as mandatory car insurance is. Also true are the institutional racism in police departments and economic discrimination against minorities. I’m questioning his and other Second Amendment advocates’ larger dedication to the issue of social and economic justice for minorities.
If the red herring is tossed out there, especially in such a depressingly predictable way, I’m going to sweep it off the table as harshly as I can.
That’s the idea: discounts on premiums for proof of training, purchase of gun safes and locks, good ownership record over time, etc. Also, just as not every car owner pays extra-high premiums for an overpowered Ferrari for everyday use, not every gun owner would pay extra-high premiums for owning an overpowered AR-15 for urban or exurban home defense (rural owners should get an exception, as they’re used for industrial purposes as well; unsportsmanlike hunters who use semi-auto rifles should get a discount if they have a hunting license).
If the NRA wasn’t run by such racist, right-wing, greedy knobs they’d see that using their domain expertise to sell mandatory firearms insurance would make them more money than their current mission (lobbying for the firearms industry) ever would.
I know you’ve been pushing this barrow for a while, and I suspect you’re quite invested in it by now It’s a good idea, but I think it has some substantial problems.
For one, it’s kinda racist, or at least classist.
For another, it’s not hard to find examples where insurance has been a complete freaking disaster (#cough#healthcare#cough#)
Thirdly, relying on capitalism to fix what is basically a social issue seems fraught
Deltaly, and related to the previous point, treating safety issues as financial problems seems like it’s likely to just become a cost of doing business - “oh, whoops, I shot you? Meh, no biggie - here’s my insurers number. See ya!” That seems like a prime candidate to be a serious moral hazard.
It’s no more of a candidate for moral hazard than mandatory auto liability insurance for injuring another person. It would be hard to find an arsehole who would be raging enough to tell a pedestrian he ran over “meh, no biggie – here’s my insurer’s number.”
And I LOVE it! And I get really grumpy at the government’s aggressive efforts over the last decade to kneecap it in order to advance some weird rightwing ideology.
Anecdote: I had a friend from the US come over a few years ago for several months, practically all of which he spent tramping in the mountains. One of his trips was kayaking down the Whanganui River. He rented a kayak, and the guy gave him a once over on using the kayak and basic safety procedures (the river is pretty safe, there’s practically no white water, and it’s a Grade 2). Greg was about to set off, then stopped to ask the operator if there was some disclaimer or waiver he had to sign. The operator responded “Nah mate, if you hurt yourself that’s on you. Have a great trip!”
That, my flag waving gun toting American friends, is what freedom tastes like.
What’s your alternate proposal for accomplishing what insurance in general does? To be honest, I haven’t seen any other options to the insurance industry model (for-profit or non-profit) for compensation other than “endless lawsuits” or “expecting everyone to follow the golden rule.”
Given the number of guns in the USA (300 million, last I heard?), spreading the risk so broadly should make the insurance generally pretty inexpensive.
If there is any classism in such a law, it is an unintended consequence. Unintended consequences of legislation might be of real concern if such a barrier to gun ownership created real material or spiritual hardship for poor people. Hard to say. Seems like a barrier to car ownership hurts them much more.
Also, since the poorest in society are most negatively affected by firearms, it is seems that their inability to readily purchase weapons would actually be better for poor people as a group– fewer guns would mean fewer dead people.
I agree with you though that insurance and other free market solutions are seldom the answer. Car insurance premiums are really unfair to safe drivers of limited means, while rich assholes can afford to ruin the road for everyone. I agree with you that we should always be concerned about the unintended consequences of law-making. Getting any kind of laws restricting guns in the US is so hard, I commend any creative strategies, even if they are far-fetched…
That depends on the problem you’re trying to mitigate. In the case of firearms, both us and Australia have done it without resort to the “free” market.
But if you know about the consequences, yet press on anyway, it’s a bit of a stretch to continue calling it unintended
aaaaand that would be an example of the classism I was talking about.
Oh, definitely. As I said above I agree, but you have to understand the level of crazy stubbornness we deal with on the issue over here from at least a quarter of the electorate. In the case of firearms, mandatory insurance seems to be the only way to get some traction toward what NZ enjoys.
[ETA: regarding intent, the primary purpose of mandatory firearm ownership insurance is not to “punish” poor people, any more than the primary purpose of progressive income taxes is to “punish” wealthy ones (conservatives in this country actually make that last claim with a straight face). It’s more of a negative externality, and weighted against the positive effects the latter win out]
Both you and Australia don’t have the 2nd Amendment. Seriously, Jim Jeffries knows but you can’t get anyone else on one side of the aisle to talk about what the word “amendment” means.
You guys went ahead and gave people health care and time off from having children and all kinds of “nice human” things without needing to get the free market involved. We’ve got a lot of assholes over here worried about being able to rise up against the government.
It’s a good idea, but I think it has some substantial problems.
And I get really grumpy at the government’s aggressive efforts over the last decade to kneecap it in order to advance some weird rightwing ideology.
