Well, how does vehicular manslaughter work? If you have good insurance it will probably pay part of your damages, but not all. It’s also possible to buy individual liability coverage to pick up the rest, and it’s not too expensive since claims are fairly rare.
As for paying the cost, good luck getting the NRA to pay. Cold, stiff fingers, you know. Also, I do not believe auto manufacturers subsidize auto insurance, but I could be wrong.
Maybe gun owners, makers, and sellers would be less opposed to these proposals for mandatory training, mandatory insurance, mandatory technology if they were not so blatantly intended to make gun ownership difficult and expensive. As things stands, the right sees these proposals the same way the left sees voter ID laws – as having the intent to deter the exercise of a constitutional right, with the claimed goal of reducing crime being a mere smokescreen.
Show me a legal theory under which lobbyists are legally responsible for the impact of the laws they lobby for or against?
Gun manufacturers are under strict Federal rules and accounting for the handling of firearms, for the transfer of firearms to a federally licensed dealer, and for transfers from a dealer to the purchaser. Failure to follow these laws brings civil and criminal liability on gun makers and dealers.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), includes explicit exceptions allowing damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible or should have known the purchaser intended to use the weapon in a crime. There’s nothing in the PLCAA to prevent legitimate lawsuits based on knowing violations of federal or state law related to gun sales, or on traditional grounds including negligent entrustment or breach of contract, or product liability cases involving injuries caused by a defective firearm.
Most people would say that the FBI’s saying “This guy is OK” is sufficient to clear the dealer and manufacturer of liability. To go beyond this and extend liability beyond the first sale is an extreme stretch of secondary liability, unlikely to stand up in court. The PLCAA exists because lobbyists working to ban guns were using lawsuits to drive manufacturers out of business through the use of unusual theories of vicarious liability.
[quote=“Boundegar, post:103, topic:75078, full:true”]
Well, how does vehicular manslaughter work? If you have good insurance it will probably pay part of your damages, but not all. It’s also possible to buy individual liability coverage to pick up the rest, and it’s not too expensive since claims are fairly rare.[/quote]
Vehicle manufacturers are not liable for selling a car to somebody who should not have one, or for cases where a car functioned as designed, even if the vehicle was high-powered beyond any legitimate street use.
Car makers, like gun makers, can be held liable for a product that is truly defective, but are not required to build products incorporating every possible safety feature; only features mandated by law are necessary to avoid liability.
This doesn’t stop lawsuits, for example, Paul Walker’s family is suing Porsche alleging their car was too fast and too powerful.
Welp, I generally don’t agree with you on the gun issue, but this is spot on. I think it’s important to remember this. Unfortunately, there is a whole subset of people in the country who do NOT see things in this manner, they don’t see problems that impact us all, that we all share, they only see an atomized collection of individuals (ie, many Libertarians). That makes getting to sit down and hash out complicated issues like gun violence hard to do.
So, I don’t really know what the answer to THAT particular problem is, but we got to get through that to be able to be productive about other issues.
I tried looking up specific (US) stats on home invasions (as you’re defining it, which I can agree with, vs. burglary) and it seems the FBI doesn’t keep specific stats on that. However, this Atlantic article deals with this topic and that home invasions are rather rare compared to burglaries in general and tend to be overblown as a problem:
I’d guess that the majority of legit home invasions are aimed at specific people that the person invading actually knows? But I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’d also guess that people who get shot by intruders probably surprise the intruder, who didn’t realize someone was home. Again, that’s speculation on my part, but this doesn’t seem to be as major a problem as some make it out to be.
To be clear, mental health gets trotted out mostly when the shooter is white - not when they are POC.
Couldn’t be that rare, no less an august person as Wayne LaPierre has warned us repeatedly:
We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and carjackers and knockout gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all. I ask you. Do you trust this government to protect you? We are on our own.
See? Probably everybody who doesn’t have a gun has already been killed quite a few times!
Mental health gets trotted out when the rational behind it seems to be non-senseical, random, or otherwise “crazy”.
A criminal shooting another criminal or a robbery victim isn’t something that people are at least understanding of their motives. Regardless of color.
Random mass shooting for no obvious reason and most people conclude there must be something mentally wrong with them. Regardless of color. It just seems that POC commit less mass shootings. Or maybe they just don’t make the news due to media bias. I bet none of you heard about this, but I did because I have friends who live in/near Heston.
The guy who shot two former co-workers while they were on site, Vester Lee Flanagan II/Bryce Williams was also a POC and characterized as mentally ill.
The Belt-Way shooter (POC) had a mix of both mental illness, master manipulator, lone-wolf terrorism, and methodical murderer.
So I think a blanket statement like that is neither accurate nor helpful.
I will say also that mental health certainly plays into SOME murders, but not the vast majority. The problem is everyone wants to do SOMETHING when something bad happens. They want to lay blame on SOMETHING when something doesn’t make sense.
I skimmed through the insurance scheme proposals.
What the hell, exactly, are you trying to do with that?
The reason we have car insurance is because of the rather high risk of DAMAGE, INJURY, and DEATH we encounter driving a car every day. You screw up, or shit happens, you damage yourself or your car or someone else and/or their car. You use insurance to help make everyone whole.
So what or who are you trying to force insurance on and why?
Guns don’t cause a lot of damage, typically, in their PROPER, everyday use. At the range or your private land, you are shooting target, cans, maybe an animal if you are a hunter. If I screwed up and hurt myself or damaged property, that is what your homeowners or health insurance is for. Just like if I cut myself bad with a knife, a chainsaw, fell off my bike, fell out of a tree, impaled by a lawn dart or arrow, or accidentally sat on a beer bottle (honest, Doc!) one should already have coverage to make you or the damaged property whole.
To be clear, only 800 gun deaths a year are attributed to accidents (and I want to stress that we need to look at this number more closely, because I have seen several examples where suicides were ruled accidents.) While tragic, out of 80+ million gun owners, that occurrence isn’t enough to warrant the NEED for insurance.
Is this to make people whole who are victims of gun violence? If this is the case, please let me know so I can laugh my ass off. If you think a poor criminal, who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place, got a gun by circumventing the system, is going to go and make sure this gun is INSURED, then that is what I would generously call that a special kind of naivety.
Let’s just say we did implement this. How would one enforce it? Are there other consequences you might not be thinking about?
The whole concept smacks of classism at best, racism at worst. Your privileged white middle class male can afford to pay for such a scheme. Your poor, especially poor minority, will not. So law abiding, poor minorities will either not enjoy the freedom and ability to defend themselves - or they will become criminals by not paying the mandated insurance. This of course leaves them to be further victimized by the same system that already too easily incarcerates minorities for petty, victim-less crimes.
TL;DR - the people who need the insurance won’t be buying it, and you just further alienated the poor, especially poor minorities.
It is probably quite rare. But in some places, it is pretty much the only sort of violent crime that happens to law abiding people. certainly that is the case where I live. We are rural, reasonably isolated, and almost everyone that lives here is retired. I suspect that the fact that most of my neighbors are elderly is a factor in the area being targeted. There have also been burglaries of homes where people live here only seasonally. The perpetrators who have been identified have all come from more populated areas, a couple of hours drive away. But I have no idea how much research the criminals do before choosing a house to rob. I am not sure that I want to risk the safety of my children on the ability of some drugged up hoodlum to realize that we are home and pick another house. And I really do not like the odds. Of about fifteen neighbors who I know well and speak to regularly, two have been the target of home invasions, and another two families have been burglarized while they were out of town. One of those has been robbed twice.
So we have this argument, you and I. You claim that home invasions are very unlikely. I agree, but say that I am not willing to risk my family over something being unlikely. Perhaps you feel that the police are only a phone call away. that might work great for you, but I am over an hour of hard driving from the nearest police station, and it is not much. It is prudent to be reasonably prepared to deal with whatever happens by ourselves. Some of the things that can and do happen are best dealt with using a firearm. The last time I had to use a gun was last year when a rabid squirrel was chasing after one of my children. My daughter made it into the house, and the creature kept banging into the back door scratching and making awful screaming noises. Honestly, I would not have predicted that to be a thing to be worried about. But that is the thing about life. Sometimes unexpected and unlikely things do happen. It would be silly to live in fear of such things, as their unpredictability is part of their nature. But it is possible to anticipate and prepare for broad categories of things. So we have some firearms. Also some commercial fire extinguishers, some canned food and a bunch of firewood. You may not need any of those things. I probably will.
That is the key, right there… seems. It could still have an internally coherent narrative for the shooter. Jared Loughner clearly had mental health problems that were not addressed. No one denies that. Contrast that with Elliot Rodgers, who although you and I might not understand what he did, was clearly not mentally ill. He hated women bad enough to want to murder them. Same with Dylan Roof. Yet, that was the first place people went. It may seem crazy to go out and shoot a bunch of people to us, because we don’t sit around with a bunch of hatred in our hearts, but doing so doesn’t make someone crazy. These are often not “random” shootings, but planned and with intent in mind. But the media almost always initially goes with the crazy train.
Which is pretty rare to hear about, actually.
Which is why I said “mostly”! 
The problem is that the media hasn’t really gotten this memo.
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