There’s a way to stabilize America’s addiction to guns which hasn’t really been tried. Like nearly all major public programs in U.S. history, it will require a public/private partnership. Large-scale national tasks such as providing health care, building railroads, or researching and producing vaccinations, weapons, and space travel have all depended on cooperation between government and private enterprise.
The private partner in the gun scenario is the insurance industry. Gun control has proven too hot a political football, too warped by lobbying money, for it to be managed by the government alone.
Gun liability insurance is an idea that I’ve written about for twenty years to Congress, newspapers, and friends, but my voice is very small! I’ll try again here, and maybe you’d like to join me and write some letters yourself!
The concept has been discussed recently by publications such as Forbes, proposed as potential legislation in California, New York and other states, passed into city ordinance in San Jose, and recommended by public figures such as Chicago’s police chief. These efforts are too recent to provide data, and they tend to have limited goals. Unfortunately, there is no national policy in sight.
Unlike many other countries, the U.S. tends to be afraid of using the government alone for the sake of the public good, for fear of offending corporate constituents. To get anything done on a larger scale, we have to engage with private business. It seems to me that pitting the self-interest of the insurance industry against that of the gun manufacturers may well be the only fair fight that can make a real dent in America’s gun addiction.
Objectively speaking, gun liability insurance is a no-brainer. We have as many guns per capita as cars, and they cause the same number of fatalities. Yet we only require insurance for cars.
Most politics is subjective, however. Since 2008, when the Supreme Court decided that the 2d Amendment gave gun rights to individuals, we have had to deal with fanatical arguments that any limitation on gun ownership, including requiring insurance, is unconstitutional. The Court’s take on the issue, of course, may yet be up for debate in a future Court. As former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger said, "The gun lobby's interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
Requiring insurance on the part of gun owners could accomplish many goals of gun control without the nightmare of banning guns. When their own money is on the line, private insurers would analyze the risk of gun owners, assess appropriate premiums, and pay for damages far more effectively than the government can. After all, this is their daily business. The government just has to require it in order to activate the partnership.
Actuaries would assess the danger of a gun's location, the mental health of the owner and family, the number of guns and types of accessories in their possession, and would take account of any other relevant factors based on all available statistics. It would be in the insurance company’s interest to keep good statistics in order to make meaningful assessments of their liability. (Recall how Republicans passed a law in 1997 to stop the CDC from collecting any data about gun violence.) Discounts would incentivize any training and safety measures that lower the risk of gun violence.
By making realistic premium assessments, liability insurance would make the cost of owning a gun reflect not merely the price of the gun but also its cost to society, as we do with car insurance. It could be made to cover damage caused by guns, including damage resulting from criminal activity.
And since the vast majority of gun owners are law abiding and competent, spreading out the cost of gun liability insurance across all owners should result in affordable premiums for the typical, less risky gun owner, such as a hunter.
Some like to argue that insurance would penalize law-abiding owners because criminals would be the ones who would avoid paying premiums. This is daydreaming. First of all, if we refused to implement a regulation or law just because some people would get away with breaking the law, we would not have any laws at all! Of course criminals will avoid following the law — by definition, those who do not follow the laws are called criminals! But we make the laws partly to define proper behavior for the average citizen, partly to deter crime, and partly as a means of punishing criminals after it is found that they violated them. Some gangsters of the 1920s were imprisoned on tax evasion charges because of obscure laws about furniture tags which might seem pointless to law-abiding citizens, but gave authorities an effective means of putting criminals behind bars.
There are many who are not known as criminals who would be affected by insurance premiums. Rules and policies throughout our society are built around what insurance companies will allow — for example, whether alcohol can be sold at an event, or whether a medical procedure can be done. Insurance premiums and requirements have a huge impact on daily behavior. A temporary restraining order may invoke a gun insurance surcharge, just as a speeding ticket causes an increase in car insurance premiums; this would complement red flag laws to help protect victims, or may even take the place of red flag laws in places that do not pass such laws.
Gun insurance premiums could penalize and deter violence in indirect ways. There have been so many thousands of shootings, and hundreds of mass shootings, that many perpetrators would certainly be influenced by the prying eye and inconvenience of insurance. For example, the Las Vegas mass shooter had no police record, and being an auditor and businessman, was the kind of person who seeks to fly under the radar, someone who would keep insurance requirements up to date. It’s possible that a gun and accessories collection like his would be hard to keep secret in that case, and could easily be a costly insurance liability. His large and unusual collection might even have triggered an advance warning for law enforcement from the insurance company, depending on how a gun liability law is written. In other words, gun data that the government is uncomfortable collecting for political reasons, would be collected and used by private insurance for financial reasons.
There is a huge disconnect between the vast majority of Americans who want more control of gun sales and use, and the politicians who refuse to take action. By taking some of the more uncomfortable but essential gun control actions out of the political arena and turning them into moneymakers for private insurers, we may well be able to start addressing America’s addiction to guns effectively.
We can’t go cold turkey, but we could at least instill some discipline and make our communities safer.