Since the tragic shootings in Oregon, there have been several media articles and thousands of postings, tweets, etc. on social media. A gun insurance mandate is on many more people’s minds than it was after Newtown--when I started to advocate for it at Gun Insurance Blog. I don’t really think I had much to do with it; but who knows.
The typical demand for this compares guns to cars, where we do require insurance; and there are many parallels between guns and cars. Both have dangers to others built into them; both involve activities we have decided to have in our society, for better or worse; and both are related to specific objects with owners which are the nexus of the danger.
But the differences are also significant. Most car accident victims are in their own cars which could carry the insurance. Most car accidents have an identifiable person who is or could be assumed to be at fault. Most car accidents can be settled by insurers without litigation. None of these apply to firearms.
Almost every important activity (other than gun ownership) which creates injuries has a kind of insurance in our society. The different kinds vary in many dimensions, who buys?, who collects?, fault or no-fault?, what’s covered, how are claims settled?, etc. etc. Over centuries when ever a new danger becomes important a new kind of insurance is invented to handle the specific situations. Most take aspects from several kinds of pre-existing insurance and put them together in a new way. It’s time to do that for guns.
The opponents of requiring insurance for guns are of two kinds—gun proponents who object to any new requirements for gun ownership and insurers who object to any mandate for insurance as bringing regulation and government oversight. The insurance industry has objected to a car insurance mandate since the 1920’s.
There are problems to be addressed in designing gun insurance; but the problems have solutions:
- The bad guys who cause most of the injures and deaths won’t buy insurance.
An answer to this is to require that insurers stay responsible until the gun is legally transferred for another insurer takes up the responsibility. Let them stay on the hook for stolen, illegally sold or transferred guns.
Lot of kinds of insurance pay for intentional injuries, they just pay the victim instead of the person who causes the injury.
There are hundreds of millions of guns to share the cost. Guns mostly kill and don’t create the millions of injuries that cost car insurers so much. Gun insurance would be much, much cheaper than car insurance for responsible gun owners.
Victims don’t need to know who owns the gun, they just need to know who insures it. Publish that. Enforce the mandate by requiring insurers to report or publish the transfer of insurance coverage not gun ownership.
- Litigation would take too long and cost too much.
No-fault insurance is the answer to that. It’s very hard to establish the blame in most cases. If the gun causes injury, the insurer should have to pay benefits.
There is a good model in our current insurance system. It’s the way we typically handle worker’s compensation insurance. It pays if the injury is in connection with a job and doesn’t look at fault. That way, most litigation goes away. Employers don’t try to blame co-workers or third parties. Victims get medical care right away, not just after years of wrangling. Good gun insurance for victims would look a lot like workers compensation insurance.
The Questions and Answers on Gun Insurance Blog has an outline in greater detail.