Florida is on the verge of adopting a law that prohibits insurance companies from refusing insurance, excluding gun injuries or from charging higher rates based on gun ownership. I have argued in various venues that this is a subsidy for the risks of gun ownership by the general insurance buying public. More importantly, insurers are likely to react to this kind of requirement by reviewing and tightening down exclusions in ways that don’t directly refer to guns but which reduce the overall protection for homeowners and injured persons. For example, most homeowners insurance excludes liability protection for injury to insured persons who live in the household. Insurers will have a strong incentive to adjust the definition of excluded persons to lower their risk. It’s a bad deal for the public and even for gun owners.
What to do below.
So if we are going to have people be insured against gun liability, we should do it in a way that protects the victims of shootings as well as the gun owners. There are important changes that Florida should make in their laws for this purpose. The first is to establish strict liability for injuries from guns. Guns are designed for the purpose of creating injury and users should have a high level of responsibility that. Florida already recognizes that dogs have a potential to bite. There is a specific law there and in many states that holds dog owners financially responsible without requiring establishment of negligence. There should be a similar law for guns.
Gun owners should be responsible for their guns even in the hands of others as they are for their dogs. This should continue in the case of lost or stolen guns at least until the loss is reported to authorities. Whether dog owners are responsible for bites after their dog is stolen is not yet decided by the courts, because there are few such cases. With guns there is a lot of injury after theft.
Another change is to require the insurance to pay for injuries that are intentional or criminal on the part of someone other than the injured person. Insurance companies keep saying they can’t do that, but many kinds of insurance make such payments. They just pay the victim not the wrongdoer.
Make these changes and Florida’s new gun law will be a good thing for the public.