For the entirety of my
adult life, gun control has been a political hot button that has
been kicked around and made difficult. Thus we have no working
system whatsoever. My contention is that this is easily resolved and
certainly not by any of the methods that have been dabbled in. In
Canada we had the long gun registry which evolved into a bureaucratic
boondoggle for a decade before it was recently put out of its misery.
All programs suffered
from been excuses for run away government aggrandizement.
The natural solution is
to establish an insurance mandate and simply allow private industry
run wild. The risks are completely measurable and fundable.
1 Start with mandatory
insurance coverage for every firearm privately owned.
2 That coverage includes
a $1,000,000 payment to the estate of anyone killed and full medical
in event of injury. Even make it no fault. This is similar to auto
insurance.
3 Establish gun dealers
as agents to sell the product and administer it.
4 liability is not
escaped in the case of theft. Nonpayment of insurance is possible if
the weapon is put directly into police storage or equivalent.
Liability from theft can only be extinguished in a similar facility.
5 Then consider
establishing liability back to the last owner as the gold standard
for the system thus making the manufacturers the first owner. There
is a lot of fuss out there in terms of present ownership, but all
these aspects can be insured and should be.
Thus the industry has
their industry but is forced to establish an economic system of
ultimate responsibility that offsets the true costs of the industry.
I personally think that the industry itself will turn all this into a
profit center and become marvelous at driving down the costs of doing
business until death by gunshot becomes rare. Even better, the
government is out of game and storage becomes a local problem.
It also provides an
avenue to pursue weapons that have disappeared as the risk to former
owners is not zero. In the meantime, we have an insurance scheme in
which insured weapons cover the costs of uninsured weapons to society
which really motivates the industry to run down every such weapon in
order to reduce claims.
Since the total homicides
per year in the USA happens to be around 15,000, the actual annual
claim level for this form of insurance will run at about fifteen to
thirty billion dollars. Since this will be covered by around
50,000,000 households, the insurance bill per household should run
around $500 on average per year with a wide range of adjustments with
few breaks for collections. Farmers will naturally have their own
much cheaper class as an example of an obvious break.
Perhaps the gun industry
itself would love to foot this bill? It is long past time that
society stopped paying for reckless or criminal behavior in gun
handling.
I would also cause
uninsured weapons to be stored against a minimal storage fee that
can accumulate to half the assessed value of the weapon and be
automatically collected whenever the weapon comes out of storage.
They are easy enough to store and such a system makes storage the
preferred option to collectors and most owners.
In the end, I do expect
that insurance companies will be way more circumspect regarding who
gets to own a gun than anyone presently in the loop. It still will
never stop a dedicated nut case, but no gun control system will ever
do that anyway. However someone buying multiple weapons requiring
multiple policies should at least attract a visit from his agent.
