“Tea Party Absolutism”: The High Cost Of Hating Government Levies An Enormous Unnecessary Cost On Everyone Else
The tourniquet applied by the outgoing Congress to the economy allows a two-month breather before we are consumed by the next deadline. The president and his party can allow themselves a brief moment of celebration for imposing higher taxes on the richest Americans, but the next stage in fixing the nation’s fiscal problems may not be as easy. By the end of February, lawmakers must find enough cuts in public spending to allow the debt ceiling to be raised. Two more months of uncertainty will prevent businesses and consumers from making spending decisions that would bolster the economic recovery.
The devil is not so much in the detail of the arguments to come as the big picture that frames the debilitating running debate. While the difference between the sides is ostensibly over taxes and public spending and borrowing, the more profound division is over where government should begin and end. For many of the Republican Party’s Tea Party insurgents, the choice is even more fundamental: whether there should be a government at all. Their unbending position, demanding an ever-diminishing role for the federal government, has levied an enormous unnecessary cost on everyone else.
Since Republicans regained control of the House in the 2010 mid-terms, when the Tea Party tide was in full force, they have attempted to freeze the size of government, coincidentally putting a brake on economic recovery. They have vetoed attempts at further economic stimulus, encouraged America’s economy to be downgraded by the ratings agencies by threatening not to extend the debt ceiling, and tried to veto any and every tax increase in the fiscal cliff talks. Their aim is to shrink government by starving it of funds. Such uncompromising absolutism has led to the dampening of business confidence and investment that would have created jobs.
It is not just the economy that has suffered from the absolute positions held by the anti-government rump in the GOP. Their insistence that the Founding Fathers intended us to be allowed to carry guns of any sort, including the rapid-fire assault weapon that killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, last month, continues to hamper attempts to curb the nation’s murderous gun violence. Ghosts from the eighteenth century are preying on our school-children, abetted by those who believe that compromise on amending our gun laws is surrendering to the forces of big government. Such unbending absolutism costs human lives.
Similarly, suspicion of government is behind the growth in home schooling, that narrows the education of children, deprives them of a sense of community, and diminishes their social skills. It came as little surprise to read reports that the Newtown shooter was kept home from school by his mother, a “survivalist” or “Doomsday Prepper”, who stockpiled food and guns because she expected an imminent economic apocalypse. Such paranoia about the role of government is a recurring theme in our society’s most appalling massacres, from the bombing of the Federal Government Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 by the anti-government militiaman Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168, including 19 children, to the FBI siege of the anti-government Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, in 1993, that left 76 dead.
Hostility to government also ensures that health care is unnecessarily expensive. The average cost of American health care is $8,233 per person per year, the most expensive in the developed world. In comparable Western countries such as France, which has a private health insurance mandate administered by the state, it is $3,974. In Britain, which for 65 years has enjoyed a taxation-funded national health system, it is $3,433. As much as Americans may prefer to believe that they have a health care system second to none, there is little discernible difference between the quality of health care provided, nor the efficacy of the medicine administered in the three countries, while dealing with the health insurance bureaucracy here is considerably more time-wasting, expensive, and irritating.
Changes in demography, with Americans living longer and using more medical resources to enjoy a tolerable quality of life, mean that health care costs will continue to rise unless reforms are made. The easiest way to reduce American health care costs would be for the federal government to provide a “single payer” alternative to compete with the near-monopolistic private health insurance companies. But such a system is considered an abomination by absolutists who demand that the federal government should keep out of healthcare. The harsh alternative is to cut the amount of care the system provides to the elderly. Again, an unbending attitude to the government’s role and responsibilities comes at an exorbitant cost.
Conservative theologians have devoted themselves to explaining why government interference is a bad thing. For Milton Friedman, the American system of government was so monetized from the moment the Republic was founded, and so open to corruption, that he always advocated small government – at least in the United States. For the Austrian thinker Friedrich Hayek, writing in his influential masterwork The Road to Serfdom, a burgeoning state could lead to tyranny. To be fair to Hayek, who wrote his topical tract as World War II was drawing to a close, he was principally concerned that free enterprise might continue to be stifled by the imperatives of the wartime command economy once peace was declared. In The Road to Serfdom, in a passage often ignored by contemporary conservatives, he insisted that all governments should provide a generous safety net for the needy, homes for the homeless, and universal health care.
Tea Party members owe less to conservative thinkers such as Friedman and Hayek than to uncompromising proponents of the untrammelled free market such as the libertarians Ayn Rand and Ron Paul. When the new Congress comes to head off another fiscal cliff crisis at the end of next month, it will take courage from the Republican leadership to keep their extreme wing in check. If they fail to do so and they demand too deep cuts to public spending too quickly, they will not only cause the American economy to return to recession but may find that the middle ground voters who decide elections will add together the vast cost of their allies’ absolutist intransigence and keep them in opposition forever.
By: Nicholas Wapshott, The National Memo (originally appeared at Reuters.com), January 7, 2013
“A Need To Exercise Judgment”: When The First And Second Amendments Clash
Battles over either the First Amendment or the Second Amendment often share similar dynamics, with defender/exercisers of the amendments arguing that the freedoms granted by the founding fathers are (nearly) absolute, and should not be modified just because sometimes people get hurt by them. But the issue gets stickier when a situation pits the First against the Second.
A newspaper in White Plains, N.Y., has enraged local (and not-so-local) gun owners by publishing an interactive map revealing the names and addresses of gun owners in the area. The information is public (and New York’s Freedom of Information Law is fairly expansive), so it’s not as though the newspaper unearthed secret documents or data and published it. What’s different now is that the Internet and other technology allows a newspaper—and for that matter, any blogger or website commentator—to make public information very, very public—so much so that the people affected feel they have been violated.
Some of the gun owners reacted aggressively, posting the names and addresses of editors and reporters at the Journal-News (including the guy who does the puzzle page) and making not-so-veiled threats against the journalists’ safety. The Journal-News has been unfazed, and is seeking similar gun owner information from another county to publish. That county is balking, and the paper is ready to go to court. Since the information is public, experts believe the paper will likely win, a victory for the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, the paper has been forced to hire armed guards at two of its offices to protect employees in light of the threats. That, in a way, is a victory for the gun owners and their interpretation, at least, of the Second Amendment. The First Amendment is in full force on the paper’s website, but without the Second Amendment, editors and reporters might not feel safe publishing it. On the other hand, were so many guns not so easily available, perhaps they might not have felt threatened in the first place.
There will surely be a discussion in Washington—though perhaps not much action—on gun safety and gun rights. And newspapers will continue to defend the right to free speech. But in both cases, there’s an issue of sheer judgment. Sure, some information is available to the public and should be. Does that mean newspapers should make it that much easier to learn? Some newspapers routinely report the names and salaries of public employees—even low-level employees. It’s not secret, and the workers are paid by public funds. But is it really necessary to publish what most of us consider private information? There’s an undercurrent of judgment to such lists, as though the public employees have to defend every penny they make (while well-paid CEOs of privately-held companies do not).
The names of convicted sex offenders are also public. Should newspapers publish these names, perhaps with an interactive map? To a parent, the answer might be a no-brainer; wouldn’t you want to know if a pedophile was living in the neighborhood? But publication of such information also makes it virtually impossible for an ex-con to return to society. He or she would be shunned, even in danger, wherever he went. How does someone become part of a noncriminal community in those circumstances?
Gun owners are not by definition criminals, of course. But guns are dangerous weapons if they are in the wrong hands or if there is an accident. Surely, many people would want to know if someone in their neighborhood had a gun. But is the publication of the information itself not just a little provocative? And perhaps it’s also a bit revealing—the anonymous people who posted threatening comments on the Internet (along with the addresses of Journal-News employees) probably weren’t the sort of people, prior to the controversy, neighbors feared would shoot them. But their aggressive reaction to the Journal-News list suggests some of them might have a dangerous streak.
Exercisers of the First and Second Amendments are understandably vigilant in defending their beliefs. But both should exercise judgment as well.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, January 3, 2013
“Stop The Gun Madness”: 2013 Must Be The Year When America Says, “No More”
Guns do kill people. Our national New Year’s resolution must be to stop the madness.
It is shameful that gun control only becomes worthy of public debate following an unspeakable massacre such as Newtown — and even more shameful that these mass killings occur so often. What usually happens is that we spend a few weeks pretending to have a “conversation” about guns, then the horror begins to fade and we turn to other issues. Everything goes back to normal.
“Normal,” however, is tragically unacceptable. In 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans. Most of the deaths were suicides; a few were accidental. About a third of them — 11,078 — were homicides. That’s almost twice the number of Americans who have been killed in a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Britain, by comparison, the number of gun homicides in 2010 was 58. Here we’d consider that a rounding error.
What explains the difference? Well, I spent a few years as The Post’s London bureau chief, and I can attest that Britain has the same social ills that we have — crime, unemployment, alienation, racial strife, mental illness. Britain also has a powerful, rural-based constituency determined to protect the right of hunters to spend weekends blasting away at shadows in the woods. Gun-loving Brits are no less passionate than gun-loving Americans.
But Britain recognizes the obvious distinction between guns legitimately used for sport — shotguns, hunting rifles, some target pistols — and those meant only to kill human beings. Most handguns are banned. All automatic and semiautomatic firearms, including the kind of assault weapons used at Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and the other mass shootings in this country, are banned.
In Britain, individuals must have a “good reason” to obtain a license to own a firearm. Self-defense is generally not considered an adequate reason — nor should it be, since research suggests that guns actually make the owner more vulnerable.
In an often-cited paper published in 1993 by the New England Journal of Medicine, a research group headed by Arthur Kellermann examined homicide records in the Memphis, Seattle and Cleveland metropolitan areas and concluded that guns “actually pose a substantial threat to members of the household.”
“People who keep guns in their homes appear to be at greater risk of homicide in the home than people who do not,” Kellermann’s paper said. “Most of this risk is due to a substantially greater risk of homicide at the hands of a family member or intimate acquaintance. We did not find evidence of a protective effect of keeping a gun in the home, even in the small subgroup of cases that involved forced entry.”
The National Rifle Association has been trying to discredit Kellermann’s findings for 20 years, and surely won’t stop now. The NRA’s appeal to public opinion is based on cultivating a state of paranoia: You need a gun because bad people have guns and they’re coming to get you.
Hence the unbelievable response by NRA chief Wayne LaPierre to the Newtown killings. The solution isn’t to take assault weapons out of the hands of madmen, LaPierre argued, it’s to put armed guards in the schools so there can be a great big gunfight when the homicidal madmen show up. Never mind that armed officers at Columbine tried, and failed, to stop that massacre. Just be paranoid. Fight guns with more guns.
This must be the year when America says: No more.
The solution certainly is to take assault weapons out of the hands of madmen. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) pledges to introduce legislation banning assault weapons and large-capacity magazines as soon as the new Congress convenes. This should be just the beginning.
President Obama gave a moving tribute to the Newtown victims — who included 20 children, seven adults and the troubled assassin — then followed up by assigning Vice President Biden to come up with concrete proposals. That’s all well and good. But we’ve had our fill of elegies and blue-ribbon task forces and reports destined to gather dust. We don’t need talk, we need action — and we need it now.
Politicians, beginning with the president, must show the courage to stand up to the gun lobby. They must do it for the children of Newtown. They must do it for all the 11,000 men, women and children who otherwise will not live to see New Year’s Day 2014.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 31, 2012
“Guns, A Primer”: A Brief Compendium On The Instruments That Are Killing Our Children
With gun safety at the center of public debate, it’s understandable that gun-related terminology is flying fast from all directions. So here’s a brief compendium of some basics about guns, ammo, and potential areas of regulation.
One quick item: A bullet is the slug that actually moves down the barrel, comes out the end, and delivers a godawful mess of kinetic force to whatever it hits. The shiny brass thing that contains the bullet, the explosives that drive the bullet, and the mechanism that sets it off is a cartridge, or “shell.” For convenience sake, I’m sometimes going to say “bullet” when talking about the whole cartridge. Purists beware.
Automatic, Semi-Automatic and Other
The bit of information most likely to be mangled in any reporting on a mass shooting involves the action of a gun. That is, once the gun has been fired, what action does it take to make it fire again?
Many older guns require manual intervention to eject the spent cartridge, load a fresh cartridge, and make the gun ready for firing. Rifles, including military rifles made before the 1950s, are often bolt-action. They work by pulling back on small handle that’s attached to a long “bolt.” The gun fires, the shooter raises and pulls back the handle, causing the old cartridge to eject, he then shoves the handle forward to bring a new cartridge into place and brings the handle down for firing. A skilled operator can do all this very quickly. Likewise, many shotguns use a pump action. You’ve probably seen this in movies where Our Hero is going up against a vampire, terminator, or similarly tough beast. Pulling back the handgrip sends a spent shell flying, while pulling it forward again readies the gun for a new shot. It also makes a very cinematic series of clicks.
Automatic and semi-automatic weapons don’t require help in tossing out the old shell and loading up the new. They get their energy from the firing of the cartridge, capturing the energy or gases of the spent shell to bring the next cartridge into position. The difference between a fully automatic weapon and one that’s semi-automatic is simple: A fully automatic weapon begins firing when the trigger is pulled and keeps firing until you let off the trigger (or run out of bullets), a semi-automatic weapon fires once for each pull of the trigger.
How quickly you can fire a semi-automatic weapon depends partly on the design of the gun, partly on the speed of your reactions. Most of the time, the answer is Very Damn Fast. As in multiple shots in a second. That’s unlikely in a real-world situation, but with a semi-automatic the next shot is there when you’re ready. How fast you can move your finger is generally the biggest limiting factor.
Fully automatic weapons (which most people tend to think of as “machine guns”, though the Army reserves that term for larger weapons) are not legal for private citizens in most cases. You may see fully automatic weapons available to test at a gun range, or in use at special events. But you will rarely see one at all. None of the mass shootings in the United States within recent decades has involved a fully automatic weapon. They are regulated, and that regulation appears to be working.
Semi-automatic weapons are extremely common. Yes, these weapons have been used in many mass shootings, but they are also an increasingly popular type of rifle for hunting. Semi-automatics have also become a very popular form of shotgun. And of handgun (revolvers are not semi-automatic because the mechanical motion of the trigger positions the next shot).
Some semi-automatic weapons are based directly off fully automatic military models. These guns may have cosmetic differences with their military relatives, but in the same way that a Cadillac and a Chevy may be the same under the sheet metal, they share the same bones as the military guns. They are not fully automatic, and (for the last couple of decades, at least) it has been extremely difficult to convert them to become fully automatic. However, these weapons share many other characteristics with their military cousins. In the United States, there are many variations on a rifle called the AR-15, which is a semi-automatic version of the military M16. Many variations as in dozens, from several different manufacturers. And the AR-15 is just one category. There are semi-automatics that descend from the ever popular AK-47, the Chinese QBZ-95 and several more. These weapons are often able to accept accessories that were originally designed for the military version, or to accept modified versions of those accessories. This includes tripods, extended magazines, laser sights, night vision scopes, and all manner of ridiculous extras that those fearing the looming economic / racial / zombie apocalypse can bolt on to make their guns look meaner and kill more readily. It’s these military-derived semi-automatic rifles that are most commonly called “Assault Rifles.”
What can we do here? Eliminating or restricting all semi-automatic weapons may seem like the most obvious choice, but it would also be extremely unpopular with hunters, with target shooters, and with gun owners in general. These days, semi-automatic isn’t just the first thought of anyone going in to buy a rifle or shotgun, it’s almost the only thought. Legislation aimed at all semi-automatic weapons would be difficult to pass, no matter how strong the political tailwind. What can be passed is severe restrictions on semi-automatic weapons based off military models. Nearly half the killers involved in mass shootings over the last 30 years have carried assault rifles. They should be the clear target of any legislation.
The weapon carried in most mass shootings? Semi-automatic handguns. Often more than one. Banning those would be a much tougher fight.
Ammunition
Any story involving guns is sure to bring with it a set of strange numbers: .223, 9mm, 12 gauge, etc. These numbers represent the caliber of the weapon. In simplest terms, it’s the diameter of the bullet the weapon fires.
There are three common systems for measuring caliber. When you see someone talking about a .223 or a .44, the caliber is in inches. A .22 rifle fires a bullet that’s 0.22 inches in diameter. 9mm or 10mm is just what it sounds like—a gun chambered to fire a bullet 9mm or 10mm in diameter. If you remember your metric conversions, you can do the metal gymnastics to swap them around. A .44 caliber bullet is a bit larger than a 10mm. A .357 and a 9mm are close enough that some guns will fire either size.
If you see the term “gauge,” you know the weapon in question is a shotgun. Shotguns can fire a single bullet (usually called a “rifled slug”) but most of the time a shotgun fires a number of small metal pellets. Shotgun gauge is … complicated and the numbers we commonly use mix up two different ways of calculating the size. Just remember that in general, the smaller the number, the larger the shotgun diameter. So a 12 gauge is bigger than a 20 gauge, and a 20 is bigger than a .410. Those three are the only shotgun sizes you’re likely to encounter, so it’s not too hard to keep straight.
As you might expect, if all things are equal, a larger bullet carries much more impact. However, all things are almost never equal. Speed, bullet design, cartridge design, the type of gun used, they all make a big difference.
Take a look at the picture again.
The first three cartridges on the left contain bullets sized at 9 mm, .40 and .45. All are designed for handguns, and all of them deliver devastating impact. Next to them is a 5.7mm. Compared to the big lugs on the left, the 5.7 (the skinny, pointy one) might seem like a pipsqueak, but that long cartridge below the small bullet helps to give it a very high velocity. It’s a bullet that was specifically designed as a military anti-personnel round, designed to offer more “terminal performance” than the 9mm round it replaced. That’s military speak for “more likely to kill whoever it hits.” The 5.72 round is also designed to penetrate body armor. It’s used in militaries around the world, and by the U. S. Secret Service. It’s also available at your local store.
When it comes to bullets, there is no “safe” caliber, and smaller does not always mean less deadly. There are bullets designed to tumble so that they rip paths through flesh, bullets designed to shatter on impact, bullets that can cut not just through body armor, but through walls. High penetrating rounds, made from hardened metals, don’t only pass through walls or windshields, they also pass through people, so that one bullet can strike more than one victim. In addition to terminal performance, you’ll also see terms like ballistic trauma and hydrostatic shock. They’re all measures of a bullet’s ability to royally f*ck you up in different ways.
Cartridges designed for a rifle have the same range of variability. The smaller of the two rifle cartridges above is a 5.56mm while the larger is .30 caliber. In fact, it’s not just a .30 caliber, but a .30 caliber magnum meaning that the cartridge is proportionally larger than a standard .30 caliber and delivers more oomph. Cartridges of this size were used by many World War II era military weapons, and variants on the .30 are popular today with hunters. A modern .30-06 cartridge used in big game hunting actually delivers around 3,000 ft-lbs of energy, allowing hunters to take down a large animal at 300 yards or more.
Back to that little 5.56mm. It looks kind of puny next to the .30. Did I mention that it’s also called a .223? That’s the cartridge that’s fired by the M16, AR-15 and the Bushmaster rifle used to such horrible effect at Sandy Hook Elementary. Where the .30 is a WWII era military round, this is a modern cartridge. The 5.56 is NATO’s combat round. It’s designed to penetrate deep into soft tissue. It delivers high hydrostatic shock causing damage even in parts of the body not struck by the bullet. The .223 Remington cartridge (which is likely what was used on the victims at Sandy Hook) actually delivers almost exactly the same amount of energy to target as a big .30 magnum and can be used in hunting, but a lot of hunters don’t like it. It’s unreliable an inaccurate at long range, and at short range it tends to tear things up. (Note: in comments, several people have defended the .223 as being a better round for hunting in brush).
What can we do here? Regulating ammunition by type would by no means be a cut and dried approach. Just cutting out bullets above or below a certain size wouldn’t really work, and targeting specific cartridges would lead to a kind of whack-a-mole effort as new variants appeared. But it should be possible to restrict cartridges that are designed to penetrate body armor, those using hardened materials (like the so-called “cop-killer” bullets) and those pistol bullets designed to fragment on impact.
Magazines & Clips
While bolt and pump action guns generally store their ammunition directly in a chamber inside the gun, automatic and semi-automatic weapons use magazines or clips. These can be small and completely contained within the body of the gun (the clips of many semi-automatic pistols hide within the gun’s grip) or they may curve down, up, or sideways to allow for higher capacity. The basic purpose of magazines is to allow for extended capacity and rapid reloading. On many guns, the magazine can be released quickly, and a new magazine put into place. A skilled user can switch magazines in a matter of seconds.
Many pistols have standard clips that contain between 10 and 15 cartridges. Semiautomatic rifles are more typically sold with larger magazines. The AR-15, one of the most common platforms, most often comes with a box magazine holding either 20 or 30 cartridges arrayed in column that curves down and slightly forward. Optional box magazines hold 40-50 cartridges.
However, this is just the start. Both drum and STANAG (a NATO design) magazines are available with capacities of 90-100 cartridges. These large magazines often make the weapon un-wieldy, but the STANAG variety are more compact than the older drums.
This is a Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifle equipped with an extended capacity STANAG magazine. Though it differs from what’s been in the news, I suspect this arrangement is similar to what students and teachers saw last week.
What can we do here? This is simple: Make the sale of extended magazines illegal. In fact, we should reduce the size of standard magazines. Magazines are already available that limit the capacity of AR-15 and other military-derived rifles to 5-10 cartridges. Make those mandatory at time of sale.
Net result if we can pass legislation that will restrict the sale of semi-automatic rifles based off fully-automatic military designs, limit the availability of bullets that are designed for high mortality, and strictly reduce the size of magazines that can be used with semi-automatic weapons we’ll have taken a good step. And this sensible step will not affect anyone’s ability to hunt or defend themselves.
By: Mark Sumner, Daily Kos, December 19, 2012
“The Economics Of Gun Control”: Quantifying The External Costs Of Gun Ownership
After the school massacre in Newtown, everyone has been putting out proposals for how to reduce gun violence. President Obama created an inter-agency task force. The NRA asked for armed guards in every school. And now economists are weighing in with their own, number-heavy approaches.
First, here’s a recent paper (pdf) by Duke’s Philip Cook and Georgetown’s Jens Ludwig trying to quantify the “external cost” of gun ownership. The two economists wanted to figure out precisely what sorts of costs gun owners impose on the rest of society.
That’s not an easy question to answer. For starters, there aren’t even airtight estimates of how many people actually own guns in the United States. So Cook and Ludwig created a data set that used the number of suicides by firearm in a county as a proxy for gun ownership — and checked it against a variety of existing survey data.
The next step was to figure out the “social cost” of owning a gun. The two economists determined that a greater prevalence of guns in an area was associated with an increase in the murder rate, but not other types of violent crimes (guns, the authors argue, lead to “an intensification of criminal violence”). Why does this happen? One possibility: The two economists found evidence that if there are more legal guns in an area, it’s more likely that those guns will be transferred to “illegal” owners.
When the two economists added up the costs of gun ownership—more injuries and more homicides—and weighed them against various benefits, they concluded that the average household acquiring a gun imposed a net cost on the rest of society of somewhere between $100 to $1,800 per year. (The range depends on the assumptions used—and note that they are not including the increased risk of suicide that comes with owning a gun.)
Now, normally when economists come across a product that has a negative externality—like cigarettes or coal-fired plants—they recommend taxing or regulating it, so that the user of the product internalizes the costs that he or she is imposing on everyone else. In this case, an economist might suggest slapping a steeper tax on guns or bullets.
Others might object that this isn’t fair. There are responsible gun owners and irresponsible gun owners. Not everyone with a gun imposes the same costs on society. Why should the tax be uniform? And that brings us to John Wasik’s recent essay at Forbes. Instead of a tax on guns, he recommends that gun owners be required to purchase liability insurance. Different gun owners would pay different rates, depending on the risks involved:
When you buy a car, your insurer underwrites the risk according to your age, driving/arrest/ticket record, type of car, amount of use and other factors. A teenage driver behind the wheel of a Porsche is going to pay a lot more than a 50-year-old house wife. A driver with DUI convictions may not get insurance at all. Like vehicles, you should be required to have a policy before you even applied for a gun permit. Every seller would have to follow this rule before making a transaction.
This is where social economics goes beyond theory. Those most at risk to commit a gun crime would be known to the actuaries doing the research for insurers. They would be underwritten according to age, mental health, place of residence, credit/bankruptcy record and marital status. Keep in mind that insurance companies have mountains of data and know how to use it to price policies, or in industry parlance, to reduce the risk/loss ratio.
Who pays the least for gun insurance would be least likely to commit a crime with it.An 80-year-old married woman in Fort Lauderdale would get a great rate. A 20-year-old in inner-city Chicago wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Gun insurance for gun owners does exist right now, but it isn’t required — as Wasik notes, only 22 cities even require gun dealers to carry liability insurance. And, yes, under this proposal, people would no doubt still acquire guns illegally and evade the insurance requirements.
Granted, this proposal isn’t likely to garner much political support — even the Illinois state legislature, which has often looked favorably on gun-control laws, swatted a gun-insurance bill down pretty quickly in 2009. It might not get past the Supreme Court. And over at the Daily Beast, Megan McArdle outlines a number of other possible problems with having states require individual gun insurance. Still, it’s another way of thinking about the costs of gun ownership.
By: Brad Plummer, The Washington Post Wonkblog, December 28, 2012
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