Gun Insurance: Why?

There are, of course, two purposes—to reduce the number of the killed and injured and to provide for people who are hurt. I want this blog to serve anyone who wants to be thoughtful about these. Insurance has many aspects which should be examined in coming up with a way to achieve those ends. We will have to consider the experience of other kinds of insurance and of gun insurance in other countries. It will be important to analyze the potential costs and unwanted side effects of an insurance requirement. As they teach in every writing class from High School on, we must look at Who, What, When, Where and How.

I want information, referrals, comments and suggestions from all who are interested in this subject. I don’t want to dialog with those who want to use insurance as a surrogate for banning guns or those who will not consider any restriction of them. Many people love to possess and use firearms and I can understand their interest and passion. I only hate the carnage we have around us, but the results we are seeing are intolerable.

Insurance is used to help control every other important dangerous item or activity we have. There are scores of systems for using insurance in a specially tailored way for each situation. We need to find the best way to do that in this situation. This discussion is not yet occurring. Many call for insurance as one more way to put pressure on what they see as a flood of firearms. Others think that requiring insurance would make owning firearms impossible. Both of these views see the choice as one of guns or insurance. This blog is looking for the way to have guns and insurance with a much safer society.

In my years of owning a manufacturing company, I’ve seen many insurance companies send loss prevention people to look at my operation and then suggest or require me to make things safer. I’ve never regretted that and I’m sure it had a great effect on the good safety record of my company. Of course, sometimes I thought they were asking for something that was really useless, but usually I came to see they were right. In any case, the costs were never out of hand and the fears that some have of being driven out of business by inspectors and regulators seemed overblown. Insurance companies have a lot of faults, but they do facilitate almost every activity in our society.