Category Archives: Covering All Guns

Enacting a Concealed Carry Insurance Mandate

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While it would be ideal to have a gun insurance adopted at a single time as one well designed national mandate, it’s likely that political reality will force it to come into being in stages.  The logical place to start is for the more amenable states to require insurance for holders of permits to carry firearms in public.  If this can be extended to general coverage of guns in some of these states, the stage is set for a federal mandate for top-down insurance which extends into any state requiring insurance.  This in turn will encourage other states to have their own requirements in order not to have their citizens paying for insurance without their state receiving benefits for victims.

Concealed Carry as a Start and an End in Itself

Mandating gun insurance for holders of permits to carry weapons in public is much simpler than mandating gun insurance in general.  Permit holders are already registered with state government agencies; there is no need for an additional registration system.  They are generally responsible people who have already shown their willingness to cooperate with reasonable regulations.  Insurers will find these people to be desirable customers.  Most measures to deal with gun violence have to deal with the flood of illegal weapons that come from states with weak regulation of gun trafficking.  But, states requiring insurance for permits can simply refuse to recognize permits from other states without insurance requirements or require proof of insurance in addition to such a permit.

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The Need for State Regulated Gun Insurance with a Federal Mandate.

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The answer to the question of whether we need to mandate gun insurance at the federal or the state level is to have the mandate at the federal level and the regulation of the insurance at a state level.  The special problems that guns have of illegally traveling across state lines to do their damage and of states varying so much in their willingness to regulate guns can be solved by this structure.  The federal mandate should implement the top-down process for continuing insurer responsibility advocated by this blog.  It should require that the insurance pay benefits to victims in accordance with the gun insurance requirement in the state where the shooting occurs.

One of the special difficulties that makes guns different than almost any other risk, is that move around from state to state so easily once they are in illegal hands.  Much of the country has a relatively small problem with illegal guns and people there see no need to make access difficult.  In other parts of the country, there is a major problem with death and injuries from illegal guns.  No matter how carefully places like New York, Chicago and Washington, DC work to stop the transfer of firearms to dangerous people they cannot control the flood of weapons that come in from areas with more permissive policies. The process has been named the Iron Pipeline.

This blog believes that requiring insurance is a practical way to deal with the problem.  Insurers that remain responsible for deaths and injuries from guns after they pass into illegal hands will set up conditions to prevent that passage.  They will find ways to do this that are minimal inconveniences to legitimate gun owners.  The question is how to get a requirement for such insurance into place in this environment.  The states that sell the most guns are least likely to make such a mandate.

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Insurance-Good for Victims, Safety and Gun Owners

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We have responsible ways to handle things which are dangerous but which are not made illegal because of their actual or assumed benefits to society. We look carefully at ways to contain the dangers and enjoy the benefits in almost every case. The exception is firearms, but we are just beginning to pull our heads out of the sand and examine this important subject.

First Principle — Mandatory No-Fault Insurance to Cover All Victims

One of the most powerful tools to facilitate a dangerous activity is insurance. Unfortunately, requiring insurance to cover gun violence has been looked at only as a way to penalize gun ownership or at least to transfer costs to gun owners. The result is calls for high limit liability insurance, usually with terms that make actual implementation unlikely. This blog argues that the tort/liability model is one of the least effective ways to increase safety and provide for victims. A No-Fault system similar to worker’s compensation or some motor vehicle insurance is much better. It needs to follow a gun that changes hands in a way to insure that all guns are covered.

Second Principle — Top Down Insurance Does Not Require Gun Registration or Owner Tracking

This blog also is advocating that insurance be required of gun manufacturers or anyone bringing a gun into the system in such a way that the insurer only relinquishes responsibility when another insurer (contracted by a new owner) takes it up. Insurance should remain in effect through any transfer legal or not. This would allow confidence that insurance was always in effect without tracking the gun owners. With a proper No-Fault system the victim would not have to even be told the name of the owner to collect compensation. All transactions by claimants or the government would be with the insurance companies.

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Funding the Uninsured Gun Pool

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A plan for No-Fault insurance for guns must take into account the fact that many of the shootings are likely to be in situations where the gun cannot be traced. Even if a large portion of the guns in existence are brought into the system, there will be many claims where no specific insurer is available to pay. In NY the Motor Vehicle Accident Indemnification Corporation (MVAIC) and in Michigan the Michigan Assigned Claims Plan (MACP) are available if there is no other insurer. The large costs in Michigan where there is unlimited coverage for medical expenses have generated a lot of political backlash. The Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association pays claims over $500,000 and assesses insurance companies $175 (2012) per vehicle. Funding works by having insurers pay on the basis of either a percentage of premiums collected or a fixed amount per vehicle. A system for guns could work in the same way.

Approximately half of the medical costs are now covered by Medicare or Medicaid. If gun insurance is the primary insurance only for identified guns and the Uninsured Pool is secondary to all other insurance the funds needed would be greatly reduced. Unidentified or uninsured guns do not contribute to the incentive for insurers to have loss reduction conditions or programs in any case, so making gun insurance secondary should not undercut the safety benefits of having insurance. It would also give states an incentive to identify the guns involved in injuries to save on Medicaid expenses.

It might also be desirable to have the Uninsured Gun Pool pay claims for incidents that occur after some fixed time has elapsed for guns that are reported lost or stolen. If the time is fairly long the cost would not be too great and would give an incentive for reporting losses in a timely manner. It would make things more predictable for insurers and may help establish a robust market for gun insurance.

 

Mandatory Gun Insurance and Protecting Criminals

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Writing about No-Fault gun insurance that provides an incentive for each successive owner to have insurance, one of the most common concerns in the comments was that insurance would protect criminals and wrongdoers.

Defenders of gun rights in articles and comments often seem to be writing from an assumption that the typical person who is shot is some sort of intruder or attacker who ran into the unexpected self-defense by an armed good guy.  They often complain that media don’t cover such events.  I don’t see much evidence, especially convincing evidence, to back that up.  For example, Kleck and Gertz’s famous 1994 Survey claimed that there were about 2.5 Million incidents in which victims used guns in self-defense.  Many of the loose figures in circulation come from this number.  It was calculated by applying a 1.366% positive response on the survey to the estimated 190.5 Million households.  This method has received a lotof criticism because of the likely possibility that no matter how low the real number was it only took a very small percentage of persons surveyed answering falsely to make up 1.336%.  I expect you could get that many people to claim just about anything you want (say that they had ridden on a flying saucer in the last year) if you are taking that kind of a survey.

It’s really hard to get recent good figures on the nature of the shootings.  Real data on most issues comes from government agencies collecting it from local sources and using their powers as part of federal government to insure that it is reported to them with a good bit of completeness and with consistent methods.  That process has been shut down by political processes that oppose collection of data and examination of the subject.  See Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH and Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH   “Silencing the Science on Gun Research” in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

So I’m looking at the log of news reports of gun deaths which you can get by following @GunDeaths on Twitter or use the excellent page on Slate which tracks it.  I read the last 50 deaths reports as of this morning (January 8, 2010) and found that 7 were shooting by police, 1 was an accident, 2 suicides and 4 that were murder components of a murder/suicide.  The rest were just plain murders by bad guys.  It’s a pretty small sample but easily big enough to show that self-defense by innocent parties must not be common, in order to have it not appear at all.  It’s likely that local media don’t usually report suicides; but it’s hard to imagine, they wouldn’t jump on the high reader interest that a real self-defense shooting would have.  So I’m concluding that when a through study is done that gun insurance would not be protecting attackers killed in self-defense by legal gun owners.  It does leave the question of whether, persons killed by police should be covered.  I do imagine that there would be a resistance to insurance investigations to discover whether a person killed by police was actually committing a crime.

Crossposted to guninsuranceblog