Category Archives: 3 Guns

A Progression of Kinds of Insurance for Guns

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The purpose of having insurance for victims of gun violence is to provide money for the many needs they have after they suffer from a shooting. The insurance should be structured to pay in the various situations that occur, for the various needs that are faced and in a timely manner. There are lots of kinds of insurance in use today and several ones will be examined in the chapters that follow. Starting with the most basic insurance designed only to protect the buyer of the insurance, we will add features until we see that it is possible to create a system that works to provide the needed protection. We’ll start with the simplest in the progression. Continue reading →

Firearm Suicide in DC

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This blogger has been researching statistics for presentation to the District of Columbia City Council in relation to their bill B20-170 to require insurance for guns.  Some of the figures are striking.  Firearm homicide for DC over the 10 year period 2001-2010 is over 5 times the national average but firearm suicide is one third of its national average.  This means there are over 15 times as many suicides per homicide nationally than in DC.  Part of this difference is no doubt demographic.  Suicide rates vary dramatically by race, age and gender.  But the non-firearm suicide rate per 100,000 persons in DC is 75% of the national average and the firearm suicide rate is only 32% of the national average.  That difference is probably due to the scarcity of guns in DC even with the large illegal gun problem. If this difference had not existed then there would have been an additional 142 firearm suicides in DC during the 10 year period.

It’s fair to conclude that DC’s strict firearm laws are saving about 14 lives a year from suicide, but would an insurance requirement have a substantial part of this effect in places where firearms are common.  Suicide researchers generally think that most suicides are impulsive and that substitution of means is uncommon.  This is an area where removal of the restrictions on firearm data gathering and research is very much needed.  Insurers requirements for safe storage can make a large difference.  Many informed public health experts believe that even things as small as separate storage of ammunition and keeping guns unloaded will make a substantial difference.  A person who keeps his gun at a range or shooting club rather than at home in order to get a lower insurance rate is far less likely to take an impulsive but irreversible and tragic action with it.

The figures in the table all concern deaths by firearm unless otherwise labeled.  They are totals for the period 2001-2010 and are taken from the CDC’s WISQARS system.  Rates are per 100,000 population and are not age-adjusted.

Intent DC US DC Rate US Rate
All Intents 1,453 306,946 25.18 10.21
Accidents 16 6,739 0.23 0.23
Suicide 109 175,221 1.89 5.79
Homicide 1,311 119,246 22.72 4.01
Legal Intervention 13 3,325 0.32 0.11
         
Accidents/Homicides 0.012 0.057 0.010 0.057
Suicides/Homicides 0.083 1.469 0.083 1.444
         
All Suicide Firearm or Not 352 338,043 6.1 11.38
Non Firearm Suicide 243 162,822 4.21 5.59

PreventingNewtown Blog Points Out Gun Insurance Benefits

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A new post by Julia Hartman on the PreventingNewtown blog titled “A Case for Gun Liability Insurance” gives a thoughtful and interesting discussion of the benefits of requiring insurance to protect victims of gun violence.

The post gives a moving presentation of the damage done daily by guns and calls for insurance as a way to deal with the problem.  It makes the comparison to motor vehicles and points out the fact that gun deaths exceed motor vehicle deaths in 10 states currently.  Suicides are handled on a par with homicides and accidents, an position which is often opposed by those supporting the status quo for gun policy.

Continue reading →

$100K in Jewelry Stolen From Car

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Yahoo’s OMG reports that an actress who left the jewelry in her car had it stolen while she was at a friend’s Hollywood apartment.

So what’s this got to do with gun insurance?

Well, hundreds of thousands of guns go bad by being stolen each year, many from cars. The value of the object being stolen does not seem to be adequate to prevent this problem. Insurers will limit this exposure if they are going to be responsible for the future damage the guns do. Of course, responsible gun owners don’t leave their guns in cars. Insurance is a way to engender that responsibility.

Oregon SB-758 First State Bill for Effective Gun Insurance

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Senators Dingfelder and Burdick with Representative Denbrow have introduced a bill in the Oregon Legislature (SB-758) which is the first effective plan for gun insurance that would provide for victims. It works by imposing strict liability on a gun owner for injuries associated with a gun even for one year after the gun is lost or stolen. There is no limitation to economic damages as is typical of no-fault motor vehicle insurance. The limits are set quite high at $250,000 for physical injury or death. Continue reading →

Should Gun Insurance Cover Suicide?

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If a good solid system of insurance that pays everyone injured by guns is adapted, an obvious question will be “should it cover suicide.” This is likely to be controversial because many people think that payments to survivors would encourage persons thinking of killing themselves. The issue has been worked out for regular life insurance by having “incontestability clauses” which allow such coverage two years after the policy goes into affect. The idea is that a person is unlikely to plan that far ahead which handles the insurers concerns about the hazard of selling insurance to one who knows that it will be soon be paying the benefit.

Social Security pays survivors benefits after the suicide of a parent or spouse who has been married for more than 9 months. In some cases life insurance paid for entirely by employers will pay in cases of suicide with out a waiting period. The requirement is that the insurance be given automatically by the employer and the employee not contribute to the cost. In that case the insurance may or may not have a suicide clause. It seems unlikely that a person will take a job to get insurance covering their planned death and it seems unlikely that a person will buy a gun to get insurance rather than commit suicide in some other way. Continue reading →

Costs put on gun owners are not Poll Taxes

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When a proposal for requiring insurance for guns is put into a blog discussion, many of the strong pro-gun advocates reacting to the post base their objection on rights as they assume they have them from the second amendment to the US Constitution. These assumptions can be very broad. And I see statements such as “what other rights do you have to pay for?” and “paying for gun insurance is like a Poll Tax.”

Well, I see us paying taxes on the means necessary to exercise a right all the time. Look at your phone bill, it’s full of taxes on a means to communicate. You have a right to travel, but pay taxes on cars and on air and rail tickets.

Poll taxes are really obnoxious, especially the way they were historically used, but they were not found to be unconstitutional until a specific amendment (The 24th Amendment to the US Constitution) was adopted. There is no similar amendment for gun rights. It’s interesting that rather heavy taxes for automatic weapons have never been found to be unconstitutional.

District of Columbia v. Heller is a very narrow decision in itself. It only overturns an extremely restrictive law that totally prohibits gun ownership. Later the court extended it to state laws in another case, McDonald v. Chicago. Since then lots of restrictions on gun use and ownership have been upheld by state courts. Whether the Supreme Court will strike a broader range of gun restrictions in the future is unknown. While lots has been written by legal scholars about the subject, the future path of this law will probably be determined by political considerations. Heller was supported by 5 justices with a strong dissent by 4 justices. It’s possible that it could be rolled back to the old view that any right to bear arms did not apply to individuals or it’s possible that it could be broadened.

As far as insurance is concerned, the system supported by this blog only requires regulations applied to the manufacturer of guns. Any requirement that the insurance be transferred to the subsequent owner, as would be needed to let the manufacturer’s insurer relinquish responsibility, would be a private contract.

50 Guns cross the line to illegal hands

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On Jan 26, 2013 according to the Pennsylvania State Police 50 guns were stolen from the Taylor and Robbins Gun shop which had been closed for about six years but still had old stock on the location. Two burglers broke in and escaped in a vehicle.

Nearly all of the guns that are in illegal hands or used in crimes in the United States started out as legal guns and by some means passed out of the control of their legal owners. Many of these are due to purchases by straw buyers acting for an inelegible person but many others are due to loss or theft. If an insurance company was still responsible for these guns, it’s very unlikely that they would remain for six years in such a vulnerable situation.

We’re not taking guns seriously in this country, insurance is a big step to becoming responsible.

Article: Gun used to kill N.Y. cop came from Virginia

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An article, “Gun used to kill N.Y. cop came from Virginia” published 1-26-13 in the Virginian-Pilot illustrates the kind of gun leakage from legal to illegal hands that insurance could discourage. Colleen Long writes that a robbery in 2011 resulted in the death of a New York City police officer, who was shot in the head. As our system for tracing guns that turn up in crimes relies on records kept by federal licensed dealers, the 9mm semi-automatic Ruger pistol was found to be sold legally in 1999 by a dealer in Colonial Heights, Va.

The buyer of the gun in that legal transaction said that the gun was in possessions he had packed but had ended up abandoning, when he was evicted from an apartment. The story linked above is interesting with more details.

One obvious question is, do we believe the story about the loss of the gun? A Ruger 9mm is not an especially valuable gun. According to firearmspriceguide.com a used one is worth about $200 to $400 depending on condition. A person being evicted may very well abandon a lot of stuff, so it could be true. But the gun did drop into illegal hands and end up in New York. If an insurance company had responsibility for for that gun that continued after it was lost, that insurer would have a strong incentive to require the owner to keep control of the gun. The value of the gun itself was not sufficient motive.

The laws of the State of New York couldn’t stop the gun from being illegally brought from Virginia. The laws of Virginia don’t insure that owner keep track of guns in a way that prevents their loss, illegal sale or abandonment. An insurance company on the hook would, no doubt, require the owner to periodically demonstrate that the gun was still under control. There would be some financial committment on the part of the owner, sufficient to convince the insurer that the gun would stay in legal hands.

This story is special because the victim was a police officer, which provided the motivation for tracing the gun and for the paper writing about it. Thousand of other killings with illegal guns are similar in many ways. As the article says 85% of the illegal guns in New York come from out of state.

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