Saturday, July 9, 2016

Make 'Em Buy Gun Insurance

The insurance industry is the perfect conglomeration of greedy thieves to provide a capitalistic solution to the problem of gun violence in the United States, which has reached epic proportions in the last week.

All we need is a simple law requiring that every gun owner must purchase  liability insurance, the way auto owners must purchase liability insurance. Let the market set the rates.  

A so-called hunting rifle, after all, can cause at least as much damage as, say, a Ford Focus. Just ask the families and friends of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling or the five police officers shot to death in Dallas.

We’ve tried “thoughts and prayers” to no avail.  The senseless killings persist . . .Columbine to Orlando. NRA whores in Congress  won’t even permit votes on the meekest efforts at controlling gun sales.

So let the Second Amendment bullshitters have all the damned guns they want — shotguns, rifles, machine guns, assault rifles, semi-automatic handguns, bazookas, howitzers, gatlings —any bloody kind of gun they want.  Just make sure they buy insurance before they walk out the door with them.

Liability insurance premiums for law enforcement weapons would be paid by the government agencies issuing them. If you want your cops carrying the weapons of war, use some of your tax money to buy insurance for the damage they cause, including loss of lives (especially black lives).

Yep, the gun insurance premiums would be expensive, very expensive.  But, hey, that’s the American way.  Insurance is a business, and businesses are entitled to profit. In many cases of mass murder, the killers were found to have stockpiled arsenals of weapons and ammunition.  Could they have amassed so many guns if they had had to buy insurance, too?  Maybe, maybe not.  

Perhaps having to buy gun insurance would not deter would-be killers from getting their guns.  At least there would be a pool of money to compensate victims’ families, to pay the medical bills of the wounded.

Wouldn’t it be difficult to enforce a gun insurance requirement, especially on the millions of weapons already in circulation?  For a while.  But with all this new profit to be made, the insurance industry would find a way.

You have an uninsured gun in your house, and the insurance companies find out about it, they just might send in a bomb robot.

Is an AR-15 worth the risk?