Maryland bill would force gun owners to get $300K liability insurance to wear or carry

Seems fair. If the risk is low, cost will be low. Let the free market decide, right?

Awesome. We're going to apply it to cops too, right?

Right?

These proposals would ultimately manifest in insurance for white peopel costing less and black people and hispanics costing more. All this does is price minorities out of gun rights. The whites will be fine, good thing they're not the ones comitting the vast majority of gun terrorism . . . Oh wait I've just received some devastating statistics . . .

I'm not very opinionated on guns tbh, but I do think this only makes it more difficult for poor people. I'm not sure I agree with that.

Never understood why you have to have insurance to operate vehicles, but not have insurance for weapons, or dogs for that matter.

Here's the problem...

We can require automobile insurance because driving a car isn't a right.

Now, owning a gun is a right, and you could argue that wearing or carrying the gun is not, but then you have to go back to New York vs Bruen:

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/597/20-843/

New York used to require special permission to wear or carry a gun. You had to provide special justification for your need to carry and "because I don't feel safe" or "I want to defend myself" wasn't good enough.

Supreme Court ruled:

"We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need. That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense."

Given that, I can't imagine they would hold an insurance requirement to be constitutional.

Should Alex Jones be forced to have liability insurance before spouting off conspiracy theories on InfoWars? Yeah, probably. But that's not the way the first amendment works either.

If you think that's bad, I had to get a $1,000,000 umbrella coverage policy for our swimming pool to cover liability in case someone gets injured. I don't think it's unreasonable at all

Ahhh, the old "let's make something a right that only the rich can afford." For all the "eat the rich" rhetoric here, there seems to be a lot of desire to increase the class divide even more by limiting rights to how much money you have.

It's already very difficult to nearly impossible to obtain a purchase and carry permit in the state since Maryland is "May issue" state and NOT a "Shall issue" state. This means you can be denied a permit at the whim of local law enforcement unless you have an "in" with whoever is in charge. This is purely performative theater to buy votes.

And the two groups that really should have liability insurance - drug gangs and law enforcement - will be completely unaffected by this requirement.

I see what they want to do: no sane insurance company will provide such contracts unless they either:

1. make the customers pay exorbitant prices
2. require background checks and do the control themselves

Any of those will of course disincentivize people from owning guns, which is a good thing, but it's crazy that a state has to offload these controls to a private company because there is no political willingness to do it in the right way.

Something needs to be done but wow this feels like the worst way to go.

So, let me see if I've got this right.

Maryland wants to have a privately-enforced tax on the exercise of a constitutional right. Do I have that more or less correct? Perhaps you could also have a requirement that all religious congregations or any kind have a $1B policy in case there is sexual misconduct by a member of the congregation?

Are we going to start with the police?

This would go to the supreme court who would rule that restricting the right to bear arms to someone's financial status is unconstitutional or some shit.

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Another right-wing bill that gives the rich power over poor, disguised as left-wing bill. All politicians in power are rich, which is why they always push for right-wing politics, democrat or republican, always end up against the working class. There is a good video about this.

Do we really need to help insurance companies make more money? Are thier stocks low?

This is a lot like insuring a vehicle. So they shouldn’t make it a flat insurance, which would be regressive, but tailor it to the capacity, ammunition type, and firing rate of the weapon.

That’s what would make it a progressive fee - a basic Saturday Night Special or hunting rifle would be cheap for any poor person to own, whereas a military style machine gun would be cost-prohibitive for all but the wealthiest.

They could even have extra discounts based on user certification and tested skill levels, with surcharges based on discharge accidents and situations where the gun was recorded being improperly brandished or carried.

Do cops next!

Aside from this being a regressive tax, how many unjustifiable shootings result from people legally permitted to carry a firearm?

I appreciate that they're trying to do something here, but this doesn't feel like it's aimed at stopping actually dangerous people. This feels like it's aimed at beating on people who were already willing to deal with Maryland's already more-strict-than-usual gun laws.

But I guess we'll see how this pans out in a few years.

A bit about me for context: I'm Canadian, I have an interest in guns. I do not own any guns. I can imagine myself owning a gun, but don't want one right now. I know a bit about guns, but not a lot. eg Rim fire vs center fire, and that there isn't anything specific that makes a rifle an assault rifle. I support gun regulation but think Canada's recent changes go too far (it's now impossible for a normal citizen to legally obtain a handgun in Canada).

My two cents on this bill:

1. Every responsible gun owner ought to have liability insurance that covers their firearms regardless of whether or not it's required.

2. Objections to such requirements based on the cost of insurance could be overcome in a few ways. Two that occur to me off the top of my head:

   a. Individual insurance could be not necessary if the citizen is a member of a well regulated militia (but the state could define what qualifies as a well regulated militia, maybe: shared liability, annual training)

   b. The state could offer tax payer funded insurance, for gun owners that agree to certain conditions e.g. gun use, storage (and inspections)

I look forward to the comments.

Some of us did have insurance, then a bunch of anti-gun groups pressured the payment processors to stop working with companies that offered "murder insurance."

So how much could such insurance actually cost? Does anyone have the numbers to do the maths?

Say a single policy covers any number of guns a person has. So we need a number of people owning guns.

A death is definitely 300k payout. What kind of payout, on average, would injury be? Also 300k because healthcare costs are insane? Less than that?

How many people are killed using a gun every year?

How many are injured?

I wonder what the pure business cost would be for the insurance. I don't actually know how large a profit margin insurance companies run, would curious to sort of blindly apply that here as well.

https://www.theactuarymagazine.org/firearm-risk/

The people who wrote this article are going to be happy with this.

Sounds very reasonable.

Imagine living in a place where owning a gun isn't the real controversy, and this isn't already a law...

Literally the only gun I want right now is in the VR game pistol whip. It also get me exercising.

So, this only applies to firearms, right? Can I circumvent this by owning a bow, crossbow, sword or one of the cool experimental coil//plasma/laser guns instead? /S

That's hilariously low.

I've got £2,000,000 liability on my pet insurance. And she's got about 4 teeth left.

I appreciate the concept, but is $300,000 enough to actually cover the cost of damages? Guns generally seem like the sort of thing where accidents either cause minimal or catastrophic damage with not much in between.

I’m only for this if they make law enforcement and government agencies get the same liability insurance to carry as well.

I believe in this wholeheartedly

but it'lll never pass, and even if it does, it'll never withstand a trial challenge.. because of the bolded part below.

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed

edit And just so lemmy doesnt crawl up my ass about it, I am not an ammosexual, I'm quoting the 2nd amendment for its relevance here on how this bill wont stand, not because I'm a red hat wearing cultist.

This will pretty much only affect the friends/family of politicians, as they are the only ones that can get a permit to legally carry in Maryland.

This is 10× what California’s pay for their car insurance bill.

Beneath the Mason Dixon Line? Heavens to Betsy!

This approach to gun control seems sooo american XD A little bit of money surely fixes the problems

Unconstitutional, can't require insurance to exercise a right.

Yeah I didn't read any of that (and I'm not going yo read your reply to this one either) but I just realised how dogshit your DGU stats are and wanted to share.

There are 82 million (legal) gun owners in America and 100,000 DGUs a year.

That's 0.1% of gun owners. 75 million children have to wonder if their school is next so that 99.9% of gun owners can have guns that are never used for anything except fun with their buddies.

Thanks, I'm definitely going to be using this.

It's a good idea that has been discussed before, but is almost certainly unconstitutional. You can't paywall constitutional rights.

Hahahaha I hope this passes. No insurance company would write those policies.

Ah yes, the classic "weapons are only for rich people in case the poor rise up." The class-based cousin of the ol' "ut-oh, the Panthers got guns, let's pass some restrictions like yesterday."

Make sense. There's more deaths by firearm than automobile in the US every year. It's actually fairly close at around 40-50k yearly. Which is absolutely insane...

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm

All firearm deaths

Number of deaths: 48,830

Motor vehicle traffic deaths

Number of deaths: 45,404

Unconstitutional.

can we please stop mandating insurance?

Maybe i'm ok just being sued and having assests forfeited. Maybe im ok just forking over a shit ton of money.

Maybe, just maybe, i dont want to be thrown around by predatory insurance companies looking to wring me of my money for no productive reason (to my benefit)

To everyone against this bill, dont worry, you'll get what you want. The bill wont go anywhere and the mass shootings will continue.