Health Care/Joan Retsinas

Guns: Geico, Amica, Aetna to the Rescue

How about gun insurance? Not insurance if your gun is stolen, but insurance if your gun wounds somebody. It may be the idea-du-jour, worth pondering.

Certainly the statistics-of-carnage (in 2021, 48,000 deaths, with almost half suicides) and 648 “mass shootings,” defined as killing at least four people) have spurred grief-struck parents, deep-dives into the psyches of the shooters, and funerals full of politicians, but no meaningful restrictions on guns.

We hesitate to ban the most lethal weapons. The federal government bans only a few kinds of automatic weapons. As for states, the National Rifle Association, more appropriately dubbed the National Automatic Weapon Association, has thwarted major bans. We have a patchwork of regulations, where some states have rigid laws, notably California, which just had two massacres, and Massachusetts, which requires a buyer to get an OK from the local police department. Realistically, guns travel from Second Amendment paradises to regulation-heavy states. The internet lets buyers circumvent roadblocks. Crucially, a gun lives in a household, where a spouse or a child can grab it. The Sandy Hook assassin grabbed his mother’s gun, as did the Virginia kindergartener who shot his teacher.

And the oxymoron, “gun safety,” is just that: an oxymoron. Those “gun safety” measures that aim to make a lethal weapon less lethal have not tamped down the statistics.

As for the NRA mantra that people, not guns, kill people: they are correct. But since we can’t predict the who/where/why/when of the next shooting, the calls for more mental health services, and/or more police screening don’t tamp down the statistics either.

Gun-insurance sounds plausible. The costs of gun violence leave a heavy tab on taxpayers. Consider the post-shooting police action, the ambulances, the emergency rooms, the surgeries, the hospital stays. On police shows, the victims are rushed to the ER; the plots don’t show who pays that bill. A June General Accounting Office report pegged the hospital costs of firearm injuries in 2019 at more than $1 billion, with half of that paid by Medicaid. That excludes the costs of physicians, skilled nursing, rehabilitation, durable medical equipment.

We could recoup those costs via taxes. Since 1919 the federal government has taxed the sale of firearms at 10%. We haven’t upped that number, and the money still goes to wildlife and forestry reclamation, a reasonable linkage in 1919 when people hunted animals, not people. States do levy taxes, but often flat taxes where the money goes to the treasury. States might raise taxes to discourage purchase, as states do for cigarettes, alcohol, and sometimes “nutritionally empty calorie” sodas, where moneys defray the public health costs of the product. States might also adopt incremental taxes to discourage multi-gun households. Gun-lobbyists, though, have stymied the use of taxation as a route.

San Jose, California, just mandated gun-insurance. The rationale follows car insurance. A car-owner must buy insurance to defray both the costs if s/he injures himself or others, and the costs of damages to his or another vehicle. (The San Jose insurance excludes murders, but actuaries could surely add that).

Using risk, we can set premium rates for gun insurance, just as we do for drivers. A driver who has had too many accidents and DUI arrests will pay higher premiums. For guns, we can raise premiums for owners charged with domestic violence, or under restraining orders. Some owners will pay less as insurers evaluate the “experience rating” of different subsets: senior citizens, who statistically shoot fewer people (accidentally and intentionally) would pay less than young adults; women, less than men. And just as car and medical insurers rate some applicants as “uninsurable” so too gun-insurers can say “no” to some applicants.

Similarly, car insurers factor in the neighborhood:. Gun-insurers can do the same. In those states where you are most likely to die from gun violence ( Wyoming, Mississippi, Louisiana) owners will pay more than in the least likely-to-die states (Rhode Island and Massachusetts). No value judgments, simply numbers.

Also, insurers can rate the guns accordingly. Insuring a rifle will cost less than a handgun. (Admittedly, savvy DIYers can upgrade their guns.)

Insurance bypasses those Second Amendment arguments over rights. Anybody who buys insurance can own a gun. The immediate goal is to recoup the costs of violence.

If the mega-insurers see gun-insurance as a profitable product, maybe they will use their lobbying clout to drown out the objections of the NRA. And maybe ultimately insurance will tamp down those statistics-of-carnage.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2023

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