San Jose to require owners of firearms to pay back taxpayers for gun violence
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
e.g. > The government may make no law establishing religion, but members of fundamentalist/extremist religions will need to pay insurance fees to reimburse for extremist violence committed by others of their religion.
> People choosing not to quarter soldiers in their homes will have to pay a fee towards military housing for those soldiers; people who choose to quarter soldiers don't have to pay these fees.
etc.
But on the other hand you can make up slippery slope arguments about anything.
Here's one: the government can currently limit people under 18 from buying guns. This is a constitutional challenge waiting to blow up, imagine if the government said you have freedom of religion, provided you are at least 100 years old.
Clearly this is absurd, so 5 year olds need to be able to buy guns, since one will lead to the other or one scenario is logically inconsistent with the other.
It seems to me, though, that there are two distinct categories here.
On the one hand is what the criteria are under which one can exercise their rights. This is where your age criteria for guns, or "fire-in-a-crowded-theater" exceptions, or not being able to practice cannibalism just because it's your religion, come into play.
On the other hand, though, is penalties that exist solely because you're exercising your rights. To say that a given piece of speech (or the right of an individual to buy a gun) isn't permissible is one thing, which is what I think you're referring to above. To say that a given piece of speech (or the right to buy a gun) is permissible, but that the government will penalize you for saying it anyway seems like an absolute breach of your rights.
When a legally allowed activity can have significant negative effects on society (as gun ownership does) it's not uncommon that society requires compensation through taxes or insurance.
San Francisco’s law banning firearms in public housing was struck down after the NRA challenged it. Similar issue - you can’t say “sure! we support gun rights and you can have a gun in your home, but public housing is special and not really your home”. The govt can’t provide housing then turn around and say you lose rights because of it.
The courts aren’t very big fans of these “de facto banning by carefully creating requirements that are impossible or near impossible to meet”. In fact, under strict scrutiny, the burden of any requirements have to be justified - even minor hurdles to exercising rights can be deemed unconstitutional.
My point is any constitutuonal debate is going to be wacky. All that really is going to matter is how a judge feels, ultimately.
Incidentally the text of the constitution was only meant to apply to the federal government initially so based on the actual text state governments can 100% ban guns, ban free speech, throw you in jail without the right to an attorney, etc. The Supreme Court does not interpret the constitution in that fashion today but that's a judge made reading.
Voting isn’t a right called out in the constitution, firearms are.
I was just clarifying that charging a fee definitely limits an activity.
People argued for poll taxes saying it wasn’t a large amount, it wasn’t, but the fees were enacted to limit voting. And specifically discriminate based on race. Not good.
This “insurance” fee is designed to limit gun ownership so likely conflicts with the constitution.
The risk of an individual being sued over their use of firearms is negligible, because of the strong legal protections firearms have. It’s impossible for anyone to sue anyone over a firearm used in a crime.
The insurance here is for the city of San Jose.
That would be like requiring car owners to purchase insurance to fund the police department.
That’s simply not how insurance works. Citizens don’t purchase insurance insulate tax payers against the cost of funding the government.
Car insurance is for your personal liability in an "event"
People cannot sue firearm manufacturers for their use in the crime. Civil suits against individuals are allowed. So if I shoot you, you can sue me for shooting you (or the relevant trauma/stress/hospitalization, etc). But you cannot sue Colt because I shot you. I'm not sure if automobiles have or need the same protections - can you sue Chevrolet if I run you over?
In the interest of caution, I’ve reread the article several times.
It’s not clear exactly what’s happening (or whether it’s anything remotely like car insurance.)
There are several possibilities:
1. The city has taken out an insurance policy. This policy will pay the city to cover the cost of mass shootings. In order to prevent an increase in taxes, they are charging a tax/fee to gun owners. This is nothing like car insurance.
It’s also very problematic. This “fee” is simply a tax. The fact that it’s intended to pay the city’s premium for a specific policy doesn’t make it not a tax.
So the city is simply taxing gun owners.
2. All gun owners are now required to take out insurance policies to cover their own unlawful use of firearms. The city will then sue those who engage in mass shootings, and receive damages from the insurance coverage. This is nothing like car insurance.
It’s also very unlikely. The article tells gun owners to pay the city, not find an insurance company to cover them.
3. All gun owners are required to take out insurance policies to cover their liabilities should they be sued by other citizens for their use of guns. This is a lot like car insurance, but least supported by the text of the article. It’s not supported at all really.
As we saw with Obamacare, a requirement to buy insurance is a tax, as is a fee for failing to buy insurance. Do even if it is option 2 or 3, it’s still a tax on gun owners.
Taxing people for exercising a constitutional right is, well, unconstitutional.
So you are right, but my conclusion holds unless the article is very wrong.
I pay car insurance to cover myself, not to cover my neighbor who decides to crash into another person.
What's the current punishment for losing a gun and maybe having it end up causing "gun violence"?
What happens when a person in the US loses their gun? They'll tell you they are now unsafe, but in reality all it does it take away someone's hobby.
It must be nice having such a sheltered, safe life. Not all of us are afforded such opportunity.
edit: stop editing your comment so I can address it. and stop worry about what other people think how you dress. I assure you they care less than you think
For the record, I mentioned where I live because I actually feel far less safe here than in the "bad" parts of San Francisco, Seattle, or Spokane.
ETA:
> worry about yourself
I am worried about myself! Specifically around people who make their identities all about guns, and wear shirts espousing hatred and violence and fear, and attend rallies where they think they're mercenaries being called to start the next civil war.
I lived in the Tenderloin. Hated every second of it (and SF in general), but I sure can't recall a situation where discharging a gun in the middle of a bunch of destitute people would have been the correct option.
They probably are imported from Mountain View or something ;)
It's about time they be made to pay for the increased danger they have brought to society.
Security ain't free. It's either compelled via law, or via tort. Right now, the 'insurance fee' is tort if enough companies are sued.
This isn’t a case of externalities.
Otherwise, let's perform a little experiment. There's assume the suicide rate increases by a factor of 100. This has no impact on the economy? On society?
The original point is that gun ownership increases collective risk, which has an external cost. It does this through increased crime from stolen guns from legal owners, and it does this through self-harm or family harm.
No matter how you slice it, you increase gun owners, you increase the suicides, the gun thefts eventually showing up in other crimes, the murder-suicides, and there is scant evidence that the trade off, a hypothetic stoppage of crime by gun ownership, is worth it, especially since the statistics are in dispute with the NRA claiming 2.5 million crimes per year, and scientific authorities saying it's more like 60,000.
If I own a gun, pay premiums, and my child kills themself with it, do I collect the payout? (Sorry if the article covers that point, adblocker preventing from reading it now, I’ll scan the dead tree version tomorrow.)
If its a liability policy (whuch seems to be what the suggested mandatory insurance would be, as are most insurance mandatss), no, because you can't have liability to yourself, and liability insurance pays out if you incur a liability.
Conceivably, gun insurance could be offered with additional non-liability coverage and liability coverage beyond the mandate, same as car insurance today is, but that’s outside of the requirement. The existence of the requirement would make it more likely that carriers would develop policies with add-on coverage and use mandatory insurance inquiries as upsell/differentiation opportunities.
That means there is no risk pool (unless lots of other cities have this policy). If there’s no risk pool, the insurance company is simply taking the probability of a mass shooting and multiplying it by the cost.
That doesn’t make too much sense from the cities perspective. It would be cheaper to self-insure, or simply rely on taxes to generate the needed revenue.
Unless the city is requiring all gun owners to contact their insurer and get a policy (which the article seems to contradict), this move doesn’t make much sense.
It seems like a pretext to discourage gun ownership.
A more interesting claim for you to attack: externalities are hardly the only thing that matters. Governments need to choose an operating point between citizen freedom and preventing the harms caused by those freedoms. Without just pointing to the exact same numbers you used, why is your operating point better than OP's operating point? What are you exchanging when you move from one to the other? Are you actually increasing Pareto efficiency? Who is harmed under your operating point that is less harmed under OP's, and why should we be willing to harm them?
As I said elsewhere, self-victimized crimes can’t be externalities because in order to be an externality no cost must be paid by the producer.
Not the case with suicides.
But an externality is “a cost or benefit caused by a producer that is not financially incurred or received by that producer.”
Suicide poses a cost on the producer. It also poses a strong immediate cost on the producers family.
I’m not saying suicidal isn’t harmful to society. I’m saying that a cost is paid by the person committing suicide.
From a strictly economic perspective, dead people can’t own any property. So a suicider would pay a 100% cost on their net worth.
I know that’s a bizarre thing to say, but there I said it!
Edit: life insurance makes things more complicated. Most modern policies do pay out in the event of suicide, so it’s possible to make a profit.