So car insurance is collective punishment? You own a gun, you increase collective risk. Conservatives hate paying for negative externalities but love positive externalities it seems.
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.
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?
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.
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.