Comment by kunle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kunle | Hacker News Reader

What if guns were treated like cars.

Every single gun has a unique signature (like a VIN #), and you had to buy insurance on your gun in order to own it, transfer title anytime its sold, and be held liable for any violence damage caused by a gun you own.

Insurance companies would have to vet you in order to give you a price, and any mishaps that occurred from guns you own, would make your insurance rates increase. As such you would take as much care who has access to your guns as you do with who has access to your car, and you'd only own guns you need.

Gun owners who are responsible would see the cost of owning guns go up a bit, but more careless folks would feel the economic effects, which would prod them to behave more responsibly.

This way, we can worry less about loopholes around what kinds of weapons people should own, or deal with bans or gun buybacks (which would secretly just be a boon for gun manufacturers). The people so adamant about owning weapons would now have a mechanism to compensate society for the damage they caused (if any).

Good policy because it's a market driven mechanism for gun safety, and good politics because it's functionally the government setting the rules, and getting out of the way (which the right wants) and reducing the societal cost/damange of gun ownership by pricing in externalities (which the left once).

Guns already have to have serial numbers (equivalent to VIN, but less structured, and managed by manufacturer, and no central registry).

The issue is that car accidents are accidents (often involving negligence), whereas gun crime is generally willful (sometimes involving crazy people, but generally just criminals).

There's the issue that a lawful collector or random hunter or whatever with lots of guns is a lower risk than a gangster with one gun, and the risk per gun is vastly lower for a law abiding person with lots of guns vs. a bad guy with one or a few.

In fact, I'd bet that gun crime goes down as the number of guns possessed goes up. Obviously 0 is the least, but 1 is the most, and it's probably close to exponential after that. The guy with 31 guns is way less likely to kill someone than the guy with 3.

The only risk when someone has lots of guns is that they'll get distributed to others -- either through theft or through willful straw-man purchase or other distribution. A person who holds ~30 guns for a gang, then distributes them as needed for crime, is a problem, yes.

Right - I recognize there are limited things you can do about guns illegally out and about. But if owners were held liable for the social effects of weapons they own(ed), then:

1. You'd choose carefully what you owned and why you owned it. No matter how you slice it, its hard to justify why someone should own ~30, ~40, or ~50 firearms (dont know how often this actually happens but I believe owning multiple weapons happens fairly frequently), and any insurer seeing that, would price your risk accordingly. You'd be forced to take steps to reduce the cost of ownership, hence reducing it to the amount you actually use.

2. As a result of this change in ownership, the likelihood of weapons getting stolen drops, and correspondingly the flow of new guns into the black market.

assuming here that guns on the black market typically start out under legal ownership.

1. Actuarially-priced insurance for a white 50 year old male who lives in a rich area and has an 800+ credit score, and owns NFA items and ~500 guns, would be less for all of his collection than for a single 21 year old black male who owns a single Raven .25acp (legally) for self defense.

(Maybe the younger guy is a military veteran, is volunteering to help his community and thus lives in a high-crime area, and has that gun to protect his 5yo niece from criminals in the neighborhood. Or, maybe he's a gang member who hasn't gotten arrested yet. The insurer would assume the latter.)

I mean, look at car insurance. There's also more of a socially-beneficial and defensible use for the 21 year old who wants to defend his family than for a collector, really.

2. Stolen guns are minor part of the supply of guns (10-15%). The benefits of this whole proposal could come from universal background checks on transfers, to the extent that they hinder straw purchases from dealers and "outside the gun show" person to person sales across state lines.

~all guns start out legal (at the manufacturer); the issue is how they go from manufacturer to first sale and then subsequent sales. Right now, a large number of illegal guns (particularly handguns) come from straw purchases (where a criminal has a non-criminal buy a gun from a dealer) or from private party sales (generally across state lines, since high crime places like LA, Baltimore, DC, Chicago have strict gun laws; places with low gun crime have looser laws).

Insurance is for covering unexpected events. A gun being fired is a deliberate act. I don't see how it makes sense in this context.

Gun theft and gun liability insurance do make a lot of sense, and are currently offered.

Generally you get theft as a rider on your homeowners insurance -- which you should have, and you should probably get for computer equipment, camera equipment, etc. Allied Brokers in Palo Alto is awesome, btw

Liability is either specific to profession, or membership in something like NRA, for instructors. It's worth having an umbrella liability policy too, since it's pretty cheap to get $1-10mm in coverage once you have $500k coverage for your car, which is itself only 2-3x as expensive as the legal minimum.

Homeowner's insurance is to cover the cost of the item. If someone steals my gun and then shoots someone with it, I don't believe the homeowner's insurance will cover that. However, I think that's what kunle had in mind.

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