Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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