A Free Market Solution to Gun Violence

           Dylann Roof, the 21 years old man accused of murdering nine African-American worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, was not a gun enthusiast, sportsman or collector.  In fact, he owned no guns until April 16, 2015.  Federal law requires gun dealers to submit biographical data about potential buyers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) in order to determine whether the potential buyer is permitted under federal law to own a gun.  The system has three business days to deny a potential gun purchase, or else, by default, the gun sale can go through.

            Roof had been arrested on a felony gun charge the month before. Under federal law, the arrest was an insufficient reason to deny Roof his gun.  That Roof had admitted to being in possession of drugs would have been a sufficient reason, but the NICS investigator didn’t learned about this until after the three-day deadline had passed and Roof had obtained his weapon.

            Intimating an unwillingness to consider new legislation, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said,  “it’s disastrous that this bureaucratic mistake prevented existing laws from working and blocking an illegal gun sale.  The facts undercut attempts to use the tragedy to enact unnecessary gun laws.”

            This fits with the general Republican narrative that governments are incompetent to do much of anything.  If only existing gun laws had been enforced, there would have been no killings. If only the federal agents hadn’t screwed up, those worshippers would still be alive.

            If only . . .

            Comes now an ingenious proposal from Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY).  In H.R. 2546, Maloney proposes that before anyone other than a government can buy a gun, he or she must provide the seller with evidence that he or she has a “qualified liability insurance policy” protecting third parties from “losses resulting from the use of the firearm while it is owned by the purchaser.”

            The idea is that rather than try to ban the ownership of firearms, we simply treat guns as dangerous instruments, incentivize their proper use and compensate for losses the way we do for cars.  Maloney argued, “We require insurance to own a car, . . The results are clear: car fatalities have declined by 25 percent in the last decade.”

            That’s because, just as with cars (conservatives, listen up), “an insurance requirement would allow the free market to encourage cautious behavior. . .” 

            What’s not to like?

            An insurance requirement would get the government out of the business of deciding who may have a gun and who may not.  There would be no national registry, and to the extent that there are records of gun ownership, they’re controlled by multiple private companies.  There would be no potential for government “incompetence.”

            Gun enthusiasts and sportsmen could renew their policies every year, and upon presentation of a valid insurance card (just like the ones we carry in the glove compartments of our cars), they could buy guns wherever they wanted and take them home on the very same day.  Under the bill, gun sellers would only have to prove that they had asked for and seen an insurance card, a requirement easily satisfied by a photocopier or a scanner.

            And insurance companies would be a position to do what they do best: assess risk and protect against it.  They might charge higher rates for men and boys, people younger than, say 30, and people who haven’t had training in gun safety.  There could be higher rates for different kinds of weapons. Insurance companies could refuse to insure people with criminal records and histories of mental health issues.  Responsible “law-abiding” citizens not likely to be involved in gun tragedies would pay low rates.  Victims could be assured that there would be money available to compensate them for their injuries.

            Of course, this sets insurance companies up to be “rent collectors” in the economic sense. But they’d be performing a valuable public service, and for that, who could begrudge them the opportunity to make a buck or two?  Does anyone think that the National Rifle Association wouldn’t jump at the chance to sell something else to its members that they have to buy?

            H.R. 2546 has some flaws. It doesn’t define what the liability limits would be for a “qualified liability insurance policy.”  More seriously, it doesn’t seem to apply to people who aren’t “purchasers,” and so it would be unlawful for a person to own a gun without also having insurance coverage, as written, the bill wouldn’t  keep guns out of his hands of people who get them from their parents.

            Still, this approach has promise.  Who says liberals can’t appreciate the power of the free market?