This is a great analysis, and an awesome opportunity to overcome the collective positions about US gun policies: Get a million people and their neighbors to call their legislators to adopt San Jose's requirement that all gun owners must have a liability policy to pay for the damage caused by their guns. It should be expensive to inflict …
This is a great analysis, and an awesome opportunity to overcome the collective positions about US gun policies: Get a million people and their neighbors to call their legislators to adopt San Jose's requirement that all gun owners must have a liability policy to pay for the damage caused by their guns. It should be expensive to inflict harm on other people. And questioning the bizarre ban on collecting gun related medical data should accompany the suggestion. It's a 'common sense' piece meal solution, for sure, but it may be a start. Our children and teachers should not have to live in a 'sick' environment every day they show up at school. Zero tolerance.
Mr. Hartman citation:
There are other commonsense solutions, like universal background checks, we could also put into law.
For example, back in the early years of the 20th century when cars had become so common they were regularly killing people in auto accidents, states hit on a simple formula to encourage safe driving and maintain clear lines of responsibility when things went wrong.
• *Every car was required to be registered every year with the state; if it was found out in public without registration it could be confiscated.
• *Every driver was required to prove knowledge of how to safely drive, with both a written and a real-life driving test.
• *And every driver was required to carry liability insurance, so if there was an accident the victims were covered, regardless of who was at fault.
For about 100 years drivers have lived with these three simple requirements, and they’ve worked. The liability insurance is particularly effective: as a “free market solution,” insurance companies now compile information on drivers’ safety records, including their history of violence, and set their rates accordingly.
Think about it: if Adam Lanza had murdered those kids at Sandy Hook by mowing them down in the street with his mom’s SUV, their families would have gotten $1 million each from Geico (for example). But because he killed them with a gun, they got nothing; even survivors of mass shootings and “accidents” get nothing for medical bills.
The only city in America who’s taken a cue from that century of insurance experience is San Jose, California which in 2021 put a liability insurance requirement into place for all gun owners in the city.
If you’ve committed gun-related crimes or your guns have killed people in the past, the “free market” for insurance will make it very expensive to own a gun; if you’re a gun owner who keeps your weapons in a gun safe and uses trigger guards, your rates will be nominal.
One of the main reasons fewer children are dying in car accidents now than a decade or two ago is that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been compiling statistics for decades and has repeatedly identified safety flaws in particular vehicles or the way they’re used.
Gun safety advocates have, for years, called for a federal agency to compile gun injury and death statistics, but a bought-off member of Congress, Arkansas Republican Jay Dickey, attached the notorious “Dickey Amendment” to a must-pass omnibus spending bill in 1996.
In response to a growing number of research papers in the 1980s and early 1990s calling gun deaths a national health crisis and demanding federally funded science on the issue, his NRA-sponsored amendment banned any federal dollars from being used to research gun injuries or deaths in the US.
As The New England Journal of Medicine noted:
“Although substantial federal funding has been devoted to research on motor vehicle crashes, the firearm industry and gun-rights organizations, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA), have been effective at keeping federal dollars from financing firearm-related research.”
This is a great analysis, and an awesome opportunity to overcome the collective positions about US gun policies: Get a million people and their neighbors to call their legislators to adopt San Jose's requirement that all gun owners must have a liability policy to pay for the damage caused by their guns. It should be expensive to inflict harm on other people. And questioning the bizarre ban on collecting gun related medical data should accompany the suggestion. It's a 'common sense' piece meal solution, for sure, but it may be a start. Our children and teachers should not have to live in a 'sick' environment every day they show up at school. Zero tolerance.
Mr. Hartman citation:
There are other commonsense solutions, like universal background checks, we could also put into law.
For example, back in the early years of the 20th century when cars had become so common they were regularly killing people in auto accidents, states hit on a simple formula to encourage safe driving and maintain clear lines of responsibility when things went wrong.
• *Every car was required to be registered every year with the state; if it was found out in public without registration it could be confiscated.
• *Every driver was required to prove knowledge of how to safely drive, with both a written and a real-life driving test.
• *And every driver was required to carry liability insurance, so if there was an accident the victims were covered, regardless of who was at fault.
For about 100 years drivers have lived with these three simple requirements, and they’ve worked. The liability insurance is particularly effective: as a “free market solution,” insurance companies now compile information on drivers’ safety records, including their history of violence, and set their rates accordingly.
Think about it: if Adam Lanza had murdered those kids at Sandy Hook by mowing them down in the street with his mom’s SUV, their families would have gotten $1 million each from Geico (for example). But because he killed them with a gun, they got nothing; even survivors of mass shootings and “accidents” get nothing for medical bills.
The only city in America who’s taken a cue from that century of insurance experience is San Jose, California which in 2021 put a liability insurance requirement into place for all gun owners in the city.
If you’ve committed gun-related crimes or your guns have killed people in the past, the “free market” for insurance will make it very expensive to own a gun; if you’re a gun owner who keeps your weapons in a gun safe and uses trigger guards, your rates will be nominal.
One of the main reasons fewer children are dying in car accidents now than a decade or two ago is that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been compiling statistics for decades and has repeatedly identified safety flaws in particular vehicles or the way they’re used.
Gun safety advocates have, for years, called for a federal agency to compile gun injury and death statistics, but a bought-off member of Congress, Arkansas Republican Jay Dickey, attached the notorious “Dickey Amendment” to a must-pass omnibus spending bill in 1996.
In response to a growing number of research papers in the 1980s and early 1990s calling gun deaths a national health crisis and demanding federally funded science on the issue, his NRA-sponsored amendment banned any federal dollars from being used to research gun injuries or deaths in the US.
As The New England Journal of Medicine noted:
“Although substantial federal funding has been devoted to research on motor vehicle crashes, the firearm industry and gun-rights organizations, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA), have been effective at keeping federal dollars from financing firearm-related research.”