Imagine having to carry “vote insurance” in case you cast a ballot for a terrible candidate. Or how about “speech insurance” just in case you say something that offends someone else. Those things would be both ridiculous and unconstitutional. Not all civil liberties are treated the same however and the mayor of San Jose, California wants to force the city’s gun owners to carry “gun insurance” in case their firearms cause any death or dismemberment. Actually, the point of this stupid thing is to offset the cost of illegal gun use, making it the worst possible 2nd Amendment infringement short of confiscation.
Sam Liccardo is the mayor of San Jose and he doesn’t like the fact that people have the right to keep and bear arms. Naturally he’s a democrat and as such wants to attack that right any way possible. In an op-ed printed in the SFGate, he laid out his argument as to why law-abiding gun owners should foot the bill for criminals committing crime:
…this month, I proposed an oft-considered but as-yet-never-implemented idea: require every gun owner in the 10th-largest city in the United States to buy liability insurance.
Every U.S. state mandates that automobile drivers buy liability insurance; we should require no less of gun owners. Cars and guns have exacted a similarly grim human toll, each causing about 40,000 deaths in 2017.
Owning a gun is a Constitutional right while driving a car is a privilege extended by the state. Also, since California doesn’t generally permit people to carry concealed weapons and bans open carry, people of the state keep their firearms at home. You don’t need insurance on a car that you keep on your own property and never drive on public streets.
That is, for decades, taxpayers have subsidized gun ownership and the harms that accompany it. Direct costs of gun violence to California taxpayers – for ambulances, cops and emergency rooms – exceeded $1.4 billion last year, according to a study from gun-control advocacy group Giffords. While the Second Amendment protects a right to bear arms, it does not require taxpayers to subsidize the exercise of that right.
See, the thing is that legal gun owners aren’t the ones committing the crime. They aren’t shooting people in the street, so why should they pay for what criminals do?
The mayor doesn’t have an answer to that, but he he does acknowledge that good guys with guns aren’t the problem:
Of course, “the crooks” won’t pay a fee or buy insurance; only law-abiding gun owners would.
Regardless of where the gun is purchased, all San Jose residents would face an insurance requirement for merely possessing a gun – just as they would a car.
Now wait for this:
Yet if a constitutionally compliant pat-down search revealed possession of an uninsured gun, the suspect would face the consequences of an uninsured motorist, including a fine, misdemeanor conviction and seizure of the gun.
Basically this is a liberal gun control scheme to confiscate firearms from law-abiding people that does absolutely nothing to target criminals.
Besides the Constitutional issues, the biggest problem here is that no companies actually offer “gun insurance” policies. The NRA use to offer gun liability insurance but liberal states like California sued then and forced them to stop.
If San Jose residents must carry gun insurance but nobody offers such a policy, what the hell are gun owners supposed to do? Don’t worry, Mayor McCheese has a solution that’s even more horrible:
If San Jose’s gun owners can’t get liability insurance, they can comply with the mandate by paying a fee to compensate taxpayers for the “gun violence subsidy” borne by the public.
If some gun owners can’t get insurance, then our proposal simply requires them to pay an annual fee to compensate taxpayers who have grudgingly borne the financial costs of gun violence.
And how much is that fee because if it’s over $0 it’s too much. This is the Obamacare of gun control and that’s not a compliment.
Here’s a better idea: a criminal tax. The people who actually commit the crimes have to pay for the cost of their destruction and incarceration, since they’re the assholes doing it. How does it make any sense for a law-abiding gun owner to pay for something he or she has nothing to do with?
