Undergraduate Reecia Gault wrote in her research project, “According to the author of ‘Mandating Gun Insurance,’ Adam Shniderman writes ‘Gun injuries in the United States cause more than $1 billion per year in hospital costs. Physician costs are estimated to add about 20% to that figure. Medicaid and other public coverage sources are responsible for paying more than half of these costs.’ And that doesn’t even count the human costs from the death toll, and the mental trauma on survivors and family members…”
The Second Amendment is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court has upheld this in recent years. But maybe there’s a solution where responsible gun owners can be protected, and irresponsible ones who contribute to the deaths and costs on all Americans be held accountable: gun insurance.
Reecia researched the book Guns In America: Examining the Facts. Author Donald J. Campbell writes, “First, insurance costs might discourage an unknown but presumably sizable number of non-gun-owning individuals from ever purchasing firearms, thus decreasing the number of guns that might be stolen, used for suicide or criminal activities, or result in accidental discharges and injuries.”
Campbell continued with this point: “Second, mandatory insurance might discourage actual gun owners from acquiring additional firearms if insurance fees increased with each gun owned. Third, to obtain discounted rates, gun owners might be more likely to store their firearms more securely.”
According to Campbell, several state legislatures (California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York) considered gun insurance mandates, as has the U.S. Congress, But only a few have passed it, such as New Jersey and the city of San Jose, California.
In her award-nominated research, Reecia compared San Jose to three cities of comparable size for gun death rates. She found San Jose’s gun death rate (3.8 per 100,000) were far lower than Charlotte, North Carolina (16.3 per 100,000), Jacksonville, Florida (13.7 per 100,000) and Austin, Texas (13.9 per 100,000).
Reecia also compared New Jersey to other states of similar size in America. In her work, she discovered that New Jersey had a gun death rate of 1.7 per 100,000, compared to Georgia (17.6 per 100,000), North Carolina (16.3 per 100,000) and Michigan (12.6 per 100,000).
Finally, she found that the U.S. had higher gun death rates than other countries with gun insurance. In America, we have 13.7 per 100,000, while Finland’s gun death rate is 4.5 per 100,000. For the United Kingdom, it’s 0.1 per 100,000. For Sweden, they have a gun death rate of 0.5 per 100,000.
I’m sure readers will see this research and think “No one will ever go along with this, even though it seems to work.” Perhaps there’s an even better way to make this work. There’s a staggering cost all of us have to pay for gun violence in America, whether we own a gun or not. We also know many gun owners in our community who are very responsible people, whose gun ownership makes our community safer.
But then there are some gun owners whose irresponsible behavior from poorly securing weapons to giving them out to troubled family members and may even act poorly themselves. Just as we need a system to hold them accountable that doesn’t kick in after the tragedy, we could have gun insurance help do things like provide a discount on taxes for responsible usage by individuals.
Last year, Christiana Walker and I tested whether states that provide incentives for gun safety devices have fewer gun deaths. Christiana and I found that for the 13 states that provide gun safety tax breaks, and found 10.5 gun deaths per 100,000 residents. For the 37 states that don’t provide such breaks, they had 16.2 gun deaths per 100,000 residents.” We need to act to prevent gun deaths from continuing to skyrocket in America and could possibly lead to mass gun confiscation as a desperate response.
Reecia Gault is an art major and political science minor, a finalist for a Hines Undergraduate Award.
John A. Tures is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Political Science Program at LaGrange College, in LaGrange, Georgia. His first book, “Branded”, is available on Amazon. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu.