1,The new law imposes unnecessary burdens on lawful gun owners and are unlikely to save taxpayers a single dollar, much less save a single life.<\/p>\n
2,The law\u2019s burdens on San Jose gun owners aren\u2019t justified by the rare times when insurance might cover an incident of gun violence.<\/p>\n
3,If San Jose officials are serious about reducing gun violence and lowering associated financial costs, there are plenty of better solutions.<\/p>\n
8 Problems With San Jose\u2019s Gun Insurance Mandate and Gun Ownership Tax<\/a><\/p>\n Lawful gun ownership in San Jose, California, is about to become more expensive and onerous after the City Council\u00a0passed a measure<\/a>\u00a0imposing two unprecedented burdens on the possession of firearms inside city limits.<\/p>\n Beginning later this year, San Jose\u2019s lawful gun owners will be required to maintain \u201ca homeowner\u2019s, renter\u2019s, or gun liability insurance policy \u2026 specifically covering losses or damages resulting from any negligent or accidental use\u201d of their firearms.<\/p>\n Gun owners also must pay an annual \u201cGun Harm Reduction Fee\u201d\u2014an as-yet undetermined amount that\u00a0officials suggest<\/a>\u00a0will be roughly $25 a year.<\/p>\n City officials claim these are necessary steps that will save lives by incentivizing responsible gun ownership practices while making gun owners foot the bill for the financial costs of gun violence.<\/p>\n Want to keep up with the 24\/7 news cycle? Want to know the most important stories of the day for conservatives? Need news you can trust? Subscribe to The Daily Signal\u2019s email newsletter.\u00a0Learn more >><\/a><\/p>\n In reality, the new law imposes unnecessary burdens on lawful gun owners and are unlikely to save taxpayers a single dollar, much less save a single life.<\/p>\n Here are eight major problems with San Jose\u2019s latest gun control push:<\/p>\n The new ordinance doesn\u2019t require gun owners to certify that they\u2019ve obtained coverage or paid the annual fee.<\/p>\n Unless the city plans on conducting door-to-door compliance checks, it will face a nearly impossible task of ensuring widespread compliance with what is essentially an honor system.<\/p>\n Currently, the only independent liability insurance for gun owners is self-defense insurance, which covers the costs for any criminal or civil proceedings resulting from a gun owner\u2019s intentional\u00a0defensive use of a firearm<\/a>.<\/p>\n These plans don\u2019t cover civil liability for cases of negligence or accidental shootings, as required by the San Jose ordinance.<\/p>\n This means gun owners will have to rely exclusively on personal liability provisions in their homeowner\u2019s or renter\u2019s insurance plans, or pay hundreds of dollars for a personal liability umbrella plan. Even then, such plans rarely include specific provisions covering liability for gun-related injuries.<\/p>\n Even in a best-case scenario where gun liability insurance is widely available and the requirement is widely enforced, these insurance plans will cover only a miniscule fraction of gun deaths and injuries occurring inside San Jose.<\/p>\n Most acts of gun violence involve\u00a0criminal or intentionally wrongful acts<\/a>, which California law prohibits insurance companies from covering. Importantly, this would exclude coverage not just for homicide and assault, but also for gun suicides, which comprise\u00a060% of all gun deaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n Additionally, while the new law purports to make gun owners responsible for any harm inflicted by lost or stolen firearms unless the guns were first reported as lost or stolen, homeowner\u2019s and renter\u2019s insurance policies cover acts committed only by the insured person while on the insured property.<\/p>\n So regardless of who San Jose deems responsible, if the gun owner has a typical homeowner\u2019s or renter\u2019s insurance policy, that policy simply wouldn\u2019t cover, for example, harm inflicted by a thief who stole the gun or by the gun owner during an off-property hunting accident.<\/p>\n Nor do these policies cover harm inflicted on an insured party, as when a gunowner accidentally shoots himself or a household member while cleaning his gun.<\/p>\n This leaves coverage limited to the narrow circumstances in which an insured gun owner, while on his or her own property, accidentally or negligently harms a third party with a firearm.<\/p>\n This type of gun violence is relatively rare.<\/p>\n According to a report<\/a>\u00a0that the city itself relied on to support the mandate, San Jose averages only two \u201cunintentional\/undetermined\u201d gun deaths a year, amounting to only 3.4% of all annual gun deaths.<\/p>\n At the same time, the city with a population over 1 million averages 25 annual nonfatal hospital inpatient admissions and 59 annual emergency room visits without hospitalization due to \u201cunintentional\/undetermined\u201d gun injuries.<\/p>\n Even if most of these deaths and injuries are truly \u201cunintentional,\u201d as opposed to merely \u201cundetermined,\u201d it\u2019s impossible to know how many were committed with lawfully possessed guns in circumstances that would be covered with traditional homeowner\u2019s or renter\u2019s liability policies.<\/p>\n And, of course, no insurance policy would cover situations involving unlawfully possessed guns.<\/p>\n The law\u2019s burdens on San Jose gun owners aren\u2019t justified by the rare times when insurance might cover an incident of gun violence.<\/p>\n San Jose officials repeatedly defended their gun insurance mandate by lamenting the financial cost of gun violence on the city\u2019s emergency response services and insisting that gun owners should pick up the tab for gun violence.<\/p>\n And yet, mandating gun liability insurance does nothing to alleviate the cost to taxpayers. In the rare instances where insurance policies might cover gun injuries, the payouts wouldn\u2019t go to the city or to its emergency responders.<\/p>\n Instead, the payments would be directed toward the victim\u2019s medical bills (a cost only sometimes and indirectly borne by taxpayers if the victim is uninsured or on state-subsidized insurance) and any potential civil damages for lost wages or pain and suffering (a cost never borne by taxpayers).<\/p>\n Just as the insurance mandate is unlikely to save taxpayer money, it\u2019s equally unlikely to save lives by deterring future acts of gun violence.<\/p>\n California has the most stringent gun laws in the nation. If gun owners aren\u2019t deterred from negligent, reckless, or unsafe conduct by the state\u2019s existing criminal sanctions or impositions of civil liability, why would they be deterred by the risk of increased insurance premiums?<\/p>\n Perhaps worse, gun liability insurance for negligence may create perverse disincentives for gun owners, who no longer risk financial ruin for careless conduct that harms others.<\/p>\n San Jose refers to the new fee imposed on gun owners as a \u201cGun Harm Reduction Fee,\u201d but it\u2019s nothing less than an unconstitutional tax on the exercise of an enumerated right.<\/p>\n The Supreme Court has\u00a0struck down similar laws<\/a>, reasoning that \u201ca state may not impose a charge for the enjoyment of a right granted by the federal Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n This is precisely what San Jose\u2019s fee does\u2014require gun owners to pay an annual sum of money to exercise their Second Amendment rights inside the city.<\/p>\n Lawful gun owners aren\u2019t the driving force behind gun violence, and yet San Jose has singled them out to pay for gun violence.<\/p>\n Law-abiding citizens shouldn\u2019t be saddled with the blame (or the bill) for criminal actions they didn\u2019t commit, encourage, or facilitate.<\/p>\n If San Jose officials are serious about reducing gun violence and lowering associated financial costs, there are plenty of better solutions.<\/p>\n The city could focus its energy on enforcing existing gun laws\u2014perhaps, for example, by\u00a0disarming its share of the 23,000 Californians<\/a>\u00a0who state authorities know possess guns despite being prohibited persons.<\/p>\n It could make these unlawful gun owners and others who commit gun crimes pay by imposing fees and restitution to the state as part of criminal sentencing.<\/p>\n The city also could increase the size of its police force to deal with\u00a0chronic understaffing and workload problems<\/a>\u00a0that inhibit officers\u2019 ability to enforce the law.<\/p>\n Instead of opting for these rational and straightforward steps, however, the city apparently has defaulted to what\u2019s become\u00a0an all-too-common tactic<\/a>\u00a0in gun control politics\u2014passing unserious laws that burden lawful gun ownership without addressing any of the real problems.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1,The new law imposes unnecessary burdens on lawful gun owners and are unlikely to save taxpayers a single dollar, much less save a single life. 2,The law\u2019s burdens on San Jose gun owners aren\u2019t justified by the rare times when insurance might cover an incident of gun violence. 3,If San Jose officials are serious about … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,8,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-rkba","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76879,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76878\/revisions\/76879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1. Enforcement Nearly Impossible<\/strong><\/h2>\n
2. Insurance Policies Don\u2019t Exist<\/strong><\/h2>\n
3. Insignificant Coverage<\/strong><\/h2>\n
4. \u00a0Payouts Don\u2019t Reduce Taxpayer Burden<\/strong><\/h2>\n
5. \u00a0Mandate Won\u2019t Save Lives<\/strong><\/h2>\n
6. Unconstitutional Tax<\/strong><\/h2>\n
7. Misplaced Blame<\/strong><\/h2>\n
8. \u00a0Legitimate Solutions Ignored<\/strong><\/h2>\n