I think we really need to put this idea in trash bin where it belongs. I keep seeing this proposal floated in comments on gun related diaries and I think it is just plain foolish.
Think about this for a moment.
We already have too many guns out there. And clearly if you read David Waldman or Tom Begnal it becomes obvious that too many of these guns have bullets in them and quite often at times they should not have bullets in them.
So we want to insure guns?
Why? This this just transfers the liability for any bad things that happen with that gun from the "responsible" gun owner to the insurance company. How does this help?
Given the choice between a bunch of money and my 8 year old son in a casket, or fewer guns out there and going fishing with my son, well I think I'll just have to go with the latter thank you very much.
And of course what happens when they get tort reform into law and set a maximum award for these incidents? Then you end up with a dead child/spouse/etc and not much money, but at least the insurance company executives would get big bonuses.
But the worst aspect of the Insurance idea is that we would be creating a new profit center related to guns. Now we have insurance companies making money off of gun ownership and of course that puts a new group of corporations and the lobbyists that go with them in the position of favoring as many guns out there as possible. How does this help?
How about instead we create a tax on guns and bullets indexed to the number of deaths and injuries related to guns?
(Apparently the above suggestion regarding taxation has been interpreted as the suggestion of an either or choice. This is not the case, I was just throwing out the idea that there might be better alternatives and suggested one. My bad. I just think that the whole idea of gun insurance doesn't really address the problem which is people dying needlessly because of guns)