A leading national gun control organization is calling on a pair of insurance companies to stop underwriting what it calls “murder insurance”: National Rifle Association (NRA) insurance policies that cover legal and other expenses for gun owners who shoot people.
The NRA began offering Carry Guard insurance, to little fuss or fanfare, earlier this year. The nation’s leading firearms lobby bills the coverage as “America’s most complete self-defense insurance program and training for those who carry a gun.” A “bronze” policy costs $13.95 per month and provides a maximum of $250,000 for civil protection and $50,000 for criminal defense costs. “Gold Plus” level coverage, which pays up to $1.5 million for civil and $250,000 in criminal defense costs, is offered at $49.95 per month. Carry Guard also provides “gold standard concealed carry training” designed to teach gun owners how to “effectively confront today’s evolving conflict environment,” according to its website.
In addition to covering legal expenses, Carry Guard also provides funds for gun replacement, clean-up costs, bail fees and a 24-hour legal hotline that offers shooters advice on avoiding prosecution. Members are also enrolled in the NRA for a year.
Guns Down, a partner of Color of Change, the nation’s largest Internet-based racial justice group, is calling Carry Guard “murder insurance.”
“This cynical insurance plan is specifically designed to protect ‘Stand Your Ground’ murderers like George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer,” Guns Down said in a statement. “’Stand Your Ground’ laws have caused gun murders to skyrocket, and are radically skewed toward protecting white shooters who kill black victims. NRA Carry Guard turns this racist reality into profit.”
Guns Down is calling attention to the two insurance companies that administer and underwrite Carry Guard policies:
Lockton Affinity, which created and sells NRA Carry Guard insurance, and Chubb Insurance, which underwrites the policies and takes a profit, are perpetuating fear of minorities and immigrants, and by offering special protections to gun owners who shoot first and ask questions later, these insurance companies are promoting gun violence.
"The reason I call it murder insurance is because if you look at the way this is marketed, it's really sold in the context of 'There's a threat around every corner, dear mostly-white NRA member,' and that threat is either a black man or a brown man or some other kind of person of color," Guns Down director Igor Volsky told the Associated Press. "So when you inevitably have to use your gun to defend yourself from this threat around every corner, you have insurance to protect you."
In the United States, possession of firearms, including pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers and anti-tank guns, is a constitutionally enshrined right. This makes even the most common sense reforms a herculean task. After 26 people, most of them six- and seven-year-old children, were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012, millions of Americans thought — and desired — that something would change. But in his first public comments after the horrific Sandy Hook slaughter, NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre asserted that the solution to gun violence was more guns in the hands of “good guys.” Among the more extreme firearm advocates there were nauseating assertions that Sandy Hook was a hoax, a pretense for strict gun control or even confiscation. Republican politicians, who have received many millions of dollars in NRA contributions, have dutifully towed the lobby’s line and have opposed even the most reasonable efforts to curb gun violence.
Take Georgia state Sen. Michael Williams, who is running for governor, for example. Not only does Williams oppose a ban on bump stocks, which Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock used to help him murder 59 people at a country music festival earlier this month, he thinks there should be more of the devices. As sales of bump stocks, which effectively allow semi-automatic assault rifles to fire on full auto (with reduced accuracy), soared amid fears of an imminent ban that never materialized due to Republican objection, Williams announced he would give one away “to one lucky winner.”
Absent any political will to take meaningful action to stanch the bleeding, guns have been used to take an alarming number of American lives. If all of the victims of gun violence in America over the past half century were resurrected from the dead and gathered together in one place, that place would be the 5th-largest city in the nation. It would be bigger than Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Dallas or San Francisco, bigger than the population of 11 states. In fact, more people have been killed by guns in the United States since 1968 than on all the battlefields of all the wars in American history combined. On an average day, over 30 Americans — seven of them children or teenagers — are murdered with guns. There is a very good chance that someone somewhere in this country was shot while you’re reading this.
Where gun control advocates see red, the NRA sees green. Carry Guard isn’t the first insurance offered to gun owners. However, backed by one of the most powerful lobby groups in the nation, it will offer not only greater peace of mind to shooters — some of them “good guys with guns” and some of them not — and greater normalization of an armed society that makes so much of the rest of the world laugh… and cry.