Thom Hartmann: Republicans Should Love a Free Market Approach to Guns. Treat Them, at a Minimum, Like Cars.
March 28, 2021
At a minimum, guns should be treated like cars and car ownership. (Brock Wegner on Unsplash)
By Thom Hartmann
The discussion about guns in America generally falls into two polar opposite positions: don’t regulate guns at all, or ban large parts of the spectrum of guns and heavily regulate ownership of the rest.
But there’s a third position, entirely outside of that spectrum, which every actual “free market“ conservative in America should embrace, and liberals should be down with as well.
That’s to treat guns the same way we treat cars.
Back around the turn of the 20th century, cars were replacing horses in a really big way and three problems became evident.
The first was that there were a lot of people driving them who really didn’t know how to drive, and they were hurting and killing themselves and other people.
Second was that people were stealing them and it was difficult to track them back to their owners, even when they were found.
And the third problem was that completely innocent breadwinners who were driving just fine would get hit by other drivers, typically accidentally, but regardless of the intention of the other driver they would end up dead or injured for life, wiping out the ability to support their families.
Over the course of a few decades, we figured out a simple solution to all three of these problems.
Register cars so there’s a provable chain of ownership; require a license to drive that can only be obtained by proving proficiency as a driver and an understanding of the rules of the road; and liability insurance so if someone was injured or killed they or their family wouldn’t be financially wiped out.
We’ve fine-tuned the liability insurance part of that in pretty much every state with “no fault“ policies so, regardless of the intent or incompetence of whichever driver caused the death or injury, the injured party gets compensated without a lot of lawsuits and court activity.
So why not simply apply the same logic to guns?
When you buy a gun, it gets registered with the state. Every year that registration is renewed for a small fee that covers the expenses to the state of gun injuries, gun suicides and homicides. If you lose or sell that gun, just like if your car gets stolen or sold, you immediately notify the state. Having or using a gun that is unregistered would be just as much an offense as trying to drive an unregistered car on the freeway.
When you go to buy a car, they typically ask for your driver’s license. This is mostly to identify you, because no state requires you to have a driver’s license in order to buy a car, but every state in the union requires you to have a driver’s license to drive that car off the lot. Thus, no car dealer wants the responsibility or liability of letting an unlicensed and therefore presumably incompetent driver loose on the streets.
State DMV’s could easily expand their services to include a written test and a shooting range, so people who want to become gun owners can demonstrate that they understand the laws in the state, common-sense gun ownership practices, and have a level of proficiency that makes it far less likely they will accidentally kill themselves or others.
This could even be a revenue source for the states, and while a gun shop could sell you a gun without a shooter’s license, they wouldn’t let you leave the premises with it until you get your license.
But the insurance is the part conservative should love. It would create a whole new marketplace for the insurance industry, which has done very, very well over the years with car insurance. And it’s all about the “free market.“
Car insurance companies nowadays pay very careful attention to many different aspects of your life when it comes to the price they’ll quote you for your policy. They buy information from online aggregators about your medical history, drug usage, drinking habits, previous run-ins with the law, and some are even using GPS information from your cellphone to determine how fast or erratically you drive.
If they were writing gun policies, it’s a pretty safe bet they’d be checking out backgrounds far more thoroughly than the FBI does right now.
It’s hard to imagine, in fact, that any insurance company would’ve written a policy for the Newtown shooter or his mother, or for the guy who just shot up the supermarket in Boulder, Colorado. Anybody building an arsenal, amassing ammunition, or with a history of violence would immediately come under scrutiny.
And, just as a car dealership won’t let you drive a car off the lot without your driver’s license, they also won’t let you do it until you’ve confirmed with them that your car liability insurance policy also covers your new car. Gun dealers would do the same, just to protect themselves from liability.
And none of this would require government to “take away people’s guns.“
If people ended up surrendering their guns to state buyback programs or otherwise disposing of them, it would be because they couldn’t get insurance or the insurance company considered them such a risk that the price was too high for them. It would be the “free market“ that took away their guns, not the “damn gummint.”
This wouldn’t, of course, eliminate the need for common-sense regulation of firearms manufacturing and sale, anymore than requiring those three things for cars means that you can drive down the street without headlights, seat-belts or a muffler. But we already have those: just try to buy a fully automatic weapon or a sawed-off shotgun.
If anything, it would encourage a broader and stronger marketplace for safer guns. And, yes, there is such a thing. You can now buy guns that cannot be fired unless they recognize your fingerprint, for example. Others require you to wear a wristwatch or piece of jewelry that has a microchip in it that the gun senses, allowing it to be taken off safety only in the presence of its legal owner.
Guns that can be easily converted to full-automatic-fire with things like a bump-stock would become harder and harder to insure, the same way sports-cars that can go 150 cause insurance companies to get a little nervous.
But if somebody is that committed to owning a gun they, just like the guy who wants to own a Maserati, will just have to cough up the extra cash for the insurance policy.
Just consider the real-life situation today.
If the Boulder, Colorado killer had used his car to drive into a crowd of people outside a supermarket and killed a bunch of them, every single victim would receive a substantial check from his auto insurance company. The company wouldn’t like it, but they’d pay.
Because he killed those people with a gun instead of a car, however, none of his victims will see a penny. Their families will receive no help for the cost of burying their loved ones, and if people had been left injured, as they often are in these cases, there’s no help for their medical expenses and rehabilitation.
It’s unlikely America is going to solve its gun problem with a single, sweeping piece of legislation the way Australia did back in 1996.
That would probably be optimal, but given how widespread guns are in the United States, how the US Supreme Court with their Citizens United decision legalized political bribery by groups like the NRA, and how deeply buried guns are in rightwing identity politics and the sense of manhood among insecure or poorly-endowed men, it’s probably not going to happen.
Treating guns like cars, however, is something everybody can understand. We’re familiar with it. We’ve all dealt with it.
Who can argue that it’s crazy or wild to suggest that the “registration, license and insurance“ that every cop asks for at every traffic stop wouldn’t be reasonable when somebody is found with a gun?
If we’re going to solve our gun crisis in America, we need a little creativity. Hopefully this idea, which I first floated in my book The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, can provide a start.
The website of origin for this commentary is HartmannReport.Org.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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