Adding a victim compensation tax (modeled on the one used for vaccines) to every gun purchase is not a terrible idea, but it isn’t going to happen. And as long as were discussing ideas that will never happen, why go so easy on gun manufacturers? I’d argue that any gun that is discharged resulting in the death or injury of an innocent person should be the partial responsibility of the manufacturer. As long as they sell weapons that even a two year old can fire, and they refuse to make their products even remotely safe to have around the house, they should be liable. You want to sell a product that can kill dozens of people in under a minute? Okay, but you’re responsible for every unjustified death that occurs. It’s nice to be able to say that victims will get compensation, but building in a tax structure to do that really just creates a solution that disincentivizes fundamental change.
Are they going to build and sell a gun that could result in dozens of million dollar settlements? I’d say no.
A high-capacity magazine doesn’t seem like an attractive risk in those circumstances.
The same argument applies to knives. Give up on blaming the manufacturers and sellers. Sue the shooters.
I do fully support Thom Hartmann’s (I heard it first there) suggestion that gun owners be required to have liability insurance just like car owners. You can own a car but not drive it without insurance. Similarly, you could own a gun, but it would have to be stored in a third party escrow if you don’t have insurance. Insurance companies have a pretty good handle on risk. Not perfect, but it’s better than the meat ax approach.
Since a large percentage of shooters are dead, in jail, or are gangbangers, pro criminals, or crazy and out of reach, how are you going to sue them? The insurance notion sounds good, but the gun nuts would with some justification scream that the requirement would exclude Law Abiding Poor Americans from their (nonexistent) right to own guns. It would be interesting, though, to see what the insurancecos thought about the risk and the price of the insurance.
Actually, the idea is to have the insurance companies weed out the dangerous ones. Not ideal, but short of repealing the 2nd Amendment that’s about all you can do. Suing the gun manufacturers makes fine press for ambitious prosecutors, but it has been tried many times and always fails. How do you think this SCOTUS would rule? Bans don’t work, SCOTUS has overturned them in ???? vs City of Chicago. Sure you can ban scary looking guns and high capacity magazines but that’s just more feel good. Forty people were killed with guns in Chicago last weekend alone. By ordinary guns, not assault rifles. A lot by cheap crappy handguns. In Blue Illinois a big gun transfer tax was defeated. Conventional feel good bans haven’t worked for fifty years. They are only good for pulling in donations and votes. Unleashing the rapacious greed on Insurance companies might. I’d rather have them running gun control than health care.
What do you mean by “nonexistant” right to own guns?
As the law currently stands such a right exists, but not only was that not always the case, but half of the Supreme Court minus one doesn’t believe that right exists. I don’t like saying it doesn’t exist because the Supremes are the law even if we disagree.
When I worked in pharma we could be sued for making medications that were supposed to help people but instead hurt them.
Yet, if you make a product that is specifically designed to hurt people – in some cases, a lot of people in a short period of time – there is apparently far less legal liability.
Doesn’t seem quite right to me.
You can be sued if a gun is defective. For example if it blows up, hurting or killing the shooter.
But you can’t sue because a product performs its advertised function.
Would be a wonderful Idea if the R-NRA members of Congress hadn’t gotten there first; gun manufacturers are exempt from lawsuits.
Kind of my whole point.
It’s hard to imagine how a machine designed solely for the purpose of killing or injuring can be made “reasonably safe”. Comparisons with cars, knives, hatchets, etc, really don’t apply — their primary purpose lies elsewhere. If they kill/injure people it’s because they are being used well outside their intended purpose. Guns, OTOH, are being used for exactly what they’re designed to do.
PS — It’s interesting to imagine the compensation applied to drones.
You can’t make a gun safe without turning into a Nerf toy. But you can do other things.
For example, guns have safeties. That’s a good start. But how apart a warning LED light if the safety isn’t engaged? Similarly, how about a LED light that tells you that you have a round in the chamber? We’ve discussed trigger locks. That’s an okay idea, but how about a dedicated lockable storage device sold with each weapon with an number lock and an alarm. You know how annoying it is when a car alarm goes off and the owner isn’t around to disengage it? Well, you type in a code to unlock your gun and then it buys you a maximum of twelve hours without typing in the code again until the car alarm goes off.
Similarly, in the future, biometric data like Iris-recognition or voice-recognition could be used to assure that only a gun owner can fire a gun. Perhaps like modern video games, you could be allowed to add a user or two to your gun, but no more than that.
Point is, if manufacturers had to worry about liability, they’d invest in these kinds of ideas. But since cost comes before safety, they don’t and they won’t.
Here’s a wikipedia article listing various approaches to smart gun technology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Gun
Several of these approaches seem workable to me, and would make guns safer.
The things is, some people own guns because they are dangerous. People can be weird that way.
All great ideas, I can see some of them happening, especially if there’s pressure to do so. I don’t know how many more mass mrders it would take to force congress to act but to be sure, the gun manufacturers are not going to do anything without being coerced.
Combat knives are designed to solely kill people, whereas guns are also designed to kill animals and paper targets. I never heard of hunting knifes being used to kill prey, just cut it up afterward. I never heard of contests where people throw combat knives at targets, but maybe they exist.
Combat knives are legal.
I make it a point of never saying never. They said that we would NEVER elect a Black president and it happened so it is at least possible if not probable that such a tax could happen. I don’t believe it is nearly as likely for the gun manufacturers to be held accountable for the weapons that they sell. But then again I could be wrong because I thought Newtown would shock us into doing something substantial about gun violence and it didn’t.
I meant gun control at the end.
In general I support much stronger regulation of guns but I don’t like the idea of a Victim Compensation Tax, on progressive grounds. If we’re going to have guns out amongst the public, the poor should have just as much access as the welthy to whom such a tax would represent little disincentive.