3 ms·

Given the enormous amount of territory you ceded in your retreat to the motte, OP is disincentivized from bothering to attempt gaining any additional ground.

cromwellian 5y ago
The OP assumes that 'victimless' (self-victimized) episodes can't be externalities. False on it's face. When one of your loved ones kills themselves, like your child, or your parents, explain to me why you weren't psychologically harmed and victimized by their act. The original point is that gun ownership increases collective risk, which has an external cost. It does this through increased crime from stolen guns from legal owners, and it does this through self-harm or family harm. No matter how you slice it, you increase gun owners, you increase the suicides, the gun thefts eventually showing up in other crimes, the murder-suicides, and there is scant evidence that the trade off, a hypothetic stoppage of crime by gun ownership, is worth it, especially since the statistics are in dispute with the NRA claiming 2.5 million crimes per year, and scientific authorities saying it's more like 60,000.
- quantified 5y ago
  I can put myself in a gun-owning-and-agreeing-with-the-insurance-idea frame of mind. Given the risk pool and payouts, setting the premium to be for insurance needs and not as a punitive lever seems to be important. The person who uses a stolen gun needs to be primarily liable, this fund should really be a reinsurance fund. If I own a gun, pay premiums, and my child kills themself with it, do I collect the payout? (Sorry if the article covers that point, adblocker preventing from reading it now, I’ll scan the dead tree version tomorrow.)
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > If I own a gun, pay premiums, and my child kills themself with it, do I collect the payout? If its a liability policy (whuch seems to be what the suggested mandatory insurance would be, as are most insurance mandatss), no, because you can't have liability to yourself, and liability insurance pays out if you incur a liability. Conceivably, gun insurance could be offered with additional non-liability coverage and liability coverage beyond the mandate, same as car insurance today is, but that’s outside of the requirement. The existence of the requirement would make it more likely that carriers would develop policies with add-on coverage and use mandatory insurance inquiries as upsell/differentiation opportunities.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    The article is unclear, but it seems there is only once insurance policy: the one taken out by the city. Gun owners are just paying a fee to support the premiums. That means there is no risk pool (unless lots of other cities have this policy). If there’s no risk pool, the insurance company is simply taking the probability of a mass shooting and multiplying it by the cost. That doesn’t make too much sense from the cities perspective. It would be cheaper to self-insure, or simply rely on taxes to generate the needed revenue. Unless the city is requiring all gun owners to contact their insurer and get a policy (which the article seems to contradict), this move doesn’t make much sense. It seems like a pretext to discourage gun ownership.
- eindiran 5y ago
  I'm not arguing with you; I'm just pointing out that running passed 6 castles on the way to a particularly defensible one was a tactical mistake (assuming your goal is to hold on to as much of the bailey as possible, rather than just "win" the argument). Your point is a good one; the claim that guns are without externalities is obviously false. A more interesting claim for you to attack: externalities are hardly the only thing that matters. Governments need to choose an operating point between citizen freedom and preventing the harms caused by those freedoms. Without just pointing to the exact same numbers you used, why is your operating point better than OP's operating point? What are you exchanging when you move from one to the other? Are you actually increasing Pareto efficiency? Who is harmed under your operating point that is less harmed under OP's, and why should we be willing to harm them?
- pyuser583 5y ago
  I’m not the OP. The OP is the person who posted the article. But I am the one you’re replying to. As I said elsewhere, self-victimized crimes can’t be externalities because in order to be an externality no cost must be paid by the producer. Not the case with suicides.

cromwellian 5y ago

The OP assumes that 'victimless' (self-victimized) episodes can't be externalities. False on it's face. When one of your loved ones kills themselves, like your child, or your parents, explain to me why you weren't psychologically harmed and victimized by their act. The original point is that gun ownership increases collective risk, which has an external cost. It does this through increased crime from stolen guns from legal owners, and it does this through self-harm or family harm. No matter how you slice it, you increase gun owners, you increase the suicides, the gun thefts eventually showing up in other crimes, the murder-suicides, and there is scant evidence that the trade off, a hypothetic stoppage of crime by gun ownership, is worth it, especially since the statistics are in dispute with the NRA claiming 2.5 million crimes per year, and scientific authorities saying it's more like 60,000.

quantified 5y ago
I can put myself in a gun-owning-and-agreeing-with-the-insurance-idea frame of mind. Given the risk pool and payouts, setting the premium to be for insurance needs and not as a punitive lever seems to be important. The person who uses a stolen gun needs to be primarily liable, this fund should really be a reinsurance fund. If I own a gun, pay premiums, and my child kills themself with it, do I collect the payout? (Sorry if the article covers that point, adblocker preventing from reading it now, I’ll scan the dead tree version tomorrow.)
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > If I own a gun, pay premiums, and my child kills themself with it, do I collect the payout? If its a liability policy (whuch seems to be what the suggested mandatory insurance would be, as are most insurance mandatss), no, because you can't have liability to yourself, and liability insurance pays out if you incur a liability. Conceivably, gun insurance could be offered with additional non-liability coverage and liability coverage beyond the mandate, same as car insurance today is, but that’s outside of the requirement. The existence of the requirement would make it more likely that carriers would develop policies with add-on coverage and use mandatory insurance inquiries as upsell/differentiation opportunities.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  The article is unclear, but it seems there is only once insurance policy: the one taken out by the city. Gun owners are just paying a fee to support the premiums. That means there is no risk pool (unless lots of other cities have this policy). If there’s no risk pool, the insurance company is simply taking the probability of a mass shooting and multiplying it by the cost. That doesn’t make too much sense from the cities perspective. It would be cheaper to self-insure, or simply rely on taxes to generate the needed revenue. Unless the city is requiring all gun owners to contact their insurer and get a policy (which the article seems to contradict), this move doesn’t make much sense. It seems like a pretext to discourage gun ownership.
eindiran 5y ago
I'm not arguing with you; I'm just pointing out that running passed 6 castles on the way to a particularly defensible one was a tactical mistake (assuming your goal is to hold on to as much of the bailey as possible, rather than just "win" the argument). Your point is a good one; the claim that guns are without externalities is obviously false. A more interesting claim for you to attack: externalities are hardly the only thing that matters. Governments need to choose an operating point between citizen freedom and preventing the harms caused by those freedoms. Without just pointing to the exact same numbers you used, why is your operating point better than OP's operating point? What are you exchanging when you move from one to the other? Are you actually increasing Pareto efficiency? Who is harmed under your operating point that is less harmed under OP's, and why should we be willing to harm them?
pyuser583 5y ago
I’m not the OP. The OP is the person who posted the article. But I am the one you’re replying to. As I said elsewhere, self-victimized crimes can’t be externalities because in order to be an externality no cost must be paid by the producer. Not the case with suicides.