The idea of gun buyers having to purchase insurance for their gun(s)has been floated for quite some time, but Thom Hartmann has been making a particularly effective argument for the past couple weeks on his radio program, and in a recent article, using automobile insurance as a legitimate point of reference, he offers up some typically sensible solutions:
- Like cars, guns should be registered from the time they’re manufactured to the time they’re destroyed, so there’s a detailed chain of ownership.
- Similarly, anyone who owns a gun should be required to have liability insurance, so if they accidentally or intentionally injure or kill somebody, the victim or the victim’s family will receive monetary damages.
- Anyone who wants to purchase a gun should have to have an operator’s license, like all car drivers do. And, they should have to undergo a gun proficiency test, similar to a driver’s test, to get that license.
That’s not even the best part, though. That comes when Thom Hartmann, knowing full well that wingnuts are willfully ignorant of American history and the Constitution, preempts the argument that, “driving isn’t a right!” and in masterful construct, he explains the real-world basis for his reasoning:
We started car registration, licensing, and insurance back in the 1920s, when cars got fast enough and abundant enough that they started killing people. We realized we needed to put some accountability into the chain of ownership.
People may say that there’s no right to have cars on roads in the Constitution, but they’re wrong – it’s in Article 1, Section 8, where Congress is given the specific power to raise and spend tax money to create roads. It became the law of our land years before the Second Amendment was passed.
Brilliant!
The point that line 7 of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution(establishing post offices and roads)establishes a constitutional right to drive on those constitutionally-mandated roads which historically precedes the adoption of the Bill Of Rights and therefore the 2nd Amendment is one of the stronger arguments I’ve read.
And there are strict speed limits in school zones, too, punishable by all manner of regulation, while the NRA’s solution to mass shootings putting armed guards in schools reads like the indignant ramblings of the owner of a windowless van with no plates speeding through America’s school zones like intellectual pedophiles trying to remove not only the speed limits, but the whole fucking road.
Chris Mathews also pointed out over the weekend that the NRA suggesting we arm teachers and staff and even students while hiring armed guards to stand their ground on the playground while turning the visitor sign-in process into a bullet-marked window at a pawn shop are going to require background checks- criminal checks, mental aptitude tests, drug testing, periodic reviews and gun-training requirements.
They’re running out of arguments, so the default position is obviously more death threats.