Importantly, when we talk about the costs of guns, it’s not just crime. It includes accidents. It includes suicide attempts, even failed ones.
As reported by Casey Smith of the Indiana Capital Chronicle on Aug. 21, accidental shootings are on the rise. Smith wrote: “Since July 2022, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD) has been tracking accidental shootings, specifically. IMPD found non-fatal, accidental shootings more than doubled in February 2023 compared to February averages in the last 5 years. There were as many as 75 such incidents for the last half of 2022, and more than 75% of those were self-inflicted.”
There’s a cost to each one of them. Medical costs. Emergency responses. Productivity loss. When I think of these things, I immediately think of insurance. Since a home with guns in it is less safe than a home without guns, shouldn’t homeowners’ insurance rates reflect that?
San Jose, California passed an ordinance earlier this year to address just that. In January, the city began requiring homeowners and renters who own firearms to carry liability insurance. Of course, the NRA and its followers immediately claimed this is an infringement of rights, which is, as it usually is, nonsense. I’m sure homeowners with swimming pools might have an opinion about this argument in San Jose, a town that is likely teeming with home pools.
Everytown Research and Policy published its sweeping report on the cost of guns in July of last year. The number? $557 billion annually, or nearly $1,700 for every resident in America. Not every gun owner. Not every NRA member. Every resident.
The gun market does contribute something though. In 2019, the federal excise tax on guns and ammunition generated $653 million, a little over 1% of what it costs. Yes, that’s just more than nothing.
Indiana’s costs are slightly higher than that average of course, and Hoosiers just made guns cheaper.
What does culture get for this Faustian bargain? Gun owners get freedom. They get a false sense of safety and security. They get identity.
The rest of us just get the tab.
— Michael Leppert in A Year Without Permits in Indiana, Guns Still Cost Us Too Much
“The rest of us just get the tab.”
Suck it up, buttercup. I have no sympathy. As long as I have to pay the costs for schools that I’ll never use, and a professional team’s stadium that I’ll never attend, you can help defray the costs of my freedom.
And yet a horde of ILLannoy residents are flee er migrating to Indiana. Just had a friend move there last week. We’re actively pursuing the same thing. Something something FREEDOM. I betcha those mall shoppers just south of Indianapolis were happy young Dicken plugged a cretin with a rifle from (40!) yards with a glock 19🙄
In reality a good guy with a gun stops mass shootings just 3% of the time. And many so called self-defense shootings are pure bullshit as often the real story ends up being that the man with the gun was the aggressor and a hot head that shot someone after causing the confrontation. It results in a very grey area of a so called self defense shooting.
Carrying a gun often emboldens people who normally would avoid a confrontation. The infamous George Zimmerman episode was a classic case of a male that suffered from the “Little Man Syndrome”. Zimmerman was out to prove his masculinity and without a gun would never have confronted a younger man twice his size that turned out to be a viscous street thug and burglar. The result was a needless death and Zimmerman almost lost his own life in the confrontation. The racist Far Right of course cheered when a young black man was killed but at the time of the incident it was not illegal for a black man to walk through a white neighborhood, although peering into windows could have given him a misdemeanor fine.
And punk face Carl Rittenhouse without an assault weapon would never have ventured into a highly volatile situation during a large angry protest posing as a fake medic and trespassing on private property that he claimed he was protecting which was a bold face lie. Rittenhouse was armed to the teeth and went looking for a fight and found one.
Struggling for relevance with pushing your ideas?
Alright….who took the plastic bag off of Dacian’s head again???
It’s called the Criminal Misuse of firearms, bricks bats, knives, fists, feet, vehicles etc. Criminal Misuse has zip, nada, nothing to do with The Second Amendment. However michael leppert’s backdoor hate for firearms is a sneaky Gun Control zealot’s misuse of the First Amendment.
“a professional team’s stadium that I’ll never attend” (for sports I couldnt care less about)!
Ive never understood why I am forced thru taxation to subsidize the incomes of multi-millionaire team owners or their over-paid underlings.
The governors of NY & NJ were over the moon when the Yankees & Mets faced off in the 2000 World Series, the sales tax revenue from all the team gear sold, parties at restaurants/bars, and purchase of large screen tvs was through the roof. It’s the same when the NY (really Rutherford NJ) Giants are in the Stupid Bowl.
Olds,
They could be like Seattle, that saw the demolition of the Kingdome, even before it was paid off.
They were even selling chunks of concrete for souvenirs..
Its just like that in South NJ and Philly with the Eagles being pushed in your face everywhere.
Actually the increase in non-fatal, accidental shootings can be linked as a result of the COVID lockdowns, social isolation, and the devastating effects of Bidenomics.
Nonsense, those are things that aren’t happening right now, because they didn’t happen and couldn’t because the government says they didn’t and couldn’t and something about Ukraine. Word salad, bullshit, buzzword, insult, unfunny meme, get your shots kids or you could give grandma rabies.
Do I sound like a Leftist/Uniparty Douche attempting to refute you? That was my aim, but I haven’t huffed enough paint thinner to really get into character.
🙂
“Importantly, when we talk about the costs of guns, it’s not just crime. It includes accidents. It includes suicide attempts, even failed ones.” — Michael Leppert
First of all, fundamental rights are not subject to arguments of social utility. For example you can make a near iron-clad social utility argument to eliminate virtually all privacy. And yet most of us are NOT clamoring to eliminate virtually all privacy.
Second of all, 98% of Second Amendment detractors are not interested in fundamental rights, truth, facts, logic, reason, nor timeless standards of wrong-versus-right. Rather, they simply want what they want and vomit words in a desperate attempt to resonate with listeners and gain their support.
Prepare accordingly.
Mr. Leppert is another useful idiot that will meekly line up at the edge of the trench while comrade commissar steps up and points a pistol at the back of his head. I almost feel sorry for him.
Almost.
More likely, his neighbors will decide its rooms to move into his house and divvy up his stuff.
Leppard? Never heard of him. Deed?
Courthouse burned down. Now gimme your keys and your wallet.
“decide its rooms it’s time to move into his house”
Holy shit, no tags?
Guess “auto-defect” will get all the deeds, too. No need to burn down the courthouse.
When you try to type “simple”, and auto-defect insists you meant “Sylvester”, or “Syllabus”, it is good to remember the keyboard can like you, or not like you, just depending on something or other…
Bro I learned a long time ago my vocabulary outstrips my phone’s dictionary. Fucking shame, that.
“Author of a Screed on the Societal Costs of Civilian Gun Ownership…”
Theres that left wing and liberal ‘Socialist’ collective ideology again.
Society doesn’t pay my bills. I do.
Society wasn’t there when the imminent threat arrived and I was forced into defense against it.
Society wasn’t around to help out when Maui burned.
Society always seems to not be around to stop over 100,000 drug over doses annually.
and the list goes on and on…
in fact a lot of ‘Sociatal’ cost (e.g. run away and increasing crime) seems to be created by ‘Sociatal’ idiots complaining about Sociatal costs while exercising their constitutional rights simply because gun owners choose to exercise their constitutional right.
75 firearm accidents ? seriously?…while we have rampant crime, highest rates of alcoholism, drunk addiction, rape, domestic violence, and thousands annually seriously injured from violent assaults of some type, and the list goes on … and you are worried about 75 accidents.
“Everytown Research and Policy published its sweeping report on the cost of guns in July of last year. The number? $557 billion annually, or nearly $1,700 for every resident in America. Not every gun owner. Not every NRA member. Every resident.”
using numbers they fabricated using their own self serving definitions and deliberately false data.
“and more than 75% of those were self-inflicted.”
no more than the car accidents in which ~90,000 kids age 12 and under are seriously injurered each year.
“Gun owners get freedom. They get a false sense of safety and security.”
huh… ya don’t like freedom, ok we get it. but there was sure a real sense of safety and security in having our firearms when that imminent deadly threat showed up and strangely ‘Societal’ was no where around to help out.
.40 cal Booger,
Now, now, don’t be so harsh on Pr0gre$$ive True Believers–dontchaknow that their Utopia will work THIS time if we just hand over MORE to the collective?
UC,
Did you know, when the first people to brave the waves and land on the North American shores back in the 1600s TRIED socialism?
And, abandoned it the next year.
I’ll bet you can guess why…
-Hint-
The next year was ‘Wanna eat? Then get your lazy ass up and WORK.’
Stuck in Pugetopia,
In case it wasn’t obvious, my previous comment was sarcasm.
I am well aware that soshulism cannot work in the real world with real people.
(I purposely misspelled “soshulism” so that my comment would not languish in moderation limbo.)
How is it that 56.25 people managed to shoot themselves “accidentally”? Inquiring minds want to know.
They thought removing the magazine unloaded the gun and forgot about the round still in the chamber?
One guy shot himself in the foot. It happened to be the mouth of a bear at the time.
I seem to be having trouble finding the part of the constitution that addresses swimming pools. Can someone provide a page number?
Don’t have a page number, but I found this interesting:
The swimming pool on the Titanic is still filled with water.
HEY-OH! That’s a good one, I like it.
“The swimming pool on the Titanic is still filled with water.”
They used ‘Flex-Seal’ over 100 years ago???
Dat’s sum good stuff. Too bad they didn’t use it on the hull.
Because swimming pools are necessary to maintaining life.
Unlike weapons, which are just expensive toys.
/s
Half-truths are the worst kinds of lies.
All freedom has costs. How many people over the last fifty years were damaged by the lies told by the anti-gun press like CNN, NPR, NBC, ABC, PBS, and the near defunct dead tree press? They tell an innocent and and rather credulous public things like “if you resist you will just make them mad and they will hurt you” or as this idiot repeats here “if you have a gun at home it is more likely to hurt you than a bad guy.”
While freedom isn’t free, the cost of freedom should always be weighed against the cost of tyranny and while the so called “free press” isn’t all that free since all the major players side with the Democrat party on nearly any issue you can name, the existence of that freedom allows us to speak our minds in any format that will give us the opportunity to speak up. That freedom is worth the price of the lies they tell us every day of our lives!
1. Most if not all homeowner’s policies cover the costs of accidental shootings.
2. There are roughly 5000 accidental shootings per year nationwide not leading to death.
3. San Jose never established the number of accidental shootings in the city before enacting its anti-gun ordinance.
4. San Jose requires ALL gun owners in town to carry $1 million in liability coverage. I am not sure for what.
“4. San Jose requires ALL gun owners in town to carry $1 million in liability coverage. I am not sure for what.”
To discourage gun ownership, of course. Make it expensive enough, and someone will say “Fuck it, to expensive for me”… 🙁
I came to say pretty much the exact same thing in response to Mark N.’s comment.
They are trying to do the same thing with car ownership. Make it too expensive for most people, that is part of the reason for the big EV push.
Insurance companies certainly want mandatory gunm insurance laws passed.
And if I was in the buisness so would I
Keep on with that LawShield stuff, what’s the difference with their lawyers and the one you retain on your own?
Every day LawShield or whatever is up at the White House lobbying hard to get a law passed to benefit them. Say what you want, they don’t give a rats ass about you, they like your $$$. If they did give a rats ass about a defensive gun use gone bad they’d do it for free because they are American Patriots upholding the constitution.
My kids are through school. Why should I still pay property taxes to support the school system? Why should my taxes fund roads I will never drive on? Or municipal swimming pools I will never use?
Worried about firearms being used in suicides? How about ropes, drugs, blades, vehicles, or suicide by cop? What do those cost?
The reason I carry a sidearm is because my 1911 is much easier to carry than a cop.
I carry a fire extinguisher and first aid kit in my vehicles as well. I keep other tools in my vehicles and have other firearms in the house and around the homestead for utilitarian purposes. Varmints, feral hogs, snakes, etc. And, should needs be, for defense of my self, family and friends, home, community and if needs be, country. That does also mean as defensive arms should the government become the enemy of free people. And they fools are getting ever closer to that point.
You got a permit for those varmints? My girlfriends cousin needs work, and he would make a great permit inspector.
Dear antigun kook,
No terms for self defense and deterrence = FAILED EQUATION.
I don’t know where the figureof $US667 billion came from. The only figure I can find from the US Governments own statistics is in the order of $US 300,Billion which is most assuredly enough and about 2/3rd of the USA’s Defecnce spending. That eing so I can see no reason as to why all firearms cannot be subject to higher taxation a possibly on a sliding scale according to the number of firearms in Legal [or ILLEGAL] possession After all PERSONAL taxes was applied and still is applied to illegal and ill gotten gains is it not?
Hey, shit for ethics –
I require firearms to live where I do, and do what I do.
Buzz off, varmint…
Albert, we call it the 2nd Amendment!
Hey Albert, jump up your own ass and die from colon cancer. Not related to your comment, I just want you to do one good thing before you shuffle off this mortal coil.
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