Something is in the water in Colorado.
Yeah, they’ve been leaning anti-gun for a few years now, but this year it seems they’ve kicked things in overdrive, seemingly ready to advance almost any gun control bill they can think of. No, not every effort has been successful, thankfully, such as their effort to expand the list of “sensitive places” where people can’t carry firearms lawfully, but they’re still doing plenty.
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And there are major problems with what’s remaining, such as an assault weapon ban that would render your average Glock 17 illegal.
Then we have this little ray of sunshine that just advanced.
A bill that would require liability insurance for all firearms is moving forward in the Colorado state legislature.
The legislation, House Bill 24-1270, would require gun owners in the state to maintain “a liability insurance policy that covers losses or damages to a person, other than the policyholder, who is injured on the insured property as a result of any accidental or unintentional discharge of the firearm.”
Under the bill, victims of accidental shootings could file a claim against the policyholder of the gun. The bill’s sponsors said that in the event a person is shot with a stolen gun, the policyholder would be protected from any potential claims as long as the gun had previously been reported as stolen.
“What we’re really trying to do is make sure that we are just taking responsible gun ownership and adding one more protection,” Democratic state Rep. Iman Jodeh, one of the bill’s sponsors, told Denver7. “People own guns – we do not want to infringe on that right. But what we want to do is make sure they are protecting themselves even more. And so by having this insurance, we are upholding their belief that they should own guns, they have the right to own guns, and that they can be and should be responsible gun owners.”
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Except what we need to remember is that this is largely a non-issue.
Accidental injuries from negligent discharges aren’t some kind of epidemic. In fact, they’re ridiculously rare, all things considered, especially when you think about the estimated number of firearms in the United States.
And that’s nationwide. There’s no reason to think Colorado is some kind of exception.
That’s important because this is being billed as just something to hold gun owners accountable, but the truth of the matter is that this is a non-issue. This isn’t a problem, so why are they trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist?
The answer is that this is yet another barrier to gun ownership.
Buying a gun isn’t cheap, but this would require people to have some kind of insurance policy that they may or may not currently require. That’s a fee people will have to pay each and every month that will make it harder to afford firearms going forward.
This is by design, in my opinion. This started not because of some epidemic of negligent discharges. It was concocted in the wake of a mass shooting by a mayor who was down on private gun ownership.
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My hope is that good sense prevails somehow in Colorado, but I’m not as hopeful as I’d like to be.
