Gun owners have managed to externalize the medical costs of their gun ownership to the rest of us.
This is not a gun control proposal, but a proposal to more fairly distribute the costs of America’s love affair with guns. It might even have beneficial implications for gun safety: By increasing the costs of gun ownership, it might encourage Americans to buy fewer guns. And it might encourage gun owners, seeking discounts, to take more gun safety classes, or to buy gun safes for their homes, in which roughly 4.6 million minors live with unsecured guns.
Gun insurance would probably not have averted the carnage of Uvalde or Buffalo. But it may mitigate the other 99 percent of gun accidents and violence in this country. If Americans have indeed decided, as a matter of principle, that they want to live in a society with more guns than people and few restrictions on who can own them, then the least we can do is make fair provisions for the innocents who will inevitably suffer the consequences of this choice.
— Hugh Gusterson in Shooting Survivors Shouldn’t Pay Their Own Medical Bills
