Bay City News Service
State Assemblymen Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) and Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) introduced legislation Tuesday that would require gun owners to purchase liability insurance.
Assembly Bill 231 would require the owners to cover damages incurred from incidents stemming from their firearms.
"The government requires insurance as a condition of operating a car - at the very least we should impose a similar requirement for owning a firearm," Ting said in a statement.
Gomez said, under the legislation, individuals would receive a more affordable policy if they use a trigger lock for their firearms and take part in training courses.
Ting on Tuesday also introduced Assembly Bill 232, which would provide state income tax credits for people who participate in local gun buyback programs, with a cap of $1,000.
"Gun buyback programs are an effective way to reduce the number of guns in circulation, and lower the risk of intentional or accidental damage by these weapons," Ting said.
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Heller and MacDonald settled the question that the 2nd Amendment is also a fundamental right like the 1st, and fundamental rights cannot be subject to prior restraint or licensing schemes. Insurance requirements would easily fall under either prior restraint or licensing schemes. So, for this proposal to pass muster, it would stand to reason that we can now mandate, prior to publication, that Patch obtain an arbitrary amount of insurance to guard potential, unknown victims, against the possibility that it will publish defamatory material. Instead of insurance being a business decision on the part of Patch, it now becomes a government prior restraint on Patch's 1st Amendment right of speech and press. I know we wouldn't go for the idea of prior restraint on newspapers, so how could any reasonable person go for the idea of prior restraint on any other fundamental right?
In the photo, I wonder if that is part of the 1 billion handgun rounds purchased by various departments of the federal government last year, or could it be the 20 million rounds DHS is currently buying? No one is questioning why they need enough bullets to shoot every person in this country 3+ times and none of those bullets have military applications.