Via Ride Fast:
Slate waxes retarded on the gun owners' protection added to the Obamonstrosity. No surprises there. The usual gapemouthed shock that a gun rights advocacy group would advocate for gun rights. Nothing we don't expect.
But there's a little buried gem in there that shouldn't pass unnoticed:
"Seven years ago GOA got its knickers in a twist when State Farm and Prudential canceled a couple of insurance policies because of gun ownership. One policyholder alarmed Prudential because he owned a military-style Mossberg 500 pump-action rifle."
Got that? Ignore the columnist's inability to tell a shotgun from a rifle. A Mossberg 500 is a "military style" weapon. A pump shotgun, one of the two most popular pump shotguns in the United States, used by civilians thousands of times every day for sport shooting, hunting, and home defense, is a "military style" arm, presumably because it's issued to soldiers in some very limited contexts for base security applications.
If you ever, _ever_ start to doubt that these people are extremists out to ban all guns, remember this. As far as they're concerned, _everything_ is a "dangerous and unusual weapon".
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I would love to see the actuarial data that the insurance companies used in their decision.
ReplyDeleteIF there was any data.
You are right, they are extremists but the problem is they play the moderate position well.
That is one of the reasons I started blogging; to counter the "reasonable" gun law ideas being floated. Asking gun control advocates to explain what is reasonable is a sure fire way to shut down a conversation with them :)
I doubt there was any data at all. Insurance companies are understandably conservative, and they often go a bit further than I'd like. For example, my medical insurer charges smokers a higher rate than nonsmokers. I'm fine with that; smoking legitimately puts you at a higher health risk. But they treat any use of any tobacco product as "smoker". Smoke a fine cigar twice a year? Smoker. Light up a pipe at your annual buckskinners' rendezvous? Smoker. Go to a Turkish restaurant a single time and decide to try the hookah with your meal? Smoker. This is probably the exact same thing: "could potentially be a risk; treat it like one". I don't think we needed a law about this, mind you; it's the company's prerogative to have stupid policies. But _if_ the government's going to force me to buy medical insurance, _then_ we need to make sure insurers aren't screening me out based on whether I express my Constitutional rights.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, they are extremists but the problem is they play the moderate position well.
Damn right. And we're gonna need lots of practice in just what you're doing: proving that their proposals are unreasonable. MAIG is much more dangerous than Brady these days. They've seen which way the wind is blowing and adapted. The future isn't fighting Brady's gun bans and "collective rights" BS, it's fighting MAIG's smaller, savvier attempts to make gun ownership more difficult by tiny increments, so that each time fewer people go through the hassle and there are fewer to fight the next increment. It worked in New York just like it worked in New Jersey, and Bloomberg wants to take the strategy national.