Will Insurance Be The Next Anti-Gun Weapon Deployed?

Anti-gunners are getting creative. This year, they’ve used financial institutions to try and undermine the Second Amendment. After all, if they refuse to do business with any gun manufacturer or gun store, they can effectively destroy the gun culture without the first bit of legislation.

Now, it seems they might be deploying another weapon. Insurance.

Kristen Moore is an associate professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. She co-authored a piece for The Actuary Magazine exploring how the insurance industry treats the risk of firearms.

“Actuaries use math, statistics, and finance to figure out the cost today of uncertain risky things in the future,” explained Moore.

So, if you apply for health insurance, an actuary will assess your behaviors – like whether you exercise, are overweight, or engage in risky sports like rock climbing – to determine the likelihood and cost of you getting sick.

Yet, despite the potential risks of injury and death from firearms, Moore found very little evidence that insurance companies consider gun ownership when determining the cost of coverage.

“There’s not a lot in the literature about how firearm risk compares to scuba diving or private aviation,” said Moore. “To the best of my knowledge, it has not been studied.”

That doesn’t mean that gun ownership is risk free.

According to Moore’s research, death rates are higher for gun owners than they are for scuba divers. In fact, Moore found that gun owners would see changes in several kinds of insurance policies, including life, health, homeowners, commercial liability, and disability, if actuaries calculated gun ownership risk.

Of course, her research shows that.

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