Because the shooter obtains the gun illegally, they can then go and carry out a shooting without any regard for something such as “a requirement to buy insurance”.
It doesn’t seem like passing liability onto the shop fixes this. The shop, if anything, has less ability to force gun thieves to buy insurance than the law does.
The shop has the ability to invest more in security if they will be held liable for subsequent harm. They can also buy insurance themselves and pass on the cost to people who do purchase guns legally as an additional operating expense.
How is the shop going to stop a gun from being stolen from a gun owner (who happened to buy their gun at the shop)? This seems much more the domain of the law. The police can arrest people who steal guns, shop owners cannot.
If the risk is sufficiently high, then the shops would simply not sell guns to anyone who seemed like they might let their guns be stolen, for example. Note that the shops would still be held liable for any harm that occurs as a result of any gun they have sold, irrespective of whether the buyer was also the perpetrator of the harm.
In practice, the risk of a gun sold to a person with a safe background being used in such an act is probably not that large, so such a measure doesn’t need to be taken: the shop can just sell the guns at a somewhat inflated price to compensate for the risk of the gun being misused in some way, and this is efficient. If you were selling e.g. nuclear bombs instead of guns, then you would demand any prospective buyer meet a very high standard of safety before selling them anything, as the expected value of the damages in this case would be much higher.
The police arresting people who steal guns does nothing to fix the problem of shootings if the gun is used shortly after it is stolen, and police are not very good at tracking down stolen items to begin with, so I don’t understand the point of your example.
We have reasonably effective insurance regimes which successfully use non-protected information to make decisions like this. As a first proxy, you can totally use credit score to discriminate and that alone would probably catch a huge chunk of the variance.
It doesn’t seem like passing liability onto the shop fixes this. The shop, if anything, has less ability to force gun thieves to buy insurance than the law does.
The shop has the ability to invest more in security if they will be held liable for subsequent harm. They can also buy insurance themselves and pass on the cost to people who do purchase guns legally as an additional operating expense.
How is the shop going to stop a gun from being stolen from a gun owner (who happened to buy their gun at the shop)? This seems much more the domain of the law. The police can arrest people who steal guns, shop owners cannot.
If the risk is sufficiently high, then the shops would simply not sell guns to anyone who seemed like they might let their guns be stolen, for example. Note that the shops would still be held liable for any harm that occurs as a result of any gun they have sold, irrespective of whether the buyer was also the perpetrator of the harm.
In practice, the risk of a gun sold to a person with a safe background being used in such an act is probably not that large, so such a measure doesn’t need to be taken: the shop can just sell the guns at a somewhat inflated price to compensate for the risk of the gun being misused in some way, and this is efficient. If you were selling e.g. nuclear bombs instead of guns, then you would demand any prospective buyer meet a very high standard of safety before selling them anything, as the expected value of the damages in this case would be much higher.
The police arresting people who steal guns does nothing to fix the problem of shootings if the gun is used shortly after it is stolen, and police are not very good at tracking down stolen items to begin with, so I don’t understand the point of your example.
You do realize it is illegal to discriminate against customers on the basis of things like race, income, where they live, etc, right?
So, step 1 in this plan has to begin with “dismantle the last 60 years of civil rights legislation”.
We have reasonably effective insurance regimes which successfully use non-protected information to make decisions like this. As a first proxy, you can totally use credit score to discriminate and that alone would probably catch a huge chunk of the variance.