California lawmakers are pondering a move to make violence liability insurance mandatory for all gun owners. If the measure passes, California would be the only state with the requirement, according to the Associated Press . Similar bills have been introduced in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. AB231 puts the onus of paying for gun violence on gun owners as opposed taxpayers picking up the cost of gun violence.

What is the impetus behind California's legislation?

Assemblyman Philip Ting of San Francisco told the AP he was "moved" by the Sand Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. He felt gun violence insurance is a "constructive" way to deal with gun violence. Ting felt owning a gun is like a car when vehicle owners are required to buy insurance. The legislation's details haven't been worked out as of yet.

How does gun violence liability insurance work?

Much like health insurance and car insurance, violence liability insurance premiums could be calculated using several factors. Insurance companies in the private sector would have their own criteria for gun insurance ownership. Those people more likely to be safe would have lower insurance costs, according to financial author John Wasik in Forbes magazine .

Attorney Tricia Dunlap, writing for The Hill , lists similar criteria. A free market system for gun violence liability insurance would impose fewer charges on an antique Civil War rifle owner who keeps his or her firearm on a wall display and higher premiums for someone who carries an assault weapon around all the time. More gun safety classes would mean lower premiums and less costs for violence insurance. Even regular mental health evaluations would less costs to gun owners. Violence liability insurance would cover costs of injuries from shooters and also covers gun owners in case a weapon is stolen.

http://news.yahoo.com/gun-violence-liability-insurance-184900504.html

King owns three handguns, but he questions why gun advocates need deadly weapons like the Bushmaster or the AR-15:

"I have nothing against gun owners, sport shooters, or hunters, but semi-automatic weapons have only two purposes. One is so that owners can take them to the shooting range once in awhile, yell yeehaw and get all horny at the rapid fire and the burning vapour spurting from the end of the barrel. Their other use – their only other use – is to kill people.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, gun advocates have to ask themselves if their zeal to protect even the outer limits of gun ownership has anything to do with preserving the Second Amendment as a whole, or if it's just a stubborn desire to hold on to what they have, and to hell with the collateral damage."

http://en.avaaz.org/1319/stephen-king-gun-control-ban-assault-weapons

Both sides in the gun debate are misusing academic reports on the impact of the 1994 assault weapons ban, cherry-picking portions out of context to suit their arguments.

Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, told a Senate committee that the “ban had no impact on lowering crime.” But the studies cited by LaPierre concluded that effects of the ban were “still unfolding” when it expired in 2004 and that it was “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun violence.”
Conversely, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has introduced a bill to institute a new ban on assault weapons, claimed the 1994 ban “was effective at reducing crime.” That’s not correct either. The study concluded that “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.”

Both sides in the gun debate are selectively citing from a series of studies that concluded with a 2004 study led by Christopher S. Koper, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003.” That report was the final of three studies of the ban, which was enacted in 1994 as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.

The final report concluded the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.” Gun crimes involving assault weapons declined. However, that decline was “offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns equipped with large-capacity magazines.”

http://factcheck.org/2013/02/did-the-1994-assault-weapons-ban-work/

“Senator, there needs to be a change in the culture of prosecution at the entire federal level. It's a national disgrace. The fact is, we could dramatically cut crime in this country with guns and save lives all over this country if we would start enforcing the 9,000 federal laws we have on the books.”

— National Rifle Association Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jan. 30, 2013

Many readers have asked us about this claim of 9,000 federal gun laws, which was later repeated by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday when LaPierre appeared on that program. When we checked with NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam for the sourcing, he said that LaPierre had misspoken.

“If anything, he understated the number of laws,” Arulanandam said, noting that the NRA generally refers to “20,000 laws.”

Indeed. A Nexis search found nearly 500 references in media reports, often by NRA officials or their allies, but also by the NRA’s foes. It is repeated in letters to the editors in newspapers big and small. The figure has stretched back almost five decades. Here’s a sampling:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-nras-fuzzy-decades-old-claim-of-20000-gun-laws/2013/02/04/4a7892c0-6f23-11e2-ac36-3d8d9dcaa2e2_blog.html

Like many a good Christian, pseudo-historian David Barton likes guns and, of course, thinks that every person in America has an unlimited constitutional -- and biblical -- right to own and carry them.

Barton, not surprisingly, has been saying some pretty wild things on the subject recently, many of them on Glenn Beck's web-based TV show, where he went beyond advocating that teachers be armed, saying that the students should be armed, telling this story about an attempted school shooting in the 1850s:

"The great example, in the 1850s you have a school teacher who's teaching. A guy -- he's out in the West -- this guy from New England wants to kill him and find him. So he comes into the school with his gun to shoot the teacher, he decides not to shoot the teacher because all the kids pull their guns out and point it at him and say, 'You kill the teacher, you die.' He says, 'Okay.' The teacher lives. Real simple stuff."

Barton gives no source for his story about those gun-toting kids of the 1850s saving their teacher, making that story impossible to fact check, but many of the other things he's been saying can be checked. This is because they're based on quotes that can be found in his 2000 book, The Second Amendment: Preserving the Inalienable Right of Individual Self-Protection, which, of course, contains a plethora of those footnotes he's famous for.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/a-debunking-of-pseudohist_b_2595270.html

TheTeaParty.net falsely claims in an email that Sen. Dianne Feinstein's proposed assault weapons ban would exempt "all government officials" from the ban. While the bill would exempt military and law enforcement officials, it would not exempt legislators or administrative staff.

The email further misrepresents the proposed bill, claiming that "she [Feinstein] wants to take your handguns, rifles and other weapons away from you." In fact, the proposal would grandfather in all of the existing weapons owned by Americans, so no weapons will be "taken away" from anyone.

Feinstein, a Democratic from California, and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, a Democrat from New York, unveiled their proposed legislation at a press conference on Jan. 24. The bill, called the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013, seeks to reinstate and expand on the 1994 assault weapons ban, which was allowed to expire in 2004.

According to an email blast from TheTeaParty.net, under the Feinstein-McCarthy proposal, "We are not all equal under the law."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/02/04/fact-check-assault-weapons-bill-tea-party/1891097/

A South Jersey man has been charged by Pennsylvania authorities with allegedly forcing a female companion to help him in an illegal hunt — at times using her head as a gun rest to steady his weapon.

The man then is alleged to have sold the deer meat to restaurants in central New Jersey.

Mark N. Jarema, 38, was imprisoned in Bayside State Prison in Leesburg when authorities from the Wayne County District Attorney’s Office extradited him on Monday.

He had been in prison since June 5, 2012 on weapons charges unrelated to the deer hunting case.

http://www.nj.com/cumberland/index.ssf/2013/02/nj_man_shot_at_deer_from_truck.html

An Oklahoma City man was able to buy guns at stores in Moore and Del City, despite being “visibly” mentally ill, in the weeks before he shot his mother to death and later dismembered her corpse, police say.

Gerald David Hume, who had several mental health-related run-ins with Oklahoma City police before his mother's killing in November, bought the guns at a Walmart in Moore and Gun World in Del City, according to Oklahoma City police.

Oklahoma City Police Capt. Dexter Nelson said the fact that Hume, 52, was able to get the guns — despite being “visibly” mentally ill — is a scary reality in Oklahoma and a majority of the states in the nation.

Nelson said officers who've dealt with Hume described him as being “obviously” mentally ill.

http://newsok.com/known-schizophrenic-bought-guns-before-arrest-in-mothers-shooting-death/article/3750821