San Jose Mayor Reintroduces Proposal For Gun Insurance, Fees

By Jana Kadah, Bay City News Foundation

SAN JOSE, CA — Two weeks after the Bay Area's deadliest mass shooting in San Jose and several other recent shooting cases, Mayor Sam Liccardo on Tuesday called gun violence a public health crisis and reintroduced two policies in an effort to curb it: gun liability insurance and an annual gun fee.

"With council approval, San Jose would become the first city in the United States to require every gun owner to have liability insurance coverage for their firearms," Liccardo said at a news conference in front of the memorial at City Hall for victims of the mass shooting at a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority maintenance facility late last month.

San Jose would also be the first city to mandate an annual gun fee as well if it passes at the City Council.

The mayor said gun insurance would incentivize safer behavior from gun owners and money collected would be used to compensate injured victims and family members.

Liccardo argued it could be as effective as car insurance.

Firearm insurance would encourage gun owners to be safer by taking gun safety classes and installing trigger locks that could potentially result in lower insurance premiums — like auto insurance that rewards safe drivers and incentivizes the use of airbags and taking driving courses to keep driving records clear, he said.

"And as a result, we've reduced per mile auto fatalities by over 80 percent in the last four decades," Liccardo said. "So, we can use these approaches to mitigate gun harm as well."

The insurance would mean "little to no extra cost," for some gun owners, as they would already have it as part of their homeowner's insurance, he said.

And in terms of the annual gun fee, costs are still being calculated, Liccardo said.

But the intent behind the yearly fee would be to compensate taxpayers for the public cost of responding to gun-related injuries and death, such as emergency medical and police response, which in 2018 totaled to $1.4 billion in California, Liccardo said.

"The Second Amendment protects the right for Americans to own guns but does not require that every other taxpayer pay for that right," Liccardo said.

But he said that in accordance with the Second Amendment, "we will not be imposing fees that are so great as to be prohibitive to ownership."

Liccardo introduced these ideas initially in 2019 after the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting and since then has beefed up the legislation to include other proposals.

Those include an ordinance to prohibit "ghost guns," requiring the videotaping of gun purchases to reduce "straw purchases" where someone buys a gun for another person, and creating a community-based, crowd-sourced reporting of implied or explicit threats of violence, among many others.

Liccardo and supporters conceded that insurance and fees would not stop criminals from obtaining guns and subsequently using them violently, but because of the legal insurance mandate, those firearms could legally be taken away under the new ordinance.

"The skeptics will say the criminals will not obey either of these mandates, and they're absolutely correct," Liccardo said. "That's an important feature of these proposals, not a defect."

He said that the ordinance would create a constitutionally compliant mechanism to enable law enforcement to impound guns from high-risk individuals who are unwilling to follow the law.

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen also posed the question: could we have stopped Sam Cassidy, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority gunman who took his own life after shooting and killing nine of his co-workers?

Rosen said perhaps they might have if the county and city had a more robust program or better sharing information protocols between other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies for high-risk individuals, another part of Liccardo's many proposals.

The mayor said he is "cautiously optimistic" this policy will pass at the city level. He noted that many in the community are in support of more gun control and policy reforms but worries about opposition from gun groups and insurance agencies.

"Gun groups are very powerful in this country, and I'll tell you the insurance industry isn't crazy about this either," Liccardo said.

Though insurance agencies may appear to make more money if people were required to purchase firearm insurance, Liccardo noted that with so many gun violence cases, there may be more insurance claims filed.

Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California, called the proposed policy a "knee jerk reaction" to the mass shooting, adding that it wouldn't solve the problem of gun violence and would result in Liccardo having "his rear end handed to him in a basket by a judge."

The gun insurance and fee proposal will go before the City Council's Rules Committee next week. If it passes, the mayor's proposal could be considered by the full San Jose City Council before the end of June.

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