Narrative Fail: ‘Murder Insurance’ is Doing a Terrible Job of Promoting Gun Violence

If, as The New Yorker suggests, around two million gun-owning Americans have signed up for “murder insurance,” the insurance is doing a terrible job of promoting gun violence.

(Notably, [writer Rachel] Monroe doesn’t even answer the question posed in the title of her article. To be fair, she likely did not write the title; this is a criticism of The New Yorker, not the writer.)

There are certainly incidences of people committing murder and claiming self-defense — the men who killed Renisha McBride and Jordan Davis, for example, who are in jail — but these cases are few and far between. I would bet that only a very small fraction of gun violence, and almost none of the thousands of criminal homicides, in the U.S. annually is committed by card-carrying members of “murder insurance” companies like CCW Safe, US Law Shield, and the United States Concealed Carry Association (USCCA).

As I argued at length in my book Gun Curious (especially chapters 6 and 8), with some notable exceptions, those who own guns for self-defense are not out looking for a reason to use them or shooting first and asking questions later. To the contrary, deflecting, avoiding, defusing, and evading are essential to a civilian defensive mindset (p. 145).

People have been criticizing “murder insurance” for a long time. I wrote a blog post over a decade ago (in June of 2014) responding to a segment of “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart in which fake reporter Jordan Klepper “investigates a low-cost legal defense program intended to make shooting people more affordable for Americans.” Unfortunately, the link to the actual segment is dead now, but this quote says everything.

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.

— David Yamane in Does Self-Defense Insurance Promote Gun Violence?