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Dem bill would make homeowners, renters disclose gun ownership to insurance companies, government

February 20, 2024 | | Print Article

Golden State gun-grabbers took a new tact toward a firearm registry with some probing questions from insurance providers.

Like cats on countertops, leftist lawmakers see freedoms teetering on the edge of a slippery slope and can’t help but swat. So it was in the California legislature as Democratic Assembly Member Mike Gipson and coauthor Democratic state Sen. Catherine Blakespear introduced Section 2086 to the Insurance Code demanding providers ask renters and homeowners about their firearms.

The Firearms Policy Coalition drew attention to the legislative effort introduced Friday and summarized, “A bill has been filed in California that would require homeowner’s and renter’s insurance companies to ask how many guns people own and to report that information to the state…”

The specific language of Section 2086 stated in part, “In addition to existing regulations, an application for homeowners’ or renters’ insurance shall include questions regarding…Whether there are firearms kept in the household, including any accessory structures, and if so, how many,” and, “Whether the firearm, if any, is stored in a locked container in the home, including any accessory structures, while not in use.”

Questions would also probe whether firearms were kept in any vehicles on the property and, as it had been introduced, the requirement assured information reported to the state, “shall not contain any identifying information contained in a consumer’s application for homeowners’ or renters’ insurance, including, but not limited to, names, addresses, and telephone numbers, which shall remain confidential.”

Gipson and Blakespear’s proposed legislation was hardly the only insurance-based effort toward eroding Second Amendment rights in California as it was previously reported that San Jose became the first jurisdiction in the state, and country, to require firearm carriers to have liability insurance and pay an annual fee of $25.

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“Certainly the Second Amendment protects every citizen’s right to own a gun,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo (D) said at a press conference in January where he asserted roughly $442 million in gun violence-related costs were incurred by the city on an annual basis. “It does not require taxpayers to subsidize that right.”

These legislative efforts followed the already controversial SB2, signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in September, that went into effect at the beginning of the year banning the carry of weapons for legal gun owners in public spaces deemed “sensitive.”

Categories included hospitals, playgrounds, casinos, stadiums, places of worship, banks and libraries, or as U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney had put it when he issued a temporary injunction stayed by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “SB2 turns nearly every public place in California into a ‘sensitive place,’ effectively abolishing the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding and exceptionally qualified citizens to be armed and to defend themselves in public.”

Reactions to the legislation were more than skeptical as social media users decried the ongoing overreach from the government of California.

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Kevin Haggerty
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