A lot of places are looking at insurance mandates for gun ownership. The idea, as presented, is that it would cover injuries caused by negligence. Of course, those are actually fairly rare when you look at the number of gun owners, so we know that’s nonsense. It’s really just about creating more barriers to gun ownership, one that will cost a lot more in the long term and can’t just be covered by careful saving.

But a Republican turned Democrat who wants to be governor of Florida thinks it does something different entirely, apparently.

It seems he thinks that it actually prevents so-called gun violence.

When it comes to guns, doing nothing can be an accomplishment for the Florida Legislature. 

Now, David Jolly is asking voters if they are OK with that.

Jolly is a former Republican congressman from St. Petersburg introducing himself to voters elsewhere as a potential Democratic candidate for governor. He’s holding a series of town halls; among the things he’s talking about is gun violence.

At an April 30 town hall in Broward County, he said lawmakers should look into requiring liability insurance for firearms as a way to reduce gun violence. The idea is to leverage the profit motives of insurance companies as part of a responsible gun ownership framework. 

One catch: The idea is under challenge in the courts.

Nonetheless, a change in approach is needed, according to Jolly: Florida witnessed six mass shootings – defined as an incident involving four people injured or killed, not including the shooter – in the first four months of 2025. The shootings claimed 10 lives and injured 20.

There have been 19 mass shootings in the state since 1987, when lawmakers began a spree of repealing gun control measures to make firearms more easily accessible. 

According to information from the Statista data company, combined with the Gun Violence Archive daily totals, Florida is third in the number of mass shootings since 1982, behind California with 35 and Texas with 29.

GOA’s Florida director, Luis Valdes, put it pretty well when he said, “We don’t force insurance on free speech. Why guns?” 

And, of course, Jolly seems to believe that insurance companies will somehow vet gun owners in some way, shape, or form in order to determine if they’re responsible gun owners.

Really?

First, there are no specific policies for gun owners. This is typically covered by homeowners’ or renters’ insurance policies, which pretty much anyone can get if they’ve got the cash. The insurance companies aren’t capable of looking into someone’s personal life to the degree that would be required to determine if someone is particularly responsible or not.

Plus, if there’s a market, someone will meet it. There will be a company that would offer insurance to the sketchiest people possible, even if they charge out the posterior for it.

More than that, though, insurance can’t prevent anyone from doing anything.

We have car insurance requirements, yet people still get in accidents. We have health insurance, but people still get sick.

Insurance is what you count on when things go wrong. It doesn’t prevent things from doing wrong, so the argument that such a requirement would do anything falls apart with even a cursory examination of literally anything.

If Jolly really thinks anything like this, then he’s a freaking joke. How he got elected to Congress when he’s clearly half brain dead will remain one of the great mysteries of life, I suppose, but if he thinks he can become governor in a state that massively supports someone like Ron DeSantis, then he has no place outside without adult supervision.