I think the idea of a liability insurance if great. But that alone should be enough. Why force people to take a test? If you have nothing to prove that you know anything about guns, the insurance would simply be more expensive.
Making a test allows the government to make to artificially raise prices and discriminate the poor from having access to guns. The second question is, how hard the test should be. They could effectively outlaw guns without having change any law by gradually making it more difficult and expensive to own a gun.
Just like they used drivers license tests to keep people from being allowed to have cars, I guess.
not sure if that happened anywhere. To my knowledge in most places the cost of operating a car is significantly higher than the cost of passing a drivers license. However, that might change when we will see a push towards driverless cars.
The cost of a firearm safety certificate program should be pretty cheap and accessible too, and maybe the result of that test could also be tied to the cost of the insurance. Gun Safe/etc should be tied to the cost of insurance too.
California, for example, have firearms safety certificate programs for $25 that allows someone to take the test twice, which is much less than the cost of a gun and a gun safe. https://oag.ca.gov/firearms/fscpfaqs
Yes, it should be very cheap and any sane person will also agree that this is something incredibly useful. Just if you give something to the state it becomes hard to get rid of it again, even when it becomes prohibitively expensive in the future.
When you regulate everything via competing insurances this will be better. You are free to choose your insurance and they are free to specify which certificates they will accept.
Yeah, that's why regulations must be restricted and limited in scope to things that are really necessary and not excessively burdensome to those that aren't likely to harm others.
The level of regulation for cars seems pretty reasonable. I imagine most people do not want habitual drunk drivers driving or irresponsible gun owners that regularly threaten to shoot others (outside of self-defense) and habitually leave their loaded guns laying around little kids to have a gun.... or a terrorist (whether they're Political or Religious extremists like Nazis, Al Qaeda, etc) having a gun. Focusing on the insurance, incentives, etc on a large part of the effort seems to be a good idea though.
Then we could implement things like 'sunsetting old laws' to limit the ridiculous persistence of old laws that make the law so bloated for no good reason: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/automatically-sunsetting-old-laws/
It's extremely insane that victimless behaviors like possessing marijuana are illegal right now. That's even less harmful than alcohol. People are forcefully jailed and taken out of the workforce, for a victimless crime... ruining their entire life and harming the nation altogether. I've never even smoked them, but it's ridiculous that we have a very expensive mass incarceration system just to enrich lobbyists... rather than for creating a better world and empowering everyone.
We need an e-government infrastructure like Estonia too. It would make so many things like verifications cheaper and more efficient.