Monday, July 8, 2013

School Insurance Preventing Concealed Carry?

According to the Talking Points Memo, Iowa insurance company EMC has decided they will not insure any schools that allow concealed carry on campus.  The issue has come up in Kansas, where EMC currently insures 85 to 90 % of the school districts.  Kansas legislators passed a bill effective July 1st allowing the schools to permit teachers and staff to carry weapons to protect children. No school districts in the state had adopted such a policy as of Saturday. 
"We’ve been writing school business for almost 40 years, and one of the underwriting guidelines we follow for schools is that any on-site armed security should be provided by uniformed, qualified law enforcement officers,” Mick Lovell, EMC’s vice president for business development, told the Des Moines Register. “Our guidelines have not recently changed.”
Note that the decision is based on their longstanding policy, not on statistics from the experience.  Considering how small the number of school districts that allow staff of any kind to carry is, and how small the number of school shootings is, that's not surprising.  I went to the source to see if they had statistics, but they don't.  EMC says it's not a political decision, but a financial one.  Without actuarial data, it's a guess.  They believe it raises the risk they're subject to, but have no idea how to price that risk, so they're refusing to insure schools that might produce that data.   

The problem here is that in our litigious society, the availability of insurance could end up setting the policy.  School liability insurance has already had effects on the activities available to students; seen many trampolines in schools lately?  And I can't say that without remembering the Simpsons episode where they put a trampoline in the back yard, and the final scene with the back yard covered everywhere with injured kids.



3 comments:

  1. I talked about this before.
    http://street-pharmacy.blogspot.com/2013/06/i-blame-lawyers.html
    The problem is that the owner of the property is placed in this position by our legal system- a legal system that holds the property owner accountable for the actions of the law abiding while holding them harmless for the actions of criminals.

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  2. GOOD!!!
    In any free market NOBODY holds 85 to 90% of any market. No, I am not saying we have a free market. But it sure looks like a ripe opportunity for a more aggressive insurer to jump right in.
    I hope that some right-minded insurance people will jump right on in on this.

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete