Registries don’t quite register

Rob Morse
EXAMINER COLUMNIST Wednesday, January 5, 2000

——————————————————————————–

WELL, THAT’S the way to start the first week of the millen nium. I took Monday off to get a smog check.

Not just to get a smog check, of course. I also had to get a reality check after working New Year’s and renewing my faith in the human race. What a grand weekend it was, with all those Y2K buggers proven wrong.

That meant, though, that I had to face the DMV, whose computers I wish had imploded. Getting a smog check doesn’t take all day, but you have to set aside a chunk of one to get it done. Then you have to make a copy of your proof of insurance and send it off to Sacramento with a big fat check.

Meanwhile, here’s what they’ve done in Sacramento. The Legislature passed a new law for 2000 offering a pilot program of low-cost insurance for uninsured drivers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. This immediately raised four questions:

One: How have these drivers been getting registered if they didn’t have insurance before? For several years I’ve had to mail in proof of insurance.

Two: If they haven’t been registered at all, why haven’t they been punished after they have accidents and the cops ask for their registrations? The least the authorities should do is force them to register their junkers and make them get smog checks.

Three: Does anyone ever get hit by a driver who is insured?

Four: Why should people who’ve been driving around with no insurance suddenly be rewarded with low insurance rates?

Not to be too selfish about it, but it would make more sense to offer $400 insurance to a guy like me, who has never caused an accident but has been hit several times by uninsured drivers and lost a lot of money every time.

***

There’s a philosophical reason the state of California has let drivers get away without having insurance. Requiring insurance discriminates against the poor.

The uninsured, though, are indiscriminate in who they hit with their cars. Therefore they hit a lot of poor people, and the ones with insurance lose their deductibles and get stuck with higher rates. What kind of economic justice is that?

I bring this all up, not because I object to poor people with good driving records getting a break in basic insurance. They’ll be able to drive to work, and if they hit anybody, that person won’t be up the creek.

But what makes anybody think irresponsible drivers are going to bother filling out all the forms and spend $400 when they can keep driving around, registered or otherwise, and save all that money?

You can make a big purchase with 400 bucks — like a gun.

Now many Democrats in Sacramento (with the notable exception of centrist Gov. Davis) want to create the equivalent of a DMV for guns, complete with registration and licensing tests — everything cars have but muzzle-emission tests.

What makes them think a DWV (Department of Weapons and Violence) is going to work any better than the DMV?

***

At lunch I asked the five people at the table if they’d ever been hit by a driver without insurance or without registration. They all had.

This is California and people feel they have a right to keep on driving until someone slaps them in jail or compresses their car into a 3-foot cube of junk.

The people who have guns feel even stronger about their pieces of metal. This raises four more questions.

One: How many gun owners are voluntarily going to register their guns and face constant re- registration and fee increases, which will surely follow tobacco taxes into the stratosphere?

Two: If the owner of a handgun doesn’t register the weapon, how many cops want to go bang on that person’s door knowing there’s a gun on the other side?

Three: Consider the number of unregistered and uninsured drivers causing auto accidents. Many of the mass shootings of the last few years were done with illegally procured guns, so what makes us think illegal guns won’t still be killing people?

Four: What makes us think a registered gun doesn’t kill or maim too?

***

At the beginning of the millennium conservatives and liberals alike are itching to solve the state’s problems. Actually, they’re itching to solve one of the state’s problems — how to spend that huge $85 billion budget.

For some reason, I don’t think creating a Department of Weapons and Violence is going to make the already declining homicide rate decline faster.

If you’re a gun owner, do you really want to register your weapon and every year have to go stand in a long line with a bunch of frustrated gun nuts? Do you even want to live within a bullet’s range of a line like that?

If you don’t like guns, will it make you feel any safer if, as one proposal has it, gun owners take competency tests in such skills as clearing jammed weapons? Frankly, I’d prefer that those guns stay jammed.

If people really want to get guns off the streets, it makes more sense to find and arrest people carrying guns on the street. That’s what some Eastern cities have done by means of skilled police work. In California, though, we haven’t even been able to get uninsured drivers off the streets, and they’re easy to find. Just look for an accident, and there always seems to be one there.

Get a printer-friendly version of this article

Registries don’t quite register
01/05/2000

Here’s my thousand words
01/02/2000

Lonesome streets of S.F. New Year’s Eve
01/01/2000

Rob Morse Archives:

JanuaryFebruaryMarchAprilMayJuneJulyAugustSeptemberOctoberNovemberDecember

19991998199719961995

——————————————————————————–

Feedback

?2000 San Francisco Examiner