Among the welter of new laws going into effect at every level of government this past week are two one must suspect the MN DFL “trifecta” will trot out sooner than later; gun insurance.

San Jose passed a municipal ordinance requiring gun owners carry liability insurance.

Notably, the kinds of coverage mandated by the ordinance would not cover the overwhelming majority of firearms incidents that tend to be the subject of public concern. To start, homeowners and renters policies only extend coverage for injuries to third parties. Generally, this would mean guests, contract workers, or other visitors to the insured’s property, or in some cases, to third parties who were injured by the insured off-premises. Injuries to other members of the household would not be insured. Thus, the paradigmatic example of a tragic firearms accident—a child gets hold of an unsecured firearm and injures his or her sibling—would not be covered.

Naturally, this depends on the integrity of the state’s insurance regulators. After New York’s attack on the NRA’s carry insurance program, it’d seem that trust is misplaced, at least in all “Blue” states.

Depending on one’s point of view, the new law in New Jersey would appear to be even more insidious, or comically incompetent; it doesn’t specifically rule out insuring illegal activities with guns:

As to whether it would violate New Jersey insurance law to extend coverage to criminal acts, the question is—as it is in many states—somewhat complicated. But ultimately, the state Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld exclusions for “expected or intended” injury as barring coverage, including in Voorhees v. Preferred Mutual Insurance Co. (1992), SL Industries v. American Motorists Insurance Co. (1992), and Harleysville Insurance Cos. v. Garitta (2001). Moreover, in 1990’s Figueroa v. Hartford Insurance Co., the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey held that an injured party could be collaterally estopped from suing a third-party’s insurer to relitigate questions of intent where that intent had been settled in a previous criminal action, such as by a guilty judgment or plea.

At a minimum, it can therefore be said that New Jersey insurance law broadly permits exclusions for intentional acts in personal liability policies and that state courts have shown deference to criminal proceedings as dispositive in settling questions of intent (which isn’t necessarily true in all states.) Given that backdrop, a broad reading of A. 4769’s text would appear to require the state’s firearms owners to obtain coverage that does not actually exist, particularly in the wake of regulatory actions to shut down the NRA’s Carry Guard program. That would amount to a de facto ban on firearms ownership, directly contravening the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, even before applying the Court’s more recent Bruen test.

I can see the MNDFL majority copying and pasting either law.