JAMES TARANTO: Insurance as Punishment: The latest assault on the Second Amendment.

If you can’t force people to do what you want, force them to buy insurance: That seems to be the strategy of the liberal left in the Obama era. We refer not only to the ObamaCare health-insurance mandate but to the latest bright idea under consideration in mostly Democrat-dominated state capitals. . . .

“Gun-insurance mandates won’t solve illegal gun possession or illegal gun use, and no form of regulation will bring an end to gun violence,” writes political scientist H.L. Pohlman in a Hartford Courant op-ed. Yet strangely, Pohlman is a proponent of the idea. . . .

In Pohlman’s account of the virtuous incentives his insurance scheme would purportedly establish, he leaves out the most obvious: By burdening gun owners with an additional cost, it would encourage some to give up guns altogether. We suspect that the real goal here is to deter gun ownership or, failing that, to punish law-abiding gun owners. As for criminals, we doubt any of them will ever hesitate to use a gun because it is uninsured.

They’re pushing these kinds of ideas because they’re losing the main argument.