War & Peace Quote by Michael D. Barnes

Follow the money is the oldest political instruction because it still works, and Barnes uses it like a lever. The line opens with a blunt, almost backroom rhetorical question: "Who's paying the million bucks?" He wants you picturing a settlement check, a body count translated into a balance sheet. Then he answers it himself - not taxpayers, not "society", but the insurance company. In other words: this is already priced into the system, just hidden. The move reframes gun violence from an endless moral argument into a solvable market failure.

Barnes is not really talking about compassion; he's talking about risk management as policy. The subtext is a bet on a different kind of regulator: insurers. If lawmakers are gridlocked and courts are hostile, the insurance industry can do what it always does - set terms, demand safety standards, refuse coverage, raise premiums. He’s borrowing the logic that tamed other high-risk industries: cars got seatbelts, buildings got codes, workplaces got OSHA partly because liability made neglect expensive.

"Wrong hands" is deliberately broad, letting multiple audiences hear what they want - criminals, domestic abusers, impulsive teens - while sidestepping the culture-war trigger of "gun control". The intent is to pull the gun industry into the same accountability ecosystem as everyone else: if you profit from a product that creates predictable harm, you don’t get to outsource the cost and call it freedom.