Protecting your assets - instructor insurance

I have some questions for the group:

  1. If you’re an instructor, do you carry liability insurance for your classes? If so, does it include “professional liability” (not just protection from firearms-related litigation)? I’d like to hear how you determined what coverage to buy.

  2. If you’re teaching and have set up a small business to use for this purpose, how did you structure it? I.e., sole-proprietorship, LLC, etc. Why? Did you transfer your personal firearms used for training to the small business for an extra layer of protection?

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Liability insurance is a wise idea, and may be required by ranges you teach through. I have both general liability and errors and omissions coverage for my engineering work. Before I teach I’ll add firearms instructor coverage.

We have an s-Corp and it already covers teaching activities, so it’ll go under there. Might set up a separate DBA for the company to use, something firearms or safety oriented.

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Good info, Zee. Thanks.

As I’ve been reviewing various policies for instructor insurance, it gets complicated. You can find firearms instructor insurance. You can find non-firearms instructor insurance. You can find some that cover mixed instruction, but there are some severe caveats and exclusions. And then when you start a business, you have to consider insurance for that entity.

I’m hoping to get some time with an attorney soon, and I will be leveraging the info gleaned from responses here to inform my discussion. And I’ll share his answers!

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Someone in my instructor training class suggested these folks:
https://oigcorp.com/services/
Their prices sound comparable to what I pay for engineering consulting

BTW, attorney consultation is an excellent plan.

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I have always had my instructor insurance through the NRA, I just renewed for $250.58 or one year. [https://NRAFireArmInsurance.com
Bodily Injury & Property Damage Liability Each Occurrence Limit
Professional Liability Each Occurrence Limit
General Aggregate Limit
Products-Completed Operations Aggregate Limit
Personal and Advertising Injury Limit
Fire Damage Limit
Medical Payments
$500,000
$500,000
$1,000,000
$500,000 any one person or organization
$1,000,000
$100,000
$5,000 each occurrence any one person

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I carried through the NRA for years until their underwriter became a problem just as I carried my personal firearms liability through them.

They made some choices I consider to be very anti 2nd Amendment as a company and that was the end of me giving them my money.

I now carry everything through OIG and USCCA for legal protection and liablity.

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I just did another round of research on insurance, and I’ve signed up with OIG. Thanks for the recommendations! For those who don’t know, they pro-rate the cost from a 5/1 annual start date. In other words, annually from May 1 through April 30, it costs $375. For Oct 1 through April 30, it’s $225.19. However, if you purchase coverage in the final four months of the policy (Jan-Apr), your coverage is automatically extended for the coming year; i.e., $494.85 for January 1 through April 30 of the following year.

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