Police have unions that help pay for their legal defense in these situations. Obviously, this is funded by your tax dollars.....
Police unions are not funded by tax dollars. They are funded by member dues and third party donations. Federal law prohibits employers from contributing money to unions.
.....Could there be organizations that serve to protect conceal weapon carriers that people can join that could be organized and provide the same benefits?....
Unions are a special type of association. They represent employees in their relationships with employers. They also fund, through a number of mechanisms, various employee benefits. Unions are subject to significant regulation under federal law.
......Many ask about the NRA, but the NRA is not the only game in town when it RKBA or 2A-oriented organizations. Many people do not like paying more than their yearly dues, but if there was some type of legal defense/ carrier insurance that members could fund, where all members pay a monthly due for the subscription, I would think it could possibly be a feasible solution. As well, they could network with attorneys and provide support on picking respectable attorneys who are specialized in handling cases of self-defense with firearms (or any potentially lethal weapon to be honest).
However, what you suggest here is theoretically possible. It would not be a union. It would be a form of mutual protective or fraternal protective or fraternal benefit society (or association).
Such arrangements were, perhaps, more common in the past than today. Many have evolved into insurance companies. They were commonly used as a means of providing various medical or life insurance type benefits to members of a lodge or association. They tend to be regulated under state law much like insurance companies. Just for background, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners model law on fraternal benefit societies may be read
here.
Similar types of arrangements have been set up by medical societies to fund malpractice defense and liabilities for physicians and certain other providers of medical care.
Setting something like this up for gun owners would involve roughly the following:
- The underlying organization would need to be set up. That would involve developing the necessary incorporation and governance documents -- articles of incorporation and by-laws. These would then be filed in whatever State is chosen as the organization's domicile.
- A plan of benefits would need to be designed and documented.
- The organization would need to decide in which States it wanted to operate. Then the laws of those States would need to be reviewed to determine if the organization would be subject to regulation in those State, and if so, decisions would need to be made regarding compliance and necessary filings with state regulators.
- those steps would, in some ways, be the easiest and most straightforward. But the real issue, and the one which should probably be addressed first, would be adequately funding operations. So --
- The organization would need to work out its business model, budgets and projected growth.
- The organization would also need to develop actuarial projections of the costs of providing benefits, probably out for the first ten years.
- The organization would need to project growth and decide how much it would need to charge to fund operations and benefits.
- The organization would also need to find a source of adequate start up funding.
- The organization will need an executable business plan to attract enough membership to cover costs and reserves and to recruit enough qualified lawyers to provide services.
I suspect that some existing plans, like the USCCA plan, were probably developed in that sort of way.
My point is that while there are models for these sorts of arrangements, setting one up is a reasonably complex chore. There are a bunch of legal issues to be dealt with, and the arrangement will need to be adequately funded. It will also need grow sufficiently to generate enough income to cover costs and reserves.