Smart guns finally poised to change U.S. gun market?
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
> Smart weapons recognize their owners' fingerprints or hand grip, or unlock when they wirelessly interact with a special watch or ring worn by the shooter.
So what happens if I'm wearing gloves? What happens if I lose the ring or it comes off while I'm drawing? What happens if my girlfriend needs to grab my handgun out of my nightstand while I'm in the shower? There are so many ways for this to fail, I would never purchase it over a regular firearm.
Are you currently holding the gun? If not, take off the gloves and then pick up the gun.
> if I lose the ring or it comes off
Same thing that happens if you lose your wallet or car keys. You go find it immediately or get a replacement quickly.
> girlfriend needs to grab my handgun
Hopefully they can make smart guns that can have two authorized users.
> so many ways for this to fail
Regular handguns can also fail - anyone can pick them up and shoot anyone else. Some people consider that a bug, not a feature.
Sorry would-be assailant, please hold-by while I remove these gloves.
> if I lose the ring or it comes off
Sorry would-be assailant, please hold-by while I drive to my local sporting goods store and have them clone me a new ring.
And when you lose the ring, get a new one immediately instead of waiting for the would-be assailant to come along.
* What is the ring/watch material made of? How durable is it.
* For the "smart ring", can I get this sized-to-fit?
* What exactly is powering this scanner? What happens without power?
These are just concerns off the top of my head; I'm sure there are other concerns I'm not thinking of. Should my fob become damaged/dislodged in a scuffle what happens then? With a firearm, what you don't want is fragility.
Re battery dying - if I was designing a smart gun, I would have it default to a regular, usable-by-anyone gun if the power dies. That way you don't have to worry about mastermind criminals with EMP devices either.
It'd at least prevent someone from grabbing your gun and immediately shooting you with it.
PS: Adding more than one user seems like a really simple feature.
It might not apply for an average american shopping guns in Walmart, but hopefully it will be important for defense forces, police, etc.
edit - typo
A failed fingerprint recognition (even due to the conditions listed above) when you intend to use a gun means you're probably dead.
Edit: I listed wet as a condition an AK would fire under, but I don't believe that's accurate. The original point is still true though, the AK is touted for it's reliability.
Meanwhile, more attention to the "shoots curious kids" failure mode seems appropriate.
This is a solved problem. The negligent parents who store guns in the open without securing them (and who don't teach their kids to be safe with guns) are abhorrent. But they're also not likely to be buying "smart guns."
When those start being enforced, then we can examine whether it's a solved problem.
An AK-type will actually fire whilst a metre or so underwater... and cycle too.
Don't wear gloves on the shooting stand
> What happens if I lose the ring or it comes off while I'm drawing?
You secure the gun, pick up the gun and continue practicing.
> handgun out of my nightstand
A handgun should be stored securely in a safe.
All those questions were answered on the assumption that you aren't specially threatened in some way. Except for those very few persons that are specially threatened, weapons actually lead to a greater risk than the security they can provide. Even in the case you are going to get robbed at home, it's more likely that the robber takes control of your guns and uses them against you than that you can use the guns against them.
Care to back up that claim?
Here's one thing worth reading:
http://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/defensive-gun-use-armed-with...
(though I suspect it'll make you uncomfortable and you'll just look for ways to discredit it, because it's a heck of a lot easier to hold onto a John Wayne-esque "I'm a big man with a gun" self-identity...)
So only people with some special justification are allowed to defend themselves?
> weapons actually lead to a greater risk than the security they can provide
Wrong, although this "fact" is bandied about depressingly often.
> it's more likely that the robber takes control of your guns and uses them against you than that you can use the guns against them
Completely wrong.
In many countries the legislation is like that. For most of the rest, if there's no extraordinary risk of someone targeting you you're actually putting yourself and those around you in an unnecessary risk.
That may be. But of the many worthy things other countries have that we might emulate, this is not one.
> you're actually putting yourself and those around you in an unnecessary risk
This is just 100% wrong.
You might feel better to carry one with you, but that is a feeling. Reality does not reflect that personal feeling.
http://www.tbuckner.com/KELLERMANN.htm
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2011/01/william-c-montgomer...
http://www.guns.com/2015/08/24/kellermanns-gun-ownership-stu...
Basic gun safety dictates that a gun is always loaded, even if your fingerprints don't match.
There's a theory behind handguns like Glocks that manual safety switches are too complicated when you're experiencing the intense response of a defensive shooting. Taking gloves and jewelry off, adjusting your grip, or the nightmare of having to screw with electronics is just asking for problems.
Funny you say that! New Jersey has a law that will ban the sale of all guns except smart guns once they become available: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325...
The people who want these guns to be sold are not the people who would buy them.
This is also how I feel about my clothes washer and dryer. Simple dials and minimal buttons. I want to be able to repair and replace a part at minimal expense.
I'm not totally sure what the people you're talking to were referring to with "guns which easily fire unintentionally and guns which are quite difficult to fire intentionally."
I don't know a single gun owner who has any interest in so-called smart guns.
1) How old is wise enough? At age two there's no way a toddler can physically reach a rifle on a top shelf that weighs half his body weight and what's he supposed to load it with? On the other hand Uncle Sam handed me a M16 when I was still 17. Then the banners want 21 yrs, or 65 years, or 150 years to effectively ban in practice. There are gun safety course and familiarization classes for roughly grade school and up kids that boil down to "here take a look, no need to (dangerously) sneak when your parents aren't around, its a tool not a toy, no playing and no pretending, tell an adult if you find one laying around". Complete with coloring books and sing along songs. So the peak "danger zone" seems to be perhaps 2 to 5 years old.
2) The second sensitive topic is parenting skill. If I abandoned a two year old in a house alone with no supervision at all and he somehow dragged a folding ladder thats twice his weight into the bedroom and climbed (and how does he know how to do any of this and how does he know anything is up there anyway?) It would take a toddler a long time to figure out how to load a gun or put the bolt in or remove the trigger lock or defeat the safety or find the hidden ammo on the other side of the room or any number of technical challenges. Fundamentally you have to ask how long the little kid really had to live if it was abandoned for the hours it would take the kid to arm himself. A fatal kitchen accident or fatal stairway accident or fatal swimming pool accident was inevitable in that case, just a gun got the kid first. Likewise the kid who offs themselves because of a post on the internet or anti-depressant use or whatever isn't "really" a gun problem, its a mental health problem, take away the gun and the kid makes a noose or takes pills and ends up just as dead, not having used a gun is very little consolation to the survivors. So file that as awkward discussion about parenting skills or whatever.
If you have 300 million people in one little country Darwin will take a few but things that show up in headlines can none the less be very rare indeed. Up there with getting struck by meteors and by lightning.
This will differ per child. Some parents take their kids hunting/to a range when they're 9. Others wait til they're 13. Others wait til 16. Some never take their child hunting/to the range. My father took me and my brother to a firing range when we were 6 years old.
Not all guns are rifles. A large assortment of handguns are reasonably dangerous to kids ages 3-7 and even the most staunch advocates for firearms recognize that. They're children - they don't know better unless taught.
>what's he supposed to load it with
Firearms used for self defense rather than sport should remain loaded. But that's another argument for another time. I'm not an advocate of keeping one in the chamber, though I know people who are.
2.
I don't think I followed the point you were trying to make.
But I've never seen a particularly fast or reliable fingerprint scanner, my hands might be dirty or greasy, and presumably the gun can run out of battery.
I don't have a gun, but if I did, I wouldn't get one of these.
* Firing with the opposite hand
* Firing with hands slick with fluid (blood, sweat, mud, whatever).
* Reloading and firing with a single hand available.
* Firing with broken or missing digits.
The world of gunfighting is a great deal messier than fingerprint scanners can handle.
"Don't Rely On Your Gun's "Safety" Treat every gun as though it can fire at any time."
Basically throwing money away for no real increase in safety. Spending the same money on a better more convenient more likely to be used safe or trigger lock or best of all, even the most basic safety and familiarization training, would save a lot more lives.
Its not necessarily bad in itself as a technology, its just an awful system wide allocation of money.
Call me when this type of technology has been in mandatory use by 100% of law enforcement and military for 10 years without a greater failure rate than traditional safety systems.
I won't hold my breath.
It's unclear what problem smart guns are trying to solve. Is the point to replace gun safes? Is it to prevent the weapon from being used against you if taken from you in a fight? Is it to deter gun theft? Is it to stop children from firing the weapon if they discover it? The latter scenario seems particularly silly to me. If you're dumb enough to leave a loaded weapon out in a house with children, you're probably not going to have the sense to get a smart gun.
Even if the cost and reliability issues are addressed, smart guns still won't help much. First, the majority of guns used in crimes are obtained through corrupt dealers and straw purchases. Only 10-15% of firearms used in crimes are stolen.[2] Second, this will do nothing to help secure the 350 million guns already in the US.
It seems to me that a much more effective way to reduce theft and accidental gun deaths is to make better safes. Right now, the best safes on the market are mechanical lock boxes.[3] They use no batteries or electronics, and they can make a gun available in seconds. Still, they're less than ideal. Many are hard to program, causing users to leave them on the default combination. Almost all of them have small buttons which are hard to press if your adrenaline is going. I'd love to get something better.
1. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/660920179904266240
2. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/gu...
Seems to me the real obstacle is the NJ law that would restrict regular gun sales once smart guns are sold, which should be revised ASAP as it gives the NRA a semi-legitimate reason to oppose the sale of smart guns.
Even if that particular law is revised or repealed, gun rights advocates will always argue (correctly, I believe) that such legislation is in the pipeline once these devices become more common/workable.
Anything that needs a wireless connection is an absolute non-starter. A gun can jam mechanically, but having a simple weapon be disabled by active ECM is just stupid.
I'd be fine with capping weapons tech at 1830s flintlocks if it means giving up smart guns. I'm guessing Sanetti has something a little more modern.
The safety lock might possibly be disengaged by numeric PIN or capacitative gesture recognition (like playing a certain sequence of notes on a theremin). Biometrics and proximity-based authorization tokens will have been discarded as untenable long before.
However I think the real question that needs to be examined is whether or not the adoption of smart guns would lead to fewer accidental injuries/fatalities on a national basis.
Requiring that a smart gun introduce absolutely no new failure modes misses the bigger picture... that too many accidental injuries/fatalities are happening right now (presumably... it would be nice to see research on this but researching gun deaths is too controversial get funding).
No one wants to be injured or killed because of a smart gun failure, and the same is true for an accidental gun injury or death. Who wants their kid to accidentally shoot them? Who wants their smart gun to fail in the face of an armed intruder? The answer in both cases is no one and these questions miss the point, much like the 'seat-belts cause injuries' advocates of yesteryear.
It really is all about reducing the total number of accidental gun injuries/deaths.
This is a noble sentiment, but it really isn't. It's about gun control, plain and simple.
This seems like an awfully hand-wavy plan for taking on the most powerful special interest lobby in American politics, which happens to hate "smart guns" like poison.
Or do you mean more powerful because they're backed up by the huge percentage of gun owners in this country? How big does a group represented have to be before you stop calling them a "special interest lobby"? There are more gun owners than there are teachers, but the teachers spend more on lobbying.
1. Significantly more expensive, at least in the short to medium term.
2. They can only reduce reliability, and they probably will.
3. Easier than the manufacturers would have you believe.
AFAIK, nobody has posted dissassembly pictures or video yet, but I would be surprised if the electronic disconnect can't be easily removed by anyone with time to field strip it.
A battery operated sensor on the ripcord will analyze the operators fingerprint and pulling position to computer whether the chute will or will not actually be deployed!! No more stolen parachutes or accidental premature deployments!
We'll make millions, guys! BRB gotta find some non-sky divers to invest.
For individuals, no.
You're somewhat likely to have guns randomly firing in peoples pockets or when a high power trucker CB transmits or not work at all when the battery is dead or in the rain or when a police officers own radio is nearby transmitting. Hold on while I reboot my service pistol, its "patch tuesday" time to rob the bank with our non-smart guns, etc.
Also there is the assumption that this won't be DRMed to hell and back to screw owners over, when of course it will be. Sure you can add your wife to the list of authorized users, just submit .gov paperwork and licenses and it'll only be $500 to unlock 2 users.