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Comment by presidentender | Hacker News Reader

The people who purchase guns do not want to purchase these guns.

The people who want these guns to be sold are not the people who would buy them.

Why wouldn't someone who wants to buy a gun want one that only he can fire? It's cool and it might reduce one's chances to get hit from behind by someone wishing to take the gun. (An honest question from someone who never wanted to own a gun.)

A gun is a tool of absolute last resort. They are simple, mechanical devices, and that's a good thing. I have no interest in adding complications and additional points of failure.

"I have no interest in adding complications and additional points of failure."

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 agree, and I hate the trend toward more complication. But for the washer and dryer, anyway, my life doesn't depend on them operating 100% reliably. (Which is good, because they don't.)

Couldn't it actually be easier for the owner to fire, overall? You could make it much more responsive to the trigger if you assumed that it knows you're actually trying to fire it, not? I heard there's a trade-off today between guns which easily fire unintentionally and guns which are quite difficult to fire intentionally from several people. (Of course there are the cases where I don't see how it even works, like if you're wearing gloves.)

As in, a gun like this might not need to include a manual safety? There are already lots of guns that don't, like Glock--one of the most common, if not the most common handgun in the world.

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."

because it introduces needless complexity into the system, reduces reliability, and just makes the firearm more expensive.

it also would reduce children killing another child or an adult.

So does a safe.

But a safe introduces needless complexity into the system, reduces reliability, and just makes the firearm more expensive.

A safe has no effect on the firearm. When you pull it out of the safe, you know it's still going to shoot.

A safe does indeed make it slower to get to the gun. That's a tradeoff lots of people are willing to make, however, and safes are generally a mature technology.

I don't know a single gun owner who has any interest in so-called smart guns.

tradeoffs... That was the point I was trying to make. You can either have safety or convenience/reliability. It seems to me that this offers another option.... do you trust a dongle or do you trust your ability to get into your gun safe before the "bad guys" "get" you. Seems weird to me to just write it off without knowing which is actually better.

That's fair enough, ignoring your scare quotes. I think a lot of the visceral reaction that gun owners have against these things is the (totally justified) fear that they'll be foisted on us by law sooner or later.

I can't directly respond to bruceb, but a child getting ahold of a gun is the fault of the parent, who neglected to responsibly secure it. If someone with a child isn't willing to buy a safe, they shouldn't buy a gun.

Children. Especially ones still a bit too young to go through proper training on the handling of a firearm.

Two sensitive topics:

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.

I don't think I followed the point you were trying to make.

If I could have a gun that only I could fire, and which I could fire with 100% reliability, that would be something I'd want.

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.

Design considerations for handguns include:

* 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.

There is something to be said about this. Remember the scene from Unbreakable where the son steals Bruce Willis' handgun and points it at him? If that was a smart gun, this would be a comical scene rather than an extremely tense one.

NSSF rule #3:

"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.

Guns have seen the benefit of hundreds of years of improvement, they are now incredibly reliable tools despite the fact that they basically operate via partially contained explosions which put a tremendous amount of stress on parts. Modern guns have been streamlined and refined to an enormous degree. When you pick up a gun you want it to work, because the assumption is that it working is going to save your life. The last thing you want is to add delay or unreliability to using a gun. And while having your own gun used against you is a concern it's much less of a concern than having a gun work reliably.

Exactly. I would add: the only people who benefit are smart gun manufacturers and those who can sell the service of "unlocking" such weapons.

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