How an Idea to Develop a Safer, Smart Gun Backfired
npr.org
npr.org
Those focused on ensuring guns aren't fired fail to grasp the paramount importance to buyers that guns fire with absolute reliability when they're supposed to. The understanding is that it will be used in a situation where failing to shoot will allow a bad person to destroy someone good, and failing to fire when needed is literally a terminal flaw. Alas, those pushing for "smart guns" are perceived as, if not actually, trying to disarm upstanding citizens. This is not a successful business plan.
(The book is a great read and I recommend it, even if it makes you wonder how we got to 2016 as well off as we did. "Always" was always more important than "never")
EDIT: article about the book, + quote: " In fact, it is easy to design weapons so that they can never fire by accident or unauthorized use. It is equally easy to design them so that they will always fire when the order is given. But it is extraordinarily difficult to meet both criteria at once—what is known as the “always/never” problem."
from http://www.thenation.com/article/eric-schlosser-and-illusion...
That's exactly the opposite of what you want from a nuclear trigger system. I mean if you actually need to launch, it's already past the point where it's going to do anything helpful. What you need is something that everyone in the world unquestioningly believes will always work, even if that isn't entirely true.
OTOH, if it ever goes off by mistake, that not good. Not good at all.
I support gun control in general, but even on a purely financial level (e.g. "I paid $X for these guns and the government might suddenly destroy their value) there are plenty of reasons for people to argue against it.
And such as been proposed in California and Maryland. It's not "paranoia" when they are explicitly "out to get you".
In the mid eighties, Colt was doing great, making hundreds of thousands of rifle for the US military. Then a five year labor strike brought the end of all military contracts as Colt replacement workers were unable to make properly functioning guns.
Colt decided to focus on the civilian market, and brought out a new high tech handgun that was so unreliable that it was eventually recalled.
Then Colt's CEO said that he was in favor of a all gun purchasers having to register federally and purchase a federal permit and training. This did not go over well. (*understatement)
His replacement, seeing that the military would not buy Colt guns and that civilians would not buy Colt guns, decided to focus on police sales.
Unfortunately making a new smart gun required ability in the two things that Colt was not good at - making reliable guns and designing new guns.
It was not just the disastrous demo that killed the smart gun - the prototype smart guns were not even able to be fired without permanent destroying the mechanism. Also, there was a delay from between when the gun was grabbed by the officer and when it could be fired. And of course, the fact that it didn't always unlock to fire even in the best possible circumstances.
Interestingly enough, police handguns have moved even farther away from the smart pistol idea. Today it's a rare department now days that does not use Glocks or M&Ps, both of which are far simpler than the average police handgun of the nineties.
On top of all the other problems, the company is now run by financial vultures who are bleeding it dry.
And, yeah, their flirtation with gun control did not go over well, I would never buy one from them after that, although their relative lack of quality in the category I might have otherwise (M1911s, which they were the original manufacturers of back in 1911) is the biggest reason.
Similarly, a gun would need to have a failure rate somewhere in the order of 1% of the typical misfire rate. E.g., if a particular gun & ammunition pairing misfires 1 time out of 1,000 then the security system must fail no more than 1 in 100,000 times or thereabouts.
At that point, any misfire due to the security system would be indistinguishable from a misfire that would have happened anyway.
A 1% increase in misfires would not equate to a 1% increase in unintentional deaths, but a viable safety system would significantly decrease them. In fact, it might be possible to mathematically derive a much higher break-even point, but I daresay that would not work out well politically.
I carry a 1911, which is a design more than a century old. I've fired that gun around 15,000 times without a single failure of any kind.
John Moses Browning was the Leonardo da Vinci of gun design. In addition to the M1911, several of his other designs are still in production, and indeed, in active duty use by various militaries.
I carry my SW1911 90% of the time these days. I occasionally switch out for a Hi-Power (another Browning design!) or a Glock 31.
The Hi-Power is honestly a more practical gun, but the trigger is harder to make decent, since Browning was working around his own patent that he'd sold. My 1911's trigger is the best I've ever seen, bar none.
I do understand that rural areas are going to need a level of protection from wild animals that might not be required in urban areas.
My suggestion for how to solve gun violence is to put together an "Apollo moonshot" project to develop a non-lethal weapon as effective at stopping as a lethal one. Phasers on stun is my dream. Once you can stop a person without harming them you can then take a tobacco industry marketing campaign to make owning a lethal weapon unacceptable in civil society. Rifles and relevant lethal weapons should still be available outside of urban areas unless non-lethal alternatives would work.
If you don't understand your opponent, how can you ever hope to reason with him?
The most notable example of that in my lifetime was the reevaluations of some liberals on the wisdom of gun control in hit's heyday after the Saturday Night Massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre) where Nixon dismissed the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and his Attorney General and Deputy AG resigned rather than carry out the order. We mostly Nixon supporting "gun nuts" were among other things part of the insurance that mess wouldn't go too far.
I wonder if this would create a risk asymmetry between people breaking the law and people obeying the law.
How do people living in rural areas with strong gun control even survive?
But seriously, absent a population of brown bears (e.g. the Grisly), I'm not sure it's that great of a problem. And many people simply don't care about the occasional child, jogger, etc. killed by a mountain lion, bear, whatever. But I consider myself lucky to have grown up in an area were humans are the undisputed the apex predators, not even any black bears in my part of SW Missouri. Got to watch out for snakes, though.
Expect that thing to be fired indiscriminately and very often by people who want to commit crimes or pull pranks, but aren't hard enough to kill.
We'd see many orders of magnitude more crimes like burglary and carjacking committed if that weapon existed.
That I'm going to potentially be "judged by 12" even if I'm not "carried by 6" weighs heavily in my mind (sort of, I've never had to make such a decision in, say, 45 years of gun ownership (starting as a kid in a gun owning family when I was trusted enough) and ~17 years of carrying concealed (as noted in a previous recent related HN discussion, avoidance is the best policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429446
First off, gun homicides are actually down over 50% since the early 90s. There are still too many, of course.
Assault weapons bans are ineffective, since they account for 2% of crimes.
Open carry and concealed carry are emotional issues, but aren't a big contributor to guns deaths. 13M people are already permitted to concealed carry, and while it has led to more aggravated assaults with guns, it hasn't been a big increase.
Background checks and waiting periods actually do make sense. People with a restraining order shouldn't be able to get guns - research indicates that keeping guns out of their hands would reduce this category of murders by 10%.
Most of this is cribbed from Nicholas Kristof:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/some-inconv...
The former is debatable (e.g. most handgun murders aren't committed when gun stores are even open, i.e. evening and night), and as far as I know the latter, when it's domestic violence, it's the law of the land everywhere. But that's very dangerous, since it's an easy way for the non-law abiding to strip a victim of protection when they most need it, and the threshold to get a restraining order, even a permanent one, is way too low.
The first time I bought guns was from a professional couple, and they wouldn't have done it if I and my SO hadn't convinced them we were also such, and would treat them with all due respect.
Of course, no one denies there are problems at the other end, but we are talking about a Constitutionally enumerated right in an era where all Constitutional protections are under threat (yes, even the 3rd Amendment, pervasive surveillance is exactly what quartering troops was all about way back then).
I won't predict a violent counter-revolution if the nation went to mandatory background checks, like would be certain if registration became mandatory, but that would be playing with fire.
Right. If Indiana's gun laws were to blame, you'd see similar levels of violent crime within Indiana, and you don't. The only places in Indiana with anything like Chicago-level violence are areas such as Gary (which is a Chicago suburb in all but name).
On the other side of the coin, nor do you see Chicago levels of violence in downstate eastern Illinois, which is just as close to Indiana.
Chicago has a violent crime rate of 884/100,000. Urbana has a violent crime rate of 338/100,000.
Blaming Indiana's gun laws is convenient rhetoric, but quite obviously wrong.
Not particularly any more, see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11464325
Gun laws there are confounded by so many other factors in general crime and murder rates that I doubt much useful knowledge can be discerned until some number of years pass as the city returns to US norms of gun ownership and concealed carry.
To me insisting on a 0% failure rate for a smart gun is very reminiscent of the mandatory seat belt arguments. Sure... sometimes a gun will fail and the owner end up injured/dead and that's pretty awful. However, if the overall the number of deaths and injuries has been reduced then those tragedies will have been "worth it".
It is irrational to insist on a 0% failure rate.
It is also probably irrational to insist on the same failure rate as existing guns. The correct measure is the deaths/injury rate.
Unfortunately the US doesn't seem to want to tackle the problem of gun deaths/injuries in any sort of scientific manner. There needs to be accurate and reliable data on gun ownership, gun usage (scared someone off), gun deaths, gun injuries. Solid data is the foundation of good policy... and preventing the gathering of good data is pretty telling.
And far too many vested interests are more than willing to mislead people. Specifically, the NRA's constant "confiscate our guns" rhetoric i pretty unconscionable... but folks seem to blithely accept this sort of misrepresentation.
The NRA does attempt to mislead folks on a regular basis... this is well documented.
As for your specific claim about confiscation, how about this tag I was reminded of on a blog that's in my early morning rotation: http://blog.joehuffman.org/category/gun-rights/no-one-wants-...
Or Senator Diane Feinstein, who represents a lot of HN readers), telling "Mr. and Mrs. America turn 'em all in" in a 60 Minutes interview.
And let me assure that, using registration lists, guns have been confiscated in the US, e.g. SKSs in California after the government decided they were "assault weapons" after all (OK, you were allowed to move them out of state, but...).
And California has created a unit to do the same to people they think are prohibited. Most recent horror story was about a nurse who'd voluntarily checked herself into a mental ward because of a medication screwup (i.e. it was self-limiting) and her husband's guns were confiscated: http://bearingarms.com/california-returns-confiscated-guns-t...
I'm not even sure in Crazy California a voluntary admission is a disbarring event, it isn't Federally or of any state I'm aware of, as this case shows it shouldn't be.
And note medication screwups/unwanted mental side effects happen all the time, a former SO got frank suicidal ideation when switched to a standard normally well tolerated anti-depressant (she just stopped taking the drug and was careful while it worked its way out of her system).
And many drugs can cause mania, as I can personally attest (hypomania in my case, and my "you're impaired" flag kept me from doing anything stupid including spending money needlessly (well, beyond buying a power supply as a kit when they're so cheap and easy in the form of wall-warts) until the problem was realized). Many that are not normally psychoactive, I've read systemic steroids like prednisone often do this.
The safest way to sky-dive is not to sky-dive.
The safest way to have sex is not to have sex (I like the last one the most as it is touted by various groups).
That logic is absolutely broken.
If you mean that foregoing experiences for safety's sake isn't your cup of tea, that's one thing; but claiming it's logically broken is simply false.
p | q | p ∧ q → ¬q
--+---+-----------
T | T | F You can't be safe and own a gun.
T | F | T You can be safe and not own a gun.
F | T | T You can be unsafe and own a gun.
F | F | T You can be unsafe and not own a gun.
p | q | p ∧ q ↔ ¬q
--+---+-----------
T | T | F You can't be safe and own a gun.
T | F | F You can't be safe and not own a gun.
F | T | T You can be unsafe and own a gun.
F | F | F You can't be unsafe and not own a gun. p | safe (p) | ¬p | safe (p) ↔ ¬p
--+----------+----+--------------
T | F | F | Owning a gun is unsafely owning a gun.
F | T | T | Not owning a gun is safely owning a gun.
edit: I think we can legitimately fix the confusing sentence to read "not owning a gun is safely not owning a gun".
Hard to have a discussion when data is spun & cherry picked, and cultural differences abound.
This isn't true. A classic example of confirmation bias. Obviously the pro-gun people say the exact opposite: that every gun study shows the opposite.
Is that right? If so, USA is in a much worse state than I thought so.
ADDED: on the other hand, the claim all the new ones are being bought by existing gun owners is fatuous, a back of the envelope calculation I made would have us existing gun owners own an average of $100K worth each, and I doubt even my father, who was born in the early '30s, every had quite that much.
Assume, given the unwillingness of many gun owners to answer the questions of nosy, anonymous people making telephone and other surveys, that at least half the nation's households have a gun. With then nationwide sweep of shall or better issue concealed carry laws, now all but 7 states, making gun ownership significantly more useful, which is particularly important to an aging population, I'd be surprised if the fraction wasn't higher.
The number of permits issued has been astounding, 300,000 in Wisconsin since the law passed in 2011, 1 million in Texas, in these states generally 5-10% of the residents have one, and ~10 states don't require a permit or very soon won't (that number is changing very rapidly right now).
Illiterate Third world tribesmen create high tech automatic firearms in mud houses. Prisoners create low tech firearms in between anal cavity searches. Think about that.
Gun control is possible with the extinction of the human race.
The funny thing is, many non-US countries don't have "readily available" guns everywhere you go.
In 2013, 12 people in Japan were killed by guns.
I don't think there's any removing of Japanese crime and crime control from the following 2.5 century Tokugawa military dictatorship, which had profound effects in creating modern Japanese society.
During the prior 400 years, the various Japanese governments used gun and sword confiscation to enable crimes ranging from brutal to genocidal.
For their own good, right? The prisons are already full of people who violated laws enacted under that guise. Anti-2A people don't seem to be aware of the fact that pro-2A people aren't very excited at the prospect of others deciding what is in their best interest. If you are afraid of getting shot by a privately owned gun then base your argument on that, because a temperance movement mkII isn't going to fly.
Making beer or spirits at least generally requires you to leave the store.