Engineers Say They've Created a Way to Detect Bombs and Guns Using Basic Wifi
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Inevitably, they then dump all the data into a neural net. They trained on about 15 objects, which is a reasonable start. They didn't go on to testing with enough objects to be useful. "The results show that our system can detect over 95% dangerous objects in different types of bags and successfully identify 90% dangerous material types." By "dangerous" they just mean metal or liquid. It's not like they can tell a gun from a soup can.
[1] http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~yychen/papers/Towards%20In%20...
This exists. They're just reimplemented non-cooperative SFCW radar. It's not new.
Ammunition is easier to detect, generally - almost all of it is metallic-cased and uses a metallic projectile. There have been attempts to create practical baseless ammunition, but they've generally been failures and I'm not aware of any available for purchase commercially.
Ultimately, this sort of thing is interesting from a technical perspective but not really very useful. This is even more the case in the US, as firearms are ubiquitous. In 2016, there were 14.5 million active concealed carry permits in the US, and in 11 states, no license was required to carry concealed.
Given that something like one in twenty or so adults in most parts of the country are probably carrying a firearm at any given time, knowing "there's a gun in the room" isn't very useful.
I think that’s a gross overestimation. I would guess that most CCW permit holders hardly ever carry in practice (source: used to have one).
There are states where you don’t need a permit to own a pistol at all. In others, you may not technically need one to take your gun to the shooting range (because after all, if you own one, you should practice) but...
If you’re stopped by police in a context where you don’t need a permit, it’s still always better to have one. If the police aren’t aware of the law or the particular permit exception you fall under, the best likely outcome is you get put in a cage while they figure it out. Having a permit helps avoid that.
If you're referring to the Liberator, it uses a metal nail as a firing pin.
On a practical note, probably not: the designers probably tried really hard to make a fully plastic gun - they took the trouble to make the barrel out of plastic - but didn't. Stands to reason that it's due to necessity.
At a more theoretical level, I think you'd find it exceedingly difficult to trigger a primer using a material softer than the primer itself.
I'm sure it's not impossible - for example, you could probably trigger a primer by shooting it with a plastic bullet - but within the engineering confines of a handgun it seems implausible, particularly since the easy solution, using a nail, is so readily available.
Sure, if your definition of better is generating a ton of false positives as a pretext for patting people down.
This turns consumer level tech into a militant authoritarian’s dream. Have they also developed ways to identify when this technology is being used surreptitiously?
On any given week, they'd catch about a half dozen police officers, a maintenance person or two who still had their tools on them, and the occasional delivery person.
After a few weeks they disabled the system entirely.
https://blog.danslimmon.com/2012/11/02/car-alarms-and-smoke-...
It's really, really, really hard to do this with cooperative RF sources and way way more bandwidth. This is horseshit.