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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

Anyone that has ever tried to use a fingerprint reader with greasy hands under time pressure will reject this.

As the video explains the use case for this is a by the bed gun for home defense at night. So greasy hands are less likely. It also has facial recognition as a secondary authentication source.

I mean I’ve had FaceID and TouchID each fail to work more than zero times, even and especially in early morning. And there’s no way I’d trust this tech enough to forego a safe if I had children around anyway.

Which I feel is a perfectly valid argument against it and I would definitely not trust some random small company to not have bugs in their code. I'm not defending the gun but simply pointing out that if you are going to voice concerns then actually look into what the thing is first.

Indeed. Even if they can't pull the trigger, there's plenty of stimuli that will result in a bullet being fired other than a trigger being pulled. Playing "microwave the gun" wouldn't likely end well.

Wouldn't the safest thing to be not having firearms in the home?

Statistically yes. But I can imagine the risk/benefit calculation becomes a bit murkier if you live somewhere rural where you’re effectively “on your own” when it comes to police response time.

Fair enough. It's scary to imagine from my perspective in the Netherlands and I can see how the fear could be a driving factor when anyone around me can also buy a gun.

The Netherlands has a population density of 508/km2. Wyoming has one of 2/km2. Texas almost reaches 50/km2. That type of isolation is a fundamentally different way of living.

Yeah, that kind of isolation is scary to imagine from over here, but I can see how that fear could become a strong driving factor in behavioural change.

Depends on the risk of "bad thing happening due to gun" vs "bad thing happening due to someone breaking into your house while you're there." Which in turn depends on where you live, the local crime rate statistics and possibly the response time of the local police department. I suspect the math does not favor guns as often as some people think it does but there probably are times it does favor guns.

Maybe. It's all a trade-off.

Residential homes with swimming pools have a higher mortality for children than residential homes with guns, and yet there does not exist the same sort of large scale highly funded push to ban residential swimming pools.

I mean, if the primary area of concern was safety, you'd save more children by banning swimming pools.

Isn't that a false dichotomy and a strawman?

> Isn't that a false dichotomy and a strawman?

I don't see how.

There's no dichotomy that I am aware of; when responding to a "safety" argument, demonstrating the relative safety compared to activities considered "safe" is not a dichotomy.

I also don't see a strawman - I'm making no argument, which is a requirement for making a strawman argument. If I don't make an argument, I can't be attacking a strawman.

It felt like you were arguing the people aren't worried about the safety of swimming pools around children or that we should leave aside the worry about firearms in favour of worrying about swimming pools.

But in a discussion about swimming pool safety mechanisms I'm sure we would also see people giving their views on what they consider reasonable precaution for themselves.

We can worry about both things and give them both time is what I'm saying.

> But in a discussion about swimming pool safety mechanisms I'm sure we would also see people giving their views on what they consider reasonable precaution for themselves.

I've never seen a call to ban pools based on the mortality rate of children.

> We can worry about both things and give them both time is what I'm saying.

We can but we don't. We only see safety used as an argument for banning firearms, not as an argument for banning pools.

Now, I'm not making any argument one way or another regarding banning of firearms, what I am doing, and what I started this thread with, was to point out that everything is a trade-off.

We trade higher deaths for swimming pools that serve no purpose other than recreation. Trading fewer deaths for something that has non-recreational utility is not logically sound or consistent.

IOW, it only makes sense to someone already emotionall married to their argument.

Ah, then you'd have to consider the huge emotional difference between a gun death and a swimming accident.

It's not only the deaths we want to avoid but also the trauma.

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