Assault Weapons Tracking | Hacker News Reader

Assault Weapons Tracking

assaultweaponstracking.com

Full disclosure: I'm a hardware hacker and I own many firearms, including so-called "assault weapons".

A couple of thoughts here:

1. Keep your firearms in a @$(@$ safe unless you can put your hand on them within a second or two at any given time. If you can't physically control it at all times, it needs to be locked away.

2. Don't give the safe combo to your children or anyone else. Don't let them watch while you open it.

3. Don't buy a crappy safe. Hotel-style 4-digit lock codes won't cut it.

4. Once a weapon is out of the safe and you're not there to witness it, it might as well be stolen. In other words, what you want to watch is the status of the safe's door and not the location of the individual guns. See #1 and #2.

5. There are already many wireless solutions to track door status. That NinjaBlocks appliance on HN the other day comes to mind. I don't want to invest in an entirely separate system. I want something that integrates w/ my existing home security.

6. You're not going to get much milage with the firearms community by calling them "assault weapons". That's a loaded term and I don't like it. Your potential customers are guys like me: considerate, caring people who happen to enjoy shooting guns and who own a few, but want to keep their collections safe. I'm not assaulting anyone and your use of that term is enough to keep me from buying your product.

7. You're wrong about mass shootings. Most, including the most deadly (VA Tech), were committed with handguns, not long rifles.

Expanding a little more on my #5 point:

The secret sauce here is not an API, or a cloud-based service, or SMS messages or any of that. The secret sauce is the hardware that goes inside the safe.

Contrary to popular belief, the primary reason to own a gun safe is for fire protection. Many of us have tens of thousands of dollars invested in our guns. Fire is the most probable undesired outcome and so a safe must protect against that. Your hardware device needs to be inside the safe so that it can be safe from tampering, but it /can't compromise the integrity of the fire protection/. Furthermore, it needs to be able to communicate to an outside station. This may be a problem if the device lives inside this big steel box.

I hope that you guys don't try to re-invent the wheel. There are already a number of home metrics collectors similar to NinjaBlocks and I would much rather use a platform that I can also use to monitor things like fire detection, home security, electricity usage, environmental conditions, lighting, etc. Build us something that works with most quality safes and have it integrate into the existing systems. Sell us the hardware.

agreed

there are lot of people who hoard good domains, wanted a .com domain which tells the intent. I would have very well called gun safe tracker, but I am not building a tracker for it.

I would like to get ninja blocks, they look interesting

banning high capacity magazines can reduce the fatalities, but even that is tough to achieve

it is a matter of time there is going to be another shooting somewhere, and we will again discuss and forget it, we have blood in our veins not just water, hope we can make some progress

I think you are missing his point. The term "assault weapons" is a made up term. It describes a series of cosmetic features on a rifle, and if a rifle has a sufficient number of those features, it becomes an "assault weapon". The gun community, the people who you would need in order to buy your weapons, is not going to like that name. Since most of your potential buyers aren't going to like the idea itself, you might as well come up with a website name that they are going to find blatantly offensive.

most people will not wear a seat belts while driving a car if it was not mandated. same applies to air bags, they are not effective if seat belts are not worn.

http://www.nsc.org/safety_road/DriverSafety/Pages/SeatBelts....

here is the link to seat belt legislation and compliance

though the first seat belts came in Saab, volvo and mercedes in late 50's early 60's it took 80s to get them as a law in US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_legislation_in_the_Un...

The usage of Seat belts for every state is between 72.2%(New Hampshire) to 97.6%(oregon)

if we can achieve those numbers some day Americans will feel more like Canadians

> banning high capacity magazines can reduce the fatalities, but even that is tough to achieve

The colombine shooter that fired the most, used 10rd magazines, not the one with the TEC-9. Src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre#...

I will give you props though, unlike most of the anti-gun crowd, you're thinking something other than 'ban'.

if we start with the "ban" as the idea it will take another year atleast to bring it to vote, and democrats are not majority, so the day we start announcing lot more people will start buying everything of the shelf. NRA knows how to twist people to listen to their own version of the truth.

even when the ban if it comes it would be for "manufacturing and sales of guns" just like 18th amendment for banning alcohol, it would do nothing to keep the existing guns in safety.

so my thinking is safety of the guns by owners without involving guns and and restrictions of guns in public places by involving people, organisations and if needed the government, this would be a compromise which republicans and democrats can agree on.

If you pass a ban, you'll have something around a 10% compliance rate. Then, you accept it, or you move to confiscation. Clearly you are not steeped in the non-coastal, non-liberal-elite culture, because if you were, you would realize that would trigger a LOT of blood shed.

Thank you. My first thoughts were a lot less polite.

So you want gun owners to voluntarily add a GPS tracking device that is accessible by third parties to all of their guns?

I don't like to outright dismiss projects, but I'm sorry you are never going to get enough people to do this for it to be worth anyone's time.

And how is an alarm system going to help if the guy starts firing as soon as he walks in?

The vast majority of gun homicides are committed by felons with handguns not unauthorized "assault weapons". GPS trackers are going to be easy for criminals to remove anyway.

This is a voluntary option, for parents and people who dont want their guns to me taken out or misused without their permission.

We already have electronic safes and gun safes, adding RFID or NFC based sensor would be practical, we would also need to add a sticker or embed a small chip inside the Gun.

if a Gun is removed by unauthorized person it should raise a alarm

I understand that you want to help people and save lives, but the reality of the fact is that your target market is going to universally hate your idea and the rationale behind it.

my belief stems from this link

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1227-gun-buyback-201...

even a couple of percentage adoption can be a big step

Gun buybacks are mostly for publicity. A good amount of the guns are stolen specifically to turn them in for cash. The people who organize these things make it sound like they are there to accept the surrender of a large, violent gang. Also, when a real gang member does sell a gun, chances are he still has at least one at home(like he's gonna change his entire lifestyle for 50 bucks.)

Think about it, most guns cost way more than the 50 bucks they were offering for handguns in that article and ar15s average about 1k. Guns maintain resale value in a way that makes apple products look like disposable pens, so why would anyone who didn't steal their gun sell it to these people at a huge loss?

The aforementioned LA gun buyback also bought 2 completely useless, already fired, single use rocket launchers and paraded them around the press as if they'd accomplished something.

The vast majority of guns turned in are old .22s and shotguns, very few "assault weapons" or even handguns for that matter.

I am going to compare car safety with gun safety, in last 50 years lot of effort has been to put safer cars on road. but people need to drive it safe as well, so one of the earliest of them was Seat Belt usage, it started in early 60's but based on its effectiveness for the cost added to the system, it became a law in most US states in 80s and 90s, but what is importance is compliance to it, which is 70-90% thats what is more interesting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_legislation_in_the_Un...

my reference to LA article was incentive was not good enough for all people to give away their guns, so lets agree those fact and start making progress in keeping guns safer at home.

They got about 2,000 "guns" (I use the quotes because many of the items were non-functional and in some cases not even guns to begin with). Los Angeles has a population of 3.8 million. There's somewhere in the range of one gun per capita in the United States. That's not a "couple of percentage [points]". Not even close.

No, it'd actually be a hindrance (assuming the GPS-alert-school thing is implemented). It would give a false sense of security while doing next to nothing.

If your're talking about an RFID tag that lets the owner know when something has been removed from the safe, I don't think anyone will have a problem with that.

However, the site mentions GPS tracking and access to the tracking info by third parties (alerting a school when a tracked gun gets too close). That's a whole different ballgame.

we might open source a version which is linked to SMS only and which does not talk to a server, it can be done.

bringing sensors to school and malls is lot cheaper than having troopers everywhere, but it needs political will

You know what works better? Responsible armed people willing to confront evil with faced with it.

To be somewhat dark here: you don't really need sensors at malls or schools; their utility in the event of a shooting would probably be superseded by discharges or other obvious telltales of a weapon's presence.

Let's assume you get past the obvious problems like politics, privacy concerns, massive improvements in battery technology to implement GPS tracking of guns, etc.

With the estimated 200 Million privately owned firearms in the United States alone, you seem to have a 20 Trillion dollar ($100 a firearm) problem to solve.

That's greater than the US debt (at the moment) and the entire US GDP for the most recent year.

Emotional impact aside, there are a lot more serious problems that could be solved with that kind of money that impact more people with greater efficacy

You're correct.

Second hand smoking kills 42,000 people each year in the United States alone [1].

More than 3 times as many as homicide by firearm.

Furthermore second hand smoking in Britain (more common than the US) kills about 5 times as many people per capita as do firearms in the US [2].

[1] http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/21/the-major-toll-of-seco...

[2]http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/healthyliving/sm...

it takes years to die as a second hand smoker, even the smokers ten to live on for decades. but bullets are swift like cyanide, intended to kill and do kill for sure

Not really. Rifles at close range do tend to end people quite badly - providing the bullet fragments or expands. There are many tales from Iraq/Afghanistan where this isn't happening with the 5.56mm NATO. And pistols really only kill about 25% of the time. Remember that in order to kill a human with a normal pistol, your target is the size of a pair of ten is balls separated by 18" of rebar. Hit the brainstem, heart, or spinal column and the target goes down NOW. Miss that, and all sorts of odd things can happen, including living through the hit.

200m x $100 is $20b not $20t.

yeah he got too excited, if it was $20t Boeing and Lockheed Martins would be building it :)

what I would like to point out is the cost to US economy

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-21/shootings-costing-u...

First of all, that sketch does not define assault weapons, making me wonder if you've paid any attention to the counterarguments to the "ban assault weapons" hysteria. See: http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-g...

Second, short and vague hand-wavy descriptions are not going to cut it. There's no description of where these trackers would go. There isn't a lot of empty space inside a gun; places where this might go are inside pistol grips or at the bottom of magazine wells, but those are both easily accessible. Furthermore, anywhere these trackers go would have to be accessible. Otherwise, how do you replace the batteries?

It would be challenging to design circuitry relying on solder that would stand up to the shock of being attached to a gun that's fired dozens or hundreds of times at a range, or thousands or tens of thousands of times over a typical gun's lifetime.

What does your tracking system accomplish? Guns that are stolen are going to be checked for GPS and NFC trackers, which will be removed or disabled. Guns that are bought legally (Cho) for use illegally (VA Tech) are going to have the GPS and NFC trackers removed or disabled, too.

I am not a hardware engineer, never fired a bullet.

Your points are very valid,

All I can build is couple of prototype which can prove it can be done. it might be flawed, defective whatever.

I dont know how it can be done, but there must be someone somewhere who can take these challenges and come up with a solution.

In summary: You've registered a domain name, spent 3 weeks noodling the problem since Sandy Hook, have no hardware engineering background, and have never fired a gun.

Why is this on HackerNews?

I can't build chips, but can use off the shelf parts build prototypes and have built some.

I dont want to be fired upon by a gun, nor for my family or friends and for that matter even a enemy.

this is in HackerNews, believe whatever you want to I am scratching my itch, massaging my ego, feeling less guilty for having attempted to do something for getting to the solution.

The problems you'll run into when trying a GPS solution: 1) packaging. LIke someone else said, there isn't a lot of room on your typical firearm to hide such things. You'll be left with something like a wall-wart that is completely obvious. 2) battery life. some of my rifles haven't left the safe in a year, you really going to have a battery that keeps the device powered that long?

You're wasting your time. 3D printers are going to make gun rights as inevitable as your right to download Cat Steven's greatest hits--and approximately as deadly. Just give it up.

Also, if it makes you feel better, try to keep in mind that a Ford Escort is more dangerous than a boxful of 357 magnum revolvers, statistically speaking.

I understand that guns aren't hard to make - never mind 3D printing, any machinist can make a submachine gun. [1] But what about ammunition?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2624298/sten-mk2-complete-machine-...

I made 500+ rounds over the christmas holidays as a gift for my dad. I can cast my own bullets, and if I really needed to I could make the shell casings. Yeah, it'd take a lot of work with the mill and lathe to build the dies to draw and form the brass, but totally doable.

>But what about ammunition?

Not terribly difficult considering you can reuse the casings. The primer is by far the most difficult part, but not impossible. Propellant is no more difficult to make than meth.

for driving a car you need a driving license and you should not be drunk to drive on roads. none of those apply to owning or using a gun

>for driving a car you need a driving license

No you don't. You need a driver's license to operate a vehicle on a public road.

You don't need one to keep it at home and drive around your backyard/dirt road. Most states require a CCW permit to carry a gun around in public as well.

Furthermore, vehicles are licensed with the idea that people are going to drive them in public, at dangerous speeds, in close proximity to other vehicles that are also in motion.

Guns are carried/licensed with the idea that people are not going to use them in public, except in emergency situations.

The law in most places doesn't treat prohibitions as categorical imperatives. If I'm going to be attacked unless I flee on a motorcycle, good luck finding a jury anywhere that will convict me for riding a bike without a motorcycle license.

And yet, carrying a gun, without a license, solely so that you can attempt to defend yourself in an emergency situation, will generally get you prosecuted in all but the most gun-tolerant areas[1] if you get caught or if you have to use it... prosecuted for not having a carry permit. (Ignoring unlicensed open carry -- which is legal in a few more places than unlicensed concealed carry is -- because, although I don't want open carry banned, I think it's tactically unsound.)

[1] Vermont, Alaska, Arizona so far allow unlicensed concealed carry, and in a few other places the DAs might choose not to prosecute you, but most DAs would at least try to prosecute.

You're going to need a lot of perseverance to get a project like this done, so if nothing else this project will teach you a lot of patience with people who don't believe in your idea.

You can get a prototype really easy: get an Arduino platform and some sensors and then work on your back-end. With about $100 in parts you can prove out a lot of your overall idea. Visit https://www.adafruit.com/ - you don't need to have any hardware experience to get something functional in just a few hours or days; this stuff is easy to learn.

If you have the ability to objectively analyze results, you'll quickly realize your project is a) recreating wheels that already exist, b) utterly pointless.

Anyone intent on doing evil will be able to destroy or suppress any sensor added or built-into a gun. Mass-murders are not done on a whim - they plan and have plenty of time to figure out ways around obstacles.

Yes, some obstacles will undoubtedly deter some people, but with everything there is a cost / benefit analysis that must be done. You will find in this debate that people, on both sides of the issue, will use every statistically correlation as a causation to support their point. Factual, proven data is very hard to come by without a bias: I'm pretty sure I could statistically prove that mass murders are directly related to the availability of avocados.

Weapon-smithing and ammunition production is easy with modern tools and is just getting easier. Even casings for ammunition is easy with simple machine tools. As others have mentioned, with 3D printing technology advancing printing guns from scratch is effectively here today and will only get better.

Ever hear of a booster bag? [1] Faraday cages aren't hard to make. It wouldn't shock me if a gun locker blocked signals too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booster_bag

CCTV does not stop crime, but helps in conviction. if Sandy Hook kids had one minute prior notice, atleast half of them would be alive, I am a parent myself with kids in same age group, so every possibility still excite me

Didn't the killer shoot the person who would have monitored the firearms first before taking them? So this solution would only be helpful if law enforcement actively tracked the position of all "assault weapons" at all times. And that seems like a bad idea on a variety of levels.

Simply prying the device off or smashing it with a hammer would also work.

So your idea solves the problem of someone "cracking" or knowing the combination to my gun safe and removing the gun without my knowledge?

Please explain how many of mass shootings over the last 15 years or so this would have prevented?

That's just a bad idea all around.

How about a simple RFID sensor solution that can be used detect arms being carried into public places like malls, Schools, religious places, conventions etc. were we have most of the public mass killing being reported/targeted. This would be just like RFID sensors used on merchandise's from being shoplifted. only that conceptually the sensor has to work in reverse from preventing objected materials being carried into the premises.

we are thinking in same lines, but all the guns need to be first tagged with them, which is who will bell the cat

why not take a cue from auto industry and have a recall campaign for existing one's. It should be default for new ones!

It's a great concept and extremely viable. All you need to do is ask 20 gun owners and you'll get some positives. Don't listen to the naysayers.

we have lot to cover, just of the drawing board, we will build the API,web and mobile interfaces. It needs working closely with manufacturers, parents, authorities and lot of good will to move this. I expect a 80% failure possibility but it is still worth a try.

What if this was an open source project with do it yourself hardware + software that alerts you on your phone when guns are taken out of a certain range.

Does this excite anyone?

A much, much more palatable version of this would be a simple local RFID tag that communicates with a fob in the safe, and which signals when a firearm is removed from said safe--that is, after all, the MVP for the problem you claim to want to solve.

Adding GPS is overkill, plays right into wingnut fantasies of the evil gubbernment man tracking their guns, and most of all is useless once I peel the damn thing off the weapon.

Start simple, use an RFID tag.

Oh, and check the copy on your site.

I think it would possible if it becomes a law.

While I certainly don't think we'll need to take advantage of the 2nd amendment anytime soon, the purpose behind it is to keep our government honest with the threat of an armed populace.

So why would anyone in their right mind give the government the ability to track them using the very instrument that is intended to protect you from them?

If such a law were enacted, it would surely be the most idiotic piece of legislation in the history of our nation.

I just moved to the states and clearly, I don't know the laws well enough. If laws can't stop deadly weapons, I guess there has to be another meaningful way to do that.

Its already illegal to murder people. Yet people get murdered all the time.

I hope you get eaten by a bear.

It's nice to see someone else has such a strong revulsion to poorly worded ad copy on a web site.

Grrr!

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