Slashdot Mirror
Smart Gun with Minicam and Biometric Access
StrawberryFrog writes "Ya well no fine, those crazy South Africans are at it again, this time with a "intelligent firearm". You may have heard of guns with fingerprint recognition before, but this also uses a laser to ignite the propellant, has multiple barrels and incorporates a minicam to record as evidence what you are shooting at. It's a very different gun design, and one that depends on electronics to make it work."
Red LED display of number of rounds left. (Preferably facing the user when held, so no-one else can see it).
graspee
Now script kiddies are going to h4x0r guns.
I'll stick with my H&K.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Hopefully much less than 15 seconds to shoot ten rounds. But what are you after? A slashdot-like time delay between shots?
You do understand that guns are still legal in the US, right? Despite the misguided efforts of those who can't read...
What's the best way of eventually eliminating usage of existing weapons? Prohibit manufacture of ammo for it.
I can forsee all current types of ammo being banned one day, and only a new non compatible design being allowed. The gun that can use this ammo will be highly restricted. Eventually the existing ammo supply for "pre-legal" weapons will run out, rendering them useless to all except those willing to pay high prices for the remaining ammo stocks. A black market ammo industry will arise though.
If you want to do something illegal, you probably won't use this type of gun in the first place, you'll use the regular old kind. But imagine that you are a cop accused of shooting someone irresponsibly. Having picture evidence of exactly what they were doing when you shot them could be quite useful to you.
If I run out of memory, does the gun lock up?
Why would it lock up? Obviously it wouldn't be able to store any more data without first deleting something else, but it would be up to the manufacturer to decide what it should do. My guess is that they would delete the oldest photo to make room for the new one.
These guns aren't designed to be criminal-proof, they are designed to be accident-proof, theft-proof, and self-documenting. As the article says, they are designed to be used by government officials and the military, not necessarily by Joe Civilian.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Not to mention that you can make a firearm out of just about anything. Have a potato and some PVC? Make a starch cannon... put some bearings or rocks in the potato, and you're practically guranteed to send some bastard to the ER.
Face it, as long as people want to kill themselves, there's always a way to do it.
Crossbow? Bow and arrow? Extremely effective. Heck, they can even penetrate kevlar, and can cause much more damage than a regualr 9mm FMJ.
Throwing spear? Takes some practice, but any geriatric could skewar some poor son-of-a-bitch with some effort.
Lo, the day when the thugs resort to drive-by stranglings.
I was just thinking, I wonder if there'll be bootlegged copies of those images going around, gore gallery style.. if every murder (with those guns) is captured.
but then again, who'd kill someone with one of these??
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
OK, I guess it's time for eat my words. In reply to this article, I shot my mouth off about the stupid legistlators who enact stupid laws.
Now who looks foolish.
If you want to do something illegal, you probably won't use this type of gun in the first place, you'll use the regular old kind. But imagine that you are a cop accused of shooting someone irresponsibly. Having picture evidence of exactly what they were doing when you shot them could be quite useful to you.
I think it is more likely that cops will tape it up to hide when they use their weapon illegaly, just like they, for instance, here in Sweden, tape over the numbers on their riot gear.
It could still be useful if this obscuring of evidence was a crime in itself.
Note: I actually studied explosion engineering in university, before belatedly discovering a conscience and going into IT, where I can't kill people much.
One of the major things you do when planning explosions is work out where the shock waves are going. Very strange things can happen, and it's not particularly intuitive - you just have to do the maths.
Lots of inert plastic beads scattered through your explosive are going to mess up the calculations, which are difficult enough without having to worry about inhomogeneity in your explosive -plastic beads would have a nasty habit of arranging themselves in "fault lines" as the explosive sets, like cherries in a cake.
Even if you do acheive fairly uniform distribution, and you do account for them with a dissipative term of some sort (computing power being cheap these days), they are going to screw up your nice, clean, planar shock front and spread it out.
When using explosives for demolition work, you produce focussed shock waves acting as a sort of cutting edge, not ones randomly sending bits of building or even self-spalled fragments of exploding explosive (nasty) in the wrong direction.
I'd guess that the memory for the pictures is held in the replacable barrel. Which is also the clip.
Thus it would have say 10 shots, and memory for 10 pictures.
omehow this doesn't seem to be the answer to gun crime.
Nope, but it does mean that cops and US-home/gun owners don't get shot where their own gun.
This has uses, like the police force, and legal gun owners, it would be very good for places where people claim they require a gun, for hunting for example (you then also get a nice picture of the foxes brains splatter accross the field, and your pack of hounds jumping on it, or the animal-rights actervist standard just a little too close to the evil nastie fox).
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
It doesn't hamper legitimate uses while making illegitimate ones more difficult to execute and get away with.
This is horrid for legitimate use. You no longer have a cheap detachable magazine, you've got to remove your whole barrel assembly to reload. That's not cost effective. You can't reaload it yourself, and you can't purchase amoo in bulk. When I take a 9mm out to the range for training I'll typically blow through 100 to 150 rounds. I'd need 10 to 15 barrel assemblies to do this. That's not good. Also, remember that whenever you change the tiniest thing about your firearm you will throw off the impact point. In the case of this firearm -every- round goes through a different barrel, meaning each shot will have a slightly different path.
This alone doesn't promote responsible use. If you can't predict where your round will land you shouldn't be taking any shots. If you can't actually use the firearm for training it's entirely useless for a civilian.
The real problem I see is what happens when these guns are adopted, at least in some sectors, be it 5 or 10 years from now, or maybe even sooner with the way the world works today.
Because it's all well and good for a cop to be able to prove that, Yes, I did fire in self-defense, but when courts start basing cases on the evidence from guns that record user details, and these things affect peoples lives, it becomes a whole lot scarier.
Sure, the crypto that ensures that only the gun and authorized dealers can modify the onboard memory is great now, and will be better when they actually hit production, what happens in 30 years, when guns made 5 years from now are a quarter century old?
Do you want to trust that the records in a gun made 25 years earlier are secure enough? Because everything's fine until some ex-employee of the gun's manufacturer cracks the ram, or flash memory, or whatever they used to store the data, and frames you for a murder. Think about it, 30 years from now how hard would it be to get somebody's fingerprint, when even today they're being used for authentication?
The real question is, if you wouldn't entrust your email and IM conversations to 1970's crypto technology, in the future is it a good idea to trust peoples' lives to what we've got today?
The concept of a biometric gun ala Judge Dredd is not a bad idea for law enforcement.
Things that would be useful:
* A gun that stores or broadcasts GPS coordinates of each shot fired. Makes post incident investigation easier.
* Biometric access to the gun. Fingerprints perhaps are a bad idea though, dirt being a prevalent problem. But what ever method chosen, it would be a good idea for the gun to recognize anyone on the force, or at least on each particular assignment. Solves the "my partner is down and my gun is damaged" scenario.
* Clear tagging of bullets by gun. Makes post incident investigation easier.
* The camera probably should be "on the officer" and not on his gun, and should probably upload it's data via wireless, rather than recording locally, otherwise the bad guy will just destroy the camera after killing the officer, or the officer would destroy it to CYA.
In regards to posters of the opinion that trusting your arse to one of these is crazy, it might break. I wouldn't trust any gun, technologically advanced or not, if it hasn't been field proven and heavily tested. There is no reason why a gun like this can't be brought to a high level of reliability, although we may not be technically capable of it yet.
--mike
Idiot.
Owning a gun requires *responsibility*. If the kid could get to the gun in the first place, load it, and use it, it's the parent's fault.
Don't believe me? There are something like 100 million gun owners in this country. The numbers of kids killed in firearm accidents every year is in the low thousands. A very small percentage, and mostly due to irresponsibility.
If you have kids that are too young to be responsible with guns, deny them access to the guns. There are many ways to do this. Then, when they are old enough, take them to classes, or teach them gun safety and the responsiblities therein yourself.
I grew up in, and live in, a state where gun ownership is practically a fact of life for most people. If you're not willing to take responsibility for it, then don't own one. If you do own, and are careless and one of your kids dies as a result, *don't blame the guns* blame yourself, because you're the idiot who let it happen!
Sheeese!!!!!!!!!!!
SB
Guns don't kill people, irresponsible idiots/violent human beings do. Are you going to ban kitchen knives because your kid might stab himself with it? Moron.
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.