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Gun With Wireless Arming Signal Goes On Sale Soon
An anonymous reader writes "Armatix has built a pistol that will disarm itself when it is taken away from a watch that sends it a wireless arming signal. The .22 caliber guns will go on sale in the US within months, and the initial price is 7,000 euro. Higher caliber models will follow. To activate the gun, users must enter a pin code on the wristwatch, and then keep it within roughly 20cm of the gun. If the person is disarmed, the gun can't be used against them. Also coming soon this year, civilians will also be able to buy three-shot Tasers, rubber bullets, as well as Heckler and Koch black rifles." This might not be good news for the citizens of New Jersey.
I gotta enter the pin so that I can use my gun to defend myself.
You want a perfectly "safe" weapon?
Just don't buy one.
There! Can I have 7000?
Great.
If I go target shooting I have to play "Pass the Wristwatch" to enjoy it as a communal activity and pay 10x as much for the privileged. If want to use it for self defense I have to wear the watch at all times and go through an extra layer of complications. Better yet in that situation if the gun is taken from me as we wrestle on the ground it's entirely likely that the gun will never move far enough to deactivate before I'm shot repeatedly in the chest and the watch and gun are taken.
Sounds like a lot of money to acquire a possibility of safety as well as making previously safe activities more complicated.
Unless you're wearing gloves, or your hands are dirty, or the battery dies...
At 20cm the average person WILL move their hand/watch past the authentication range. Will they need re-authentication.
The gun will fire if the attacker has twisted the gun to face the victim because the watch is within range.
The victim will need to fire with their off-hand because they used their good arm to defend against the initial attack. (This happened recently here.) The gun will not fire because it isn't close enough to the watch.
This setup is a recipe for disaster. In the name of safety, we will give up everything that gives us a chance against the bad guys.
Because now someone might actually try to enforce the idiotic legislation.
Rubber bullets kill, too. In fact, cops shouldn't even be allowed to have them because the perception that they are "non-leathal" just encourages their use -- just like the beanbag rounds. There have been cases where the beanbags come out flat with the edges parallel to the ground, sort of like a frisbee and that the impact at that angle caused severe lacerations. People have died from those, too.
I'm not anti-gun -- I have many myself. I grew up around them, and I am completely comfortable with them. I also know that if I point a loaded gun with real bullets at a person, I better be absolutely willing to kill them when I pull the trigger. Cops and soldiers are trained to know this, too. But they seem to be more than willing to pop off rubber bullets and beanbags for "crowd control," and death has been a consequence a higher-than-zero number of times.
The last thing we need is Joe Bob getting ahold of them and shooting at cats, neighbours, or even robbers. You know all those times that burglars have sued property owners over getting hurt while they're there to rob them? Imagine the lawsuits over "he shot me with a rubber bullet, broke my rib, punctured my lung and now just look at me!" I also envision a slew of YouTube videos of drunk-ass morons popping their friends with these to see what it feels like.
In short, this is pretty much the worst idea ever made.
Firearms manufacturing is one of the oldest forms of craft and art in the United States as is evident by Pennsylvania's recent push to honor the Pennsylvania long rifle as a storied part of their national history. Furthermore many involve masterful engineering and mechanics as well as providing a fun hobby to enjoy outdoors either in the form of casual target shooting or hunting.
Oh. You just wanted to register your arrogant distaste? I wont be so bold as to presume you're from a nation on another continent that bans ownership to its own citizens but happily exports them to nations around the world, but I will say you'd be surprised how much more understandable the interest is when they're a common and generally harmless part of your existence rather than an evil bogeyman.
As well as the fact that a .45 makes large holes that let in a lot of air and let out a lot of blood.
Long story involving a friend back in the '70s with a Class 3 FFL, I ended up with a chance to fire a Thompson 1928 (among a number of other weapons that day) at a hanging wild-hog carcass that weighed around 200 lbs. The entry points were just a bit bigger than the bullet (.45 ACP FMJ) however the exit wounds were anywhere from 2-1/2"/3" up to about 6" or a bit more that I attribute to how the bullet happened to tumble.
The bottom line was the thing was a mess after 2 or 3 rounds, and after the 5th and 6th, there just wasn't much left to hit except chunks hanging together even using FMJ ammo. I asked about hollow-point and soft-nose ammo, but I was told the Thompsons (and many other MGs and SMGs, and even some semi-auto pistols) tend to experience jams and feed problems with non-jacketed ammo.
Personally, my home-defense weapon-of-choice is a 12ga pump shotgun like the Mossberg 500. The ability to choose the type of load makes it particularly suited to home-defense.
I keep 2 rounds of birdshot first, followed up with buckshot for the remaining rounds. At ranges of 25 feet or less as within a typical home or apartment, it doesn't much matter if the shell is birdshot or a slug, it will still put a 2"-3" hole in a person. Birdshot is far less likely to over-penetrate and/or penetrate walls/floors/ceilings possibly causing collateral damage to innocent bystanders.
If I've fired 2 rounds of birdshot and going for more, I then figure I must be in a firefight so it's buckshot and all bets are off as I'm fighting for survival.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I find this system to be completely intrusive and unnecessary, as an American.
No criminal record is acceptable, I suppose, though here in the US that bar seems to be getting lower and lower over time. When it was limited to felonies, and felonies were violent crimes, that was fine. But now it is expanded to white-collar crimes and domestic assault that results in a misdemeanor.
No failed psych eval makes sense, but again - that bar keeps getting lower too. I've heard tales of ex-military being denied a weapon because of a decade-old PTSD diagnosis. This only makes it less likely for them to seek treatment.
Safe storage? Fifth Amendment. No law enforcement officer will ever enter my home unless they have a warrant or are acting on an emergency.
Working knowledge of guns? How do you propose to measure this? Anyone who can read can have a "working knowledge of firearms and their use" in about 30 minutes. Sounds like an arbitrary test, to me. One that can be manipulated by whomever is responsible for administering it.
See, we Americans have a widespread cultural mistrust of government.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Guns are the great equalizers: swords and arrows require a heckuva lot more practice to become proficient than guns. It's no wonder governments are afraid of mere citizens having them. What is surprising is the number of ordinary people who have nothing to fear from guns but a lot to fear from governments who have somehow managed to swallow the government anti-gun propaganda. Think for yourself.
People using guns save far more lives and prevent far more crimes than do criminals using guns. Studies show anywhere from 1.5 million (by the gun hating CDC) to 2.5 million (by a gun loving professor) crimes prevented by the use of guns, usually no more than the criminal seeing it or hearing it, seldom by actually using it. Most gun crimes in the US are by criminals on criminals. Cars kill far more people.
Considering there are more guns in the US than cars, 300 million of them, one per citizen, they are used incredibly safely. Those who think guns are bad no doubt must think worse of cars.
And the most fun gun statistic in the US: if you have one neighbor with guns and one neighbor with a swimming pool, your kids are seven times as likely to die in the pool neighbor's pool than from the gun neighbor's guns.
Infuriate left and right
People who wish to kill/harm other people will still find ways to get guns.
Because the reality is people don't want smart guns PERIOD. Every time you make a gun more complex it becomes more failure prone. The Glocks that almost all police departments use don't even have a safety on it period - because it's an extra point of failure and something to fiddle with. Just like code, a good gun should have SIMPLICITY, both in operation and in design, as a major design goal. Needless "safety" features and ESPECIALLY anything that depends on a battery are needless fluff. A nice semi-stiff double action trigger pull is a perfectly viable "safety" mechanism for 90% of shooters. For the other 10% they need nothing more than a simple manual safety.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Over half of those would be suicides and they generally support the sometimes harmful nature of firearms. So would 12.5 Million registered hunters and the law abiding citizens in 1-2 Million "defensive gun uses" every year.
For the 60 some million people (a rate that increases every year) owning over 200 million firearms 15,000 would be small even if it didn't include police shootings and intentional acts of self defense and is even less if you're cynical and feel that the another third or so shouldn't be counted because the victims were either committed by drug dealers or against them.