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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.
Better yet. Sell a small device that jams the signal! Disarm him without firing a shot. Then you can take your time to aim.
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.
"Black rifle" in this context is slang for a weapon built on the AR-15/10 platform.
And on the opposite side--send out a signal that authorizes any weapon!
If the authentication takes place only within the watch, then the weapon's mechanism is just looking for an arming signal--probably something simple--and you could mass jam or arm weapons with a strong enough transmitter (I'm thinking of those shopping-cart brake systems that people have been pranking...). Heck, you can even get your own watch, put in your own pin, and steal any weapon and it will work!
OTOH, if the weapons' system is tied to a specific watch, then the failure rate will be through the roof! And, of course, you can disarm everyone easily because the systems are so strict.
As an aside, this would make locating weapons extremely easy--all you have to do is walk around with an RF scanner, searching for watch and/or weapons signals.
I see a big market for jammers, spoofers, RF scanners, and a multitude of other mini-electronic RF products. I better go take some spectrum-analysis classes soon.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
You're an idiot if you believe this. This company is actively counting on and courting the hoplophobes in order to legislate their products into existence.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
One is a minor problem in need of a solution, the other is negligence which cannot be defeated by any mechanical means.
Read the article... law enforcement is specifically exempt. This is because the technology is too unreliable for defense / offense, and sometimes people don't have time to enter a PIN or may need to shoot with their other hand. This is for you and me, so we're no longer effective at defending ourselves.
Well, I gotta hand it to you; you guys nailed pretty much everything wrong with this idea in the first three posts. The only people who could love this idea are liberal gun grabbers who are afraid somebody might get hurt with a gun. The idea that it would be good for police is equally silly - the added layer of complexity can only further muddy the waters at times when speed and reliability are paramount. I already mourn for the police officer who will be killed when this system fails.
Guns aren't supposed to be safe, they're supposed to be dangerous as hell and for a very good reason. The entire mindset that spawned this abortion ignores the most basic natural right to self defense. Said mindset also has an unconscionably low opinion of people's judgments in such situations. It's the same mindset that recommends "passive resistance" for rape victims, as if a woman lying dead in an alley, raped and strangles with her own pantyhose is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to a cop exactly why she had to shoot her attacker.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Unfortunately you are probably dead on in your statement, but it won't be muggers you have to worry about disarming you, it will be government agencies.
This type of legislation / device is a wet dream for those who do not understand the premise or need for the 2nd Amendment.
Civil unrest? The serfs don't agree with you? No worries when they try to resist your commands and actually attempt to revolt, disable their means of meaningful resistance!
Mod Parent Up!
I understand slashdot is full of people with different backgrounds, but it becomes easily apparent when people get outside of what they're comfortable with.
A .22 is a very very useless hand to hand weapon and I don't know of any law enforcement in the world that would use the gun powder equivalent of a pea shooter. Unless you get a Boom Headshot.
There was an article a while back on how US soldiers were picking up and using the AK-47 and using them. One reason was most US guns use the Nato .223, which tops out at 4.1g the AK-47 uses a round that tops out at 10g (.22 tops out at g, 9mm at 9.5). People would keep coming after the first shot. Now if I have a suicide bomber running straight for me I want something that I know will make him stop.
For hunting they're mainly used for squirrels and the such. People hunting larger game go for larger guns.
The other being that our guns were in such tight tolerance that in the field they had great range and accuracy ... if you kept them clean. The AK-47 could be buried in a pile of sand. picked up, brushed off and fired.
*And the awesome 30-06 topped out at 14g. And you knew it. I spent an entire day shooting nothing but that at a friends once. The next day I had a palm sized bruise in on my shoulder. Oh but it was fun.
And yet the most common firearm for police officers doesn't have an external safety. Glock pistols have some internal safety's that prevent mechanical failures or dropping it from causing the gun to fire, but there is no external mechanical safety. When you pull the trigger it fires, when you don't pull the trigger it doesn't fire. Exactly the way it should be.
It's not a matter of not having a weapon; it's a matter of not having a significantly better, or at least equal, weapon than the criminals.
A weapon can be anything: your arms, a knife, a baseball bat. Chances are that violent thugs are going to come up-armed: they're going to have one or more of those things and/or a gun, and they're going to come in numbers greater than your own.
By having a gun, you greatly increase your own odds. You keep the enemy at greater-than-arm's-length, and you are reduced from being at their whims to being in control in your own home.
Every now and then you see about an armed robbery going horrifyingly right, with the criminals in question staining the homeowner's carpet. Not so often do you hear about a homeowner shot by criminals with their own gun - at least not that I have seen.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
In Britain you are allowed to use reasonable force to defend yourself and your family and property from attack; and the important part is that it must only be reasonable to you at the time of using that force. If in the cold light of day it might seem unreasonable, if you thought it was reasonable (and can get a jury to agree with you that you thought it was reasonable) then you should not be found guilty.
The problem comes when someone uses clearly unreasonable force, then they cannot claim self-defence. In the case that has recently been in the news, the householder, once he'd driven off the attackers went on to chase them down the street and when he caught them he smashed a cricket bat over his head inflicting permanent injury on him. Pursuing an attacker once the threat to yourself and family is clearly over is no longer self-defence.
From what I heard of the case, I would agree that he went beyond the use of reasonable force to defend himself and his family and so should not have been able to use the self-defence defence. However, I do agree with the appeal judge also that this was an exceptional situation and given the extreme provocation of the attackers, he should not be significantly punished for going beyond self-defence.
The main debate in Britain at the moment is whether the law should be changed so that people won't be guilty if they go beyond "reasonable" force; only if they use "grossly disproportionate" force. If this proposal from the Tory's gets into law then it will be legal to use unreasonble force to defend yourself, and legal to use disproportionate force to defend yourself. Personally I like the term the reasonable force - there haven't been any cases that I heard of in Britain where someone used anything like reasonable force in their defence where they've been convicted, so to me it feels like the law is working as it stands (but then I'm not a Daily Mail reader who thinks it should be justifiable to kill someone who has trespassed on your property).