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Using Technology To Make Guns Safer
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Farhad Manjoo writes that there are a number of technologies that gunmakers could add to their products that might prevent hundreds or thousands of deaths per year. One area of active research is known as the 'smart gun' — a trigger-identification system that prevents a gun from being fired by anyone other than its authorized user. Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology created a working prototype of a gun that determines whether or not to fire based on a user's 'grip pattern.' Gunmakers have been slow to add other safety technologies as well, including indicators that show whether a gun is loaded, and 'magazine safeties' that prevent weapons from being fired when their ammunition magazine is removed (PDF). That could save 400 lives a year. So why aren't gunmakers making safer guns? Because guns are exempt from most of the consumer safety laws that have improved the rest of American life. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, charged with looking over thousands of different kinds of products, is explicitly prohibited from regulating firearms. In 2005, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which immunizes gun makers against lawsuits resulting from 'misuse' of the products. If they can't be sued and can't be regulated, gunmakers have no incentive to make smarter guns." Note that gun safety features (not universally loved) like loaded-chamber indicators, grip safeties, and magazine disconnects are constantly evolving and have been available in some form and in various combinations for many decades, so gun makers seem to have some incentive to produce and improve them, and that the PLCAA does not prevent consumer safety lawsuits, but does shield gun makers from suits based on criminal conduct by gun buyers (though imperfectly).
a trigger-identification system that prevents a gun from being fired by anyone other than its authorized user
Looks like someone played MGS4 and liked the idea.
Are kind of missing the point. If you actually need to use a gun, you don't want a ton of hardware that will prevent it from firing when you pull the trigger.
Ask the Army if they really want their guns locked to only work when they pull the trigger, so when they pick up a fallen soldier's gun in the middle of a battle after running out of ammo it won't fire.
Insert obligatory "anti-gun" rant here. Insert meaningless blabber here.
Insert comments about "safety" and "children"
Insert head in sand.
Now that that's out of the way...hopefully this will actually be a meaningful discussion, and not just another gun bashing.
These guns aren't for the army, their for the typical idiot consumer.
I remember this old story on the news that a 3 year old picked up a gun, not knowing what it was, and shot his(?) mother when she tried to take it back.
This would prevent stories like that.
The author mostly had me with the first half of the article, then went overboard praising the Product Safety Commission and even worse, safety-related lawsuits. I'm glad guns are exempt -- many if not most product safety lawsuits are shining examples of why we need tort reform.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
is one of those obvious legalities that you would think you shouldnt have to have.
It's like the family that sued Cessna after their father, with insufficient training, crashed and died. (I guess its not his fault he didnt know how to fly)
Or the people who sue the bar for the drunk who rams their car. (i guess its not his fault he was too drunk to drive)
Or the guy who cut off his finger on a table saw, and sued Sears for not including the tech that automagically stops the saw. (I guess its not his fault he put hs finger on a frigging saw blade)
The MFR simply makes the product.
The owner still carries full weight and responsibility for proper use and misuse.
Shouldnt have to have a law to state that.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
And if you are robbed by more than one person? Getting shot once isn't enough to stop someone unless you hit them in the head (a small, moving target) or the heart (another small target). Even then it could take minutes to incapacitate them from blood loss. More holes > less holes.
"...a trigger-identification system that prevents a gun from being fired by anyone other than its authorized user..."
Yeah, this was in Skyfall. Didn't realize it was actually practical. Or is it?
The key to having an improvement in design implemented is that it must be acceptable to the buyer. It can't reduce the utility of the gun. The fact that a gun doesn't have a network of potentially unreliable sensors in it that identify a user by his grip means that gun can't be used with the other hand, or may fail to identify the user if he grips differently when under stress. One that recognizes fingerprints won't work if he's wearing a glove, using the other hand or has foreign material on his finger. These would be unacceptable to buyers. They're not going anywhere. If they have electronics of any kind, they need batteries. Why would you want to add a battery to a gun? The only one mentioned that makes sense to me is the ammo-clip lockout. That's simple to implement and would prevent accidental firing if a person forgets to eject the bullet in the chamber.
My Hi-Point C9 will not fire if the magazine is out of the pistol, even if a round is chambered. Looks like its already being done.
We're basically talking about adding technology to made guns NOT WORK, which means you are just adding another potential layer of failure to prevent the weapon from working. You want to know what solves most of those problems?, gun safes, which won't add a single potential failure layer to the overall picture.
Note: magazine safeties prevent you from clearing the firearm, which means you can't guarantee it's not loaded.
Reminds me of A.E. Van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher: guns which can only be used in self defence.
If such features become mandatory, then they have to be mandatory for police as well. It isn't in the interest of society to make the police less safe.
Because you want your gun to work, not have a bunch of computerized shit on it. Biometric sensors and close proximity wireless is flaky.
With a gun, like with climbing gear, the responsibility for saftey lies solely between the ears of the operator. The safest gun, like the safest climbing gear, is the one with the simplest possible operation that functions exactly the same way every time. Anything that creates the illusion that some component of the system can be relied upon to be responsible for the safety of the system ultimately lowers the safety of the system because it:
1) Increases the mechanical complexity of the system. More parts to fail, jam, or otherwise not operate as expected
2) Changes the behavior of the system based on the configuration. You shouldn't create a system that develops a sense of complacency in users because it's safe to do something in one configuration but not in another. In a situation that isn't intentionally firing the gun, a user shouldn't pull the trigger on a weapon without checking the chamber because he or she is relying on a magazine safety to prevent it from firing. At some ponit, encouraging this fundamentally dangerous behavior will come back and bite some user in the ass because they'll do the fundamentally unsafe thing when the system isn't in the "safe" configuration of having the magazine removed.
People get complacent, and complacency results in people doing unsafe things.
It's a gun. Made for shooting bullets to kill. Guns and safe just doesn't go hand in hand . Ever! It is only people that like guns that think they are safe. Until a vice-president shoots you in the face.
The reason why the PLCAA was passed was to prevent executive agencies from attempting to implement their own de-facto gun control via regulation, and to shut down a spate of lawsuits by a couple of states Attorneys General who were attempting to do the same thing via litigation on cases that had little to no basis in law, but were so costly that the manufacturers would have to "cave in" and settle.
As for the other features, they all suffer from a glaring weakness in that it is trivially easy to bypass them in one way or another. Let's keep in mind that firearms are, at their core, just a pipe with a relatively simple mechanism behind it to smack a pin into the back of a cartridge. Even autoloading mechanisms only have a few parts, and it is physically impossible to prevent someone from disassembling the weapon and jamming the mechanism into a permanent "fire" mode with a drop of glue, a small screw, or even by just taking some lever out. All that it really would do is add cost and reduce reliability.
Show me how exactly can you aim well after getting woken up by a break-in. Sometimes, the burglars will freeze in place, standing and shouting obscenities at you so you can aim at _one_. Sometimes. Usually, it's quick action, where even a trained soldier would likely miss a lot. Oh, and you have multiple opponents.
Also, against rational criminals one bullet would be enough: the risk of being the one who gets shot is enough of a deterrent, so they'll leave you alone. The problem is, most criminals are anything but rational. Alcohol and/or drugs don't help them think straight.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Then you carry two guns.
The gun is always loaded.
In other words, always treat a gun like it's loaded even if you don't think it is.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
And I prefer it that way. Dead simple to use. Stupidly reliable. No safety to worry about when adrenaline is pumping through your brain.
This is window dressing by the gun lobby to try and head off sorely-needed firearms regulations.
The key issue is that people not responsible enough to get guns are getting them. TFA is missing the point -- safety and use by unauthoritized users isn't the issue here -- it's that people who are dangerous to others with firearms are getting them.
Positive change isn't likely while the US (and the far Right in particular) persist with their fetish with the US Constitution, as if it were some kind of holy object. The people who wrote that document did it in a hurry, 250 years ago, in completely different circumstances to today.
Really? You can't think of *one* real-world situation that requires more than 3 rounds? Here's a hint: it's the most popular activity associated with guns. It's not hunting, and it's not shooting bad guys, and it typically uses dozens - and many times hundreds - of rounds each time this activity is undertaken.
I've never encountered a situation
Then none must exist.
except in the case of an incompetent shooter
And you've never encountered any of those, obviously. Otherwise you've just contradicted your own argument.
Many gun owners seem to be particular about the amount and type of safety mechanisms they will accept on a gun. One good example is the key lock system that you see on Taurus and S&W Revolvers. It's just a small mechanism w/ special key that renders the gun inoperable if locked, and it is completely optional, however it's not difficult to see cases of individuals refusing to buy one for that reason alone, or looking to get a "pre-lock" version of the weapon.
Bork Bork Bork!!
2 attackers, "double tap" is the standard training for putting down a threat, you're short a round.
I suspect you've never had any firearm training, and your statement that "I've never encountered a situation..." is just obfuscating the fact that you don't even have or use firearms.
Last I was aware, magazine safeties were pretty ubiquitous on semiautomatic handguns. As for any of the more advanced stuff, you're usually talking about compromises on cost, complexity, reliability and readiness. And, like the article makes a great point of, most of these lightning-strike shootings are done by people who either legally owned the firearms, or regularly fired them and would logically be coded in as authorized users. As for the story about the guy who went to sell his guns and left a round in the chamber, he's an idiot - even the NRA pounds on the point that a gun shouldn't be transported loaded, and I can't imagine why even someone who thinks they need to keep it loaded for protection or convenience would do so on their way to sell it. As a former PA resident, which is where that story comes from, I think it's another example of why the state needs to require handgun safety training for CCW permit holders like most other states do.
just because bond uses it doesn't mean it actually works.
there is a strong dislike for batteries and required electronics for normal operation of a firearm.
Users grip? oops I switched hands. biometrics? it is cold and you wear gloves?
Magazine disconnect, another thing to go wrong. some guns have it some don't. consumers have a choice.
except in the case of an incompetent shooter (i.e. poor aim).
Right, because when someone walks into your store and you grab your gun to defend yourself, you are going to be perfectly calm and stable and hit the robber with all 3 of your rounds.
This is the same nonsense I hear from people who say they carry and they'll shoot anyone that tries to rob them. As if the robber is going to wait for them to pull out their gun instead of telling them to empty their pockets and getting a second gun.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
http://imgur.com/Jinky
Which one of these two guns should be banned and why?
The Four Rules of Firearms Handling
by Jeff Cooper
Rule 1
All guns are always loaded
Rule 2
Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not prepared to destroy
Rule 3
Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target
Rule 4
Be sure of your target and what is beyond it
If everyone followed these four basic rules there would be no accidents.
As for the trigger identification and the grip identification these are not 100% accurate. When police choose firearms they standardize the firearm so if for some reason Officer B has to use Officer A firearm it will be just like his own. These "safeties" will not work for police officers.
3 rounds...why 3 rounds? when I worked as a paramedic I treated a coke head who'd been shot 7 times and was still raging...what if a private citizen had been attacked by him? 3 rounds would've just pissed him off...
I am pretty sure that most people have poor aim.
And theoretically private citizens are allowed guns partly to protect them from the government and invasion. And if you actually get in a firefight with the government or an invading army you would need more than three rounds.
Not to mansion that that would completely ruin the fun of owning a fully automatic weapon.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
We should apply your arbitrary ammo limit based because you personally have never actually needed more than 3 bullets..
I count at least 6 shots here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWoLGC-n4i4
That doesn't touch on the fact that even police accuracy is only in the 30% range, and they.. allegedly.. have standards.
I'd have to say the grip pattern idea is a no-go. In a self defence situation my grip pattern would likely be different than 'on the range', just because I might not have time to assume my normal grip.
I'd tend to avoid computers in general. Mechanical systems may have a higher rate of failure, but 'unjamming' a computer in the field is not something that I'd want to deal with. The magazine safety looks to have some practical use, though.
Show me how exactly can you aim well after getting woken up by a break-in. Sometimes, the burglars will freeze in place, standing and shouting obscenities at you so you can aim at _one_. Sometimes. Usually, it's quick action, where even a trained soldier would likely miss a lot. Oh, and you have multiple opponents.
Also, against rational criminals one bullet would be enough: the risk of being the one who gets shot is enough of a deterrent, so they'll leave you alone. The problem is, most criminals are anything but rational. Alcohol and/or drugs don't help them think straight.
That is why you get a pump shotgun for home protection. The sound of the cocking of a pump action (geez, that looks bad) will chase most folks away. And as long as you get a shotgun with a large spread (larger diameter or shorter barrel), you'll not have to aim so well.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Yeah, that's what I want. A gun that I know might not fire if I'm not gripping it completely consistently. My laptop won't even log me in via my fingerprint half the time. If I pull the trigger, I want it to fire 100% of the time.
If I pull the trigger while a bullet is chambered but the mag is out, it's because I pretended to disarm it when someone else had a gun on me and I still want the chambered one to fire. If I REALLY want to disarm it, I'll un-chamber the last round, which takes approx 0.25 seconds in most pistols.
If you need a special indicator to tell you if the gun is loaded because you don't know how to check otherwise, you shouldn't have a gun, because you're an idiot.
What they really need to do is keep guns out of the hands of idiots who don't know what they're doing. That would solve all the problem actually.
That's a great idea, indeed. Morons.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Since firearms accidents are quite rare (you're more than five times more likely to die in a fire than a gun accident, with just 600 out of 128,200 unintentional injury deaths in 2009 being from firearms), and "smart gun" technologies mostly would interfere with the ability to quickly deploy guns for defensive purposes, the call for these technologies ranges from well-intentioned ignorance to a back-door attempt to drive up the price of guns and make self-defense tools unavailable to poor people.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
If you put yourself in the mindset of someone who owns a weapon for personal defense, then the single most important safety feature is that the weapon goes "bang" when the trigger is pulled. From an engineering standpoint, any additional gizmos on the gun to keep it from going "bang" on command are *guaranteed* to reduce reliability. If someone is coming at you with deadly force, having an unreliable gun in your hand is a huge safety issue.
This particular gun design debate is similar to the "Boeing versus Airbus" design philosophy debate, and for similar reasons: ultimately, do you let the safety systems over-ride the pilot, or do you let the pilot over-ride the safety systems?
So a machine designed to kill people, and was recently used by a child to kill lots of people, can be made to kill fewer people?
I have an idea, ban guns. Same as Europe, where the death rate from guns is a tiny fraction of the death rate from guns in the US. And before the Republicans and NRA talk their ***p, no the overall rate is far lower too.
The gun enables kill options, that simply wouldn't be possible if you only were armed with a knife and reducing the number of guns means criminals with guns are a lot easier to catch spot and arrest.
If the kid didn't have a gun, then the schoolkids would be alive today. The NRA caused those deaths with their lobbying.
Isn't grip recognition essentially DRM for guns?
It prevents usage from an unauthorized user.
An unauthorized user would take steps to remove this feature from the gun before use.
How many deaths occur from someone picking up a gun and using it before having time to test fire it and thus having time to remove this feature?
Premeditated attacks will not be significantly reduced.
Accidents will be reduced so there is some benefit there.
My main concern with this idea is how often would this method fail to identify an authorized user?
From the linked document, it appears to identify a grip by finger placement and possibly pressure.
Considering the difference between one user's grip and pressure is supposed to be detectable then small changes in someone's grip would mark them as unauthorized.
In a tense moment when a gun might be needed, someone shifts their grip and is suddenly unauthorized.
Whatever the failure rate of this detection system, that rate is a possible number of times that someone would be unable to fire their weapon when they may need it.
If a soldier would be unable to trust their weapon to fire there is quite a bit of loss of confidence in them defending themselves.
So, in short, I'm concerned that this will function just like video game DRM: It's fairly easily removed by unauthorized users so that authorized users have trouble with the feature where unauthorized users do not.
A serious flaw exists whether or not we have smart guns. The individual who is contemplating a crime with a gun as their tool doesn't care if they know that a bullet is in the chamber, or of the magazine is in. Their goal is to commit a crime. Hell, someone could be killed with a #2 pencil. Where are the smart pencils? What about smart kitchen knives that automatically dull themselves when the user is about to cut their finger? Smart guns just will not work as long as there are crazed idiots out there who somehow manage to obtain a gun.
I agree on that most of these "smart gun concepts" really aren't reliable enough for any kind of firearm usage. System should be so reliable that user wouldn't mind having it were he/she police offer or hunter wearing gloves. 3 round limit would automatically ban most of the competition sports with pistol and many rifle ones too. Also if you agree that self defense is appropriate reason to own a firearm then more rounds is better. 3 round limited pistol would have some deterrent effect but you really wouldn't want use one in self defense.
The article and especially the summary is completely wrong about their central claim "gunmakers have no incentive...". Of course that's typical - anti-gunners would never shoot, never handle a firearm, so they normally have no idea what they are talking about. The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY. If you are in a situation where you actually have to fire your sidearm, you die if it doesn't work right that time. A defensive weapon has to work every single time. That's why the 1911 design is still the second most popular model over a hundred years later - because it's been proven reliable. That's why you keep firearms simple - complex things break. That's also why you definitely don't add a bunch of complexity designed to make the gun NOT WORK if something isn't perfect - it has to fire, or an innocent person dies. It's only people who don't know about firearms, or about dealing with bad guys in general, who think something like "fingerprinting" one persons particular grip sounds like a good idea. It does sound good, until you think about the fact that the user is UNDER ATTACK. They may very well have to fire with their other hand, after the BG smashes their right arms with a baseball bat, car, stabs them with a knife ....
These "smart guns" look cool in movies, but anyone with any tactical experience or training knows they are only movie props. In real life, these ideas would get good guys killed every day. If you've never even been trained in USING a firearm, please don't pontificate about how they be be designed.
We're getting there...
How dare those evil gun makers not make their products more fragile, less likely to fire and more prone to failure! If only guns could be made as safe as a child's toy,
Firearms manufacturers certainly do have an incentive to make their products safer. Just not an incentive so powerful as to completely over-ride other concerns, as the poster would like. Everyone would like a safer firearm and most are even happy to pay extra for it - IF it still functions reliably, IF it isnt TOO MUCH more. Systems currently available tend to be very expensive and have serious drawbacks, which limits their sales. As those systems are refined and perfected people sales will improve. But the manufacturers have to actually provide a system that the customers are happy with, rather than rushing to break things that we rely on in order to make victim-disarmament advocates... well, celebrate and then go right back on the attack shortly after, I am sure.
This is what really eats him up. He doesnt like firearms manufacturers offering what firearms buyers want in the first place, and he'd like to see any law passed that would interfere.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
And because you've never encountered it, that means it could never happen, right?
Anecdote != data.
Oh, and there are plenty of shotguns that carry more than 3 rounds, which can be bought at many sporting goods stores. The 3 round limit is usually a hunting regulation.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Two reasons:
1) How can you make something "safe" that has the explicit purpose of being fatal
2) therefore a gun NOT firing when needed is seen as a DECLINE in safety.
bickerdyke
Show me how exactly can you aim well after getting woken up by a break-in.
The best defense against home break-ins is to move away from high-crime areas.
Yeah I know what you mean. Gang bangers never travel in groups larger than 2 or 3.
Better to limit all non-professional firearms to 3 rounds (shotgun, iirc, already are).
That's only for waterfowl hunting. Shotguns with higher capacities are perfectly legal and easy to obtain. In fact, many come with higher-capacity tubes and an insert that prevents it being fully loaded. It is then perfectly legal to remove the insert, but illegal to go duck/goose hunting with it removed.
Show me how exactly can you aim well after getting woken up by a break-in.
It's called point shooting and it's something you can't train for at many ranges (e.g. pretty much any indoor range) because their rules prohibit shooting across lanes and rapid fire. Most will permit double-tap, but that's about it. But of course, it's best done with a semi-automatic pistol... something comfortable and with a very light trigger, like a 1911 or a BHP.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember seeing a Tales of the Gun on the History channel (you know, back when they did history) that included smart gun technology. The prototype had a watch-sized wristband that had to be behind the gun for it to be able to fire. This was maybe 10-15 years ago. The fact that it is still not out shows how difficult these kinds of countermeasures are to bring into practice.
Also, by Taurus PT-22 (use it for carry and plinking) has 3 different safety mechanisms. One is a standard switch safety. The second immobilizes the slide when the magazine is removed. The third is actually a built-in lock that is turned by an allen wrench that also prevents the firearm from discharging. My Sig Sauer SP2022 has only a loaded chamber indicator. However, may main safety when it comes to firearms is simply not keeping a round in the chamber.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Lets make guns that only can be fired at a target that is a real threat. We will have a much safer environment if weapons were intelligent... oh wait, why do I see Terminators running all over the place.
So the answer to solve the problem of people with emotional/psychological problems, or plain drunk, or whatever having weapons is to keep selling them weapons, but with extra features and more expensive?
That is the answer for the question of how to get more profit for the gun makers, not for making guns madshooter proof.
It doesn't matter what any indicator mechanism says.
If anything it would lead to more deaths as idiots start twirling their pistolos around like they were billy the kid, because hey, the gun is safe, right? This 20 cent gizmo says so.
Want a car analogy? Don't park your car on a 45% incline and expect some little cable to stop it from rolling downhill and killing someone. Assume that parking brakes don't work. Assume every gun is loaded. Assume every email attachment is a trojan/virus.
It's fairly well understood that the sound of racking (that's the proper term, I believe) a shotgun actually will not scare away an intruder. I wish it did--I'd much rather have the bad guy run away than have to shoot him.
Secondly, if you want a larger spread, you don't get a larger barrel--it's 12gauge (or 40, or whatever) all the way down. You can get barrels with different chokes, which constrict the opening at the end of the barrel to various degrees.
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Real world situations just don't unfold like you seem to think they do, and guns (especially handguns) are not the lethal one-shot killers you seem to believe they are:
"Police say that after suffering multiple hits from Assam's gun, Murray fatally shot himself"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Colorado_YWAM_and_New_Life_shootings
The editor, timothy, corrected the egregious errors in the submission while letting the parts worthy of commentary and debate stand. He did what an editor is supposed to do! Maybe 12/22 will be the end of the world after all, and this is one of the first signs of the imminent apocalypse!
Speaking of which, automatic firearms are already banned, unless you go through a rigorous screening process. Nearly all handguns today, and many rifles, are semi-automatic (one trigger pull per shot). It's "semi" because although the gun automatically loads the next round, it will not automatically fire that next round.
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What a grand idea. If we did that with hammer's to limit their misuses, we could really cut down the blunt force trauma deaths too.
The shooter saw he was going to be shot by a civilian shopper and he popped his own skull. The civilian was holding his fire until he had a clear safe shot. http://www.kgw.com/news/Clackamas-man-armed-confronts-mall-shooter-183593571.html
What if the CCW person had been hit and his friend couldn't operate his friends handgun thanks to a magic grip lock, what if it had required shooting the mental case.
Lets safe the nutters first, socialize your mental health so not only the rich and union members can access it. If you are worried about that being socialist burn your libaries and public schools first.
Here in Israel my kids teacher packs a glock, it is ilegal for them to go on a class trip without two fireams being loaned by police to trained teachers or guards. There is an armed guard at every school and preschool as well as most shops and malls. OTOH getting a gun permit is difficult to impossible unless you have a reason and then for one pistol and 50 bullets. The rifles you see are all army owned and required for all off duty draft age soldiers or rarely loaned to reserve police or anti-terrorist team members similar to volunteer firefighters.
Where's you get the 3 rounds idea? Every 12g I've ever fired held 7 shells. During certain hunting seasons they are limited to 3 or 4, in which case we cut off a pencil and use it as plug.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
I've never encountered a situation, and am at a loss for an actual, private-citizen, real-world situation, where more than 3 rounds would be necessary except in the case of an incompetent shooter (i.e. poor aim).
Perhaps law-enforcement officers can be in situations where more then 3 rounds are needed?
Right, because walking around with 5 guns is not only safer and more convenient, but less threatening than simply having a single gun with 15 bullets.
There are more, but those are the most basic and most important. Guns aren't responsible for violence anymore than cakes are responsible for fat people.
Because not aiming works really well when the bad guy is close to your children.
.... as watching USians debate gun safety.
The assumptions made, the supposed rights implied and what appears reasonable are completely alien to most other people, this reasonings avoid the patently obvious: in other places people don't need guns to defend themselves or to feel safe, and certainly don't harbour the ridiculous notion that you need them just in case you have to fight by violent means your own government (in a civilb war situation guns will be readily available, you don't need to stockpile weapons during peace time) or a foreign invader (wouldn't your armed forces fight in home soil ? Or what is the deal?)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In a crisis, your grip changes, and this can also happen during injury, which is when a gun may be used to stave off a threat. People who clamor for this sort of thing tend NOT to actually know about or use guns themselves, and that's the problem. Training is more important than any added part of a gun that can fail, causing the death of the operator from inability to defend oneself.
Intoxication and lack of training are more dangerous than guns that can fire without the magazine, and frankly, I and other gun enthusiasts AVOID guns with lots of extra nonsense as stuff that can fail and make it difficult to do things with our own property, such as decide to sell or trade the gun toward something we would like better. Guns are collectable items that often increase in value. Let's stop this nonsense already. It is unwanted by those who actually use them.
Things have changed so much since the second amendment has passed. Personal firearms aren't going to save you in the event of a government or foreign invasion. They'll just fly over with a drone and drop a bomb on your house. Private citizens have pretty much no chance of standing up to any well equipped military. If it's a foreign invader, you'd better leave it up to the US military. If it's the US government coming to get you, you probably don't stand much of a chance.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That is why you get a pump shotgun for home protection. The sound of the cocking of a pump action (geez, that looks bad) will chase most folks away.
Someone breaks into your house, hears a shotgun begin racked and does not immediately hightail it out the nearest exit, well let me tell you that person means you harm. They need to be killed because they mean to hurt you.
The sound of the cocking of a pump action is a serious fucking noise. It says shits about to get really real. It says someone is going to get fucked up something awful if they don't remove themselves from the situation forthwith.
I've seen a group of coked up druggies chattering away to the point you could not get a word in edgewise if you wanted to. Cock that pump shotgun and it gets quiet instantly. Shuts them right the fuck up.
I've seen a big, burly, pissed off man shouting about how he was going to beat someone's ass fall right down on the ground with his mouth still running because a shotgun was racked and pointed at him. The part of his brain that ran his legs knew shit just got real and made his legs quit working while the part of his brain that ran his mouth just kept going for several seconds until it realized it was time to shut up.
The best defense against home break-ins is to move away from high-crime areas.
But doesn't do you much good is crime does come to you even if you've moved to a relatively low crime area... (Know of any NO crime areas?)
using common sense to implement better gun control.
First off, the limit you reference about shotguns I think only applies to bird hunting or something. At least, I used a pump-action Mossberg that held 5 in the tube.
But on to my real question... this is a technology-oriented community... yet we seem very quick to crap all over the role that technology could play here.
Would an RFID-based system, in which you identify yourself to the gun using public key cryptography, be such a terrible thing? Assuming the mechanism can be made reliable (and with enough work, why can't it be made reliable enough?), to me it seems like it wouldn't be a bad idea to limit the number of people who can fire the weapon. E.g., you and your spouse both have key fobs that allow you to fire the gun, but without the fob, no one else can fire it.
If the fob is the problem - hear me out - why not have the RFID chip implanted in your wrist? Imagine it - you pick up your gun, and you can fire it, but if someone else picks it up, they can't. To me, that actually sounds pretty cool and futuristic. It would eliminate the need for a lot of fight scenes in sci-fi movies, though.
I know, not everyone wants something implanted in their wrist (although in this community I'd expect more than the average number to be willing). Well, maybe this is something only required for semi-automatic pistols, etc.... if you want a revolver, no RFID interlock required.
There are all sorts of interesting solutions we could come up with. Police departments could use a department key, so that any officer could fire any other officer's weapon, but a criminal in a struggle wouldn't be able to fire the officer's weapon.
Of course, we all know there are flaws with RFID. Could someone, with enough time and effort, clone a key fob? Probably. With enough time and effort, any sort of system we could devise will be defeated. Maybe someone will set off an EMP and render all our smart guns useless. The better question is, what is the increase in effectiveness we gain by doing this?
We seem very willing to invent scenarios in which safety mechanisms would cause problems... e.g., "me and my friend were working in the garage when someone came up and shot me! I told my friend to get my gun and shoot back, but he couldn't because of the RFID interlock!" and use this as a justification to ignore the potential of technology in this area. But are these really realistic scenarios? Or are we trying to justify what we already want to believe based on anecdotes...
Obviously this is not a total solution by any means. It does nothing to address the large number of firearms already in circulation. Some people suggest buy-back programs (although I'm a bit skeptical of those, since it seems like the people who are least likely to use a gun are going to be the most likely to trade it in for cash, and good luck trying to get the government to spend any money on a new program right now)... maybe gun manufacturers could offer a trade-in program, where people can upgrade to smart guns.
To sum up, I think there are viable things that can be done, but for some reason, a lot of us like to invent reasons, no matter how far-fetched, for us to conclude that nothing can be done.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
And theoretically private citizens are allowed guns partly to protect them from the government and invasion.
No, government does not allow its citizens to protect themselves against them. That is a misinterpretation of the constitution.
And if you actually get in a firefight with the government or an invading army you would need more than three rounds.
If you were to get involved in a firefight against government, you would need the tools that government has and you are not allowed to have.
There is this false sense of "freedom" that libertarians mistakenly believe they have.
NO ONE has ever had "freedom". It is not a theoretical construct granted by law. It is an absolute construct determined by power of force, and the people with the strongest force is... government.
Libertarians need to understand that they do not live in a theoretical world. They live in the real world, and the real world doesn't care if you are legally allowed to do what you wish.
The only thing libertarians need to understand is that government has guns, and you are only allowed to do what government says you can do.
It is amazing that libertarians do not understand the power structure of society.
They are the guys that never grew up and as kids would always yell at their parents saying "I can do what I want because it's a free country". lol.
No, it is not a "free country". There has never been a "free country". You were never allowed to do "what you want".
Learn what actual power is.
That's right - the point of the 2nd amendment is retaining some ability to resist a bad government. Unless the government and all of its goons are also limited to 3 rounds then it's an unconstitutional limitation for us.
Here is a crazy idea, GET RID OF THEM. If people want to go hunting let them use bows and there is no reason to have automatic weapons and handguns.
I genuinely don't understand this idea.
The firearm is a force multiplier when it comes to self defense. It allows a properly trained 90#, 4'11" person to be able to defend themselves from a 6'5" 250# person.
It is the responsibility of the owner of said firearm to learn how to properly and safely use it, and that's where I believe everyone agrees the breakdown is. The firearm is a tool. Improperly used, it's lethal, much like many other tools.
Guns don't need safety features, we just need to stop grooming human beings to become incompetent idiots. We dumb everything down, make people expect everything to be safe, treat grown adults like children... then they do stupid stuff and hurt themselves... like children. Uh oh, we better dumb everything down even more. Also, if you believe you should relinquish your gun rights to the US government, you don't deserve to be a US citizen. This is a country built on personal freedoms. The original idea was for the populace to be as well armed as the military so we could never be subjugated by our government. Asking the government to disarm us goes against everything this country stands for.
And it's indicated by the huge cum stain on your bed.
When you need to use a gun you don't want any features that may prevent you from using it that depend on a battery. How many flashlights do you have in your bed side drawer just in case that still work today?
Have you ever been target shooting? Having to reload a handgun after every three rounds would be a significant inconvenience, for no actual benefit. That's not to say that some sort of limit on high-capacity magazines may not have some effect, but 3 is probably going a bit far.
Also, shotguns are only limited to three rounds when used for hunting or trap/skeet competitions. You can easily find models that hold 7 rounds, e.g.
I do not think it is nearly as rigorous as you are implying. And it is even less if you are buying an old FA gun.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And that is why we're still a very long way off from relying on personal defense weapons that require electricity.
If it's the US government coming to get you, you probably don't stand much of a chance.
Tell this to Terry the Taliban who is right about now winning...
Exactly! This was one of the primary reasons I purchased and carried a Glock when I worked as an armed guard. That firearm actually did have 3 safeties, but they were all designed to prevent accidental discharge of the weapon if you dropped it or the trigger snagged on something. If there was a round in the chamber and your finger was all the way on the trigger the gun would fire.
These are the things that anti-gun people ignore. It's a shame that guns are used in crimes such as these, but taking 1 tool away from someone doesn't stop them from doing what they are determined to do.
In fact, if you do even one day of actual defense training, one of the exercises you do is shooting with a two-handed grip in the "A" stance, then shooting left handed "side stance" and then right handed "side stance".
This simple exercise would be impossible with some kind of electronic garbage that prevents firing based on grip signature. Also, I'd rather not have to worry about if the batteries are dead if I need the gun.
Here's what we need: a 1911-style grip safety, and a Walther PPK-style indicator pin that pops out close to the rear sight if a round is in the chamber. Those two things are remarkably effective, and cost practically nothing. Oh, and they've been around for decades.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Safety is already the primary concern. Round chambered indicators can be misleading or clogged so as to make them not useful, safeties may make the firearm not work when you want it to etc. The easiest approach is the three step approach we already take:
- Assume its loaded
- Point only at things you want to damage
- Finger off of the trigger
Those work in almost every possible case. The real deficiency is access. Keep things locked up or in-hand, don't leave it on a coffee table.
Are knives also "exempt"? Look, the point of a gun is to kill or destroy something, the only safety aspect is that the shooter should remain safe (i.e. the gun shouldn't blow up and maim me when I shoot it). Beyond that they're not safe, and, furthermore, that's the entire point.
My entire family knows how to shoot and handle guns. If someone breaks in while my kids are home and I'm not, they know how to take care of business. God forbid there would be a gun that they would point at someone and it had a "safety" feature that cost them their lives.
Likewise, I'd hate to be a police officer or soldier and know that if one of my colleagues was shot and possibly put out of action I wouldn't have his weapon available if I needed it.
I don't even know why we're having these "debates" except that a bunch of gun-hating imbeciles are always looking for some way to get their camels nose under the tent.
Do you have ESP?
I agree, but the issue is not really how effective you would be. If you have a right to own firearms to protect you from military forces, then you have a right to big clips.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
That's why you keep firearms simple - complex things break.
I find this to be an interesting sentiment coming from a technology oriented community like Slashdot.
Of course complexity can increase error-proneness. But if this logic is always true, why aren't we still driving Model Ts? Maybe it really is up for debate, but it seems to me that cars have became vastly more complex over the decades, but reliability is on the rise, and cost of maintenance has gone down.
Planes - planes are vastly more complex than in the past, but very reliable. And peoples' lives literally hang in the balance.
My point is, we can in fact make complex AND reliable things when we want to, and when we spend the time and resources required. Why are guns exempt from this?
FWIW, I know how to use (some) guns, and I agree with you... "grip recognition" sounds like something that at best, will work 99% of the time, which isn't enough. But surely we can do better than that.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Weapons can have all of the safety features in the world, but the ultimate safety feature will always be the person holding the weapon. If the person in question takes a weapon, loads a round, points it at someone, takes aim, and pulls the trigger none of these measures will matter.
No one talks about suing GM because a distracted driver causes a 10 car pile up. No one wants to sue Ford if they fail to get the oil changed. They can, but they will never find a judge willing to take that case. In these cases, we make the car owner not the company, responsible.
Am I calling for weapons bans? No. If the safety features prevent accidental shootings, good. Limited magaines -- infeffective. Ever see "The Outlaw Josey Wales?" Clint Eastwood's character had multiple revolvers and plenty of firepower. As assault weapons ban? No. CnC milling machines and 3D printers have never been cheaper. If you can buy the steel, you can make the weapon. Heck you can invent your own designs.
Plus banning something for the good of society never works. Alcohol in the 30s and narcotics in the 60s both created enormous criminal empires with the resources of a small country. In the case of narcotics, they have threatened the governments of Columbia and Mexico. Heck diamonds destroyed major parts of Africa and they are legal AND highly regulated. People were enslaved just to mine diamonds so First World people could look pretty and thugs could make war.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
Better to limit all non-professional firearms to 3 rounds (shotgun, iirc, already are).
Shotguns are limited to three rounds in the field, but not in your house. You can insert a wooden plug to temporarily restrict them to three rounds if they aren't constructed to take that few. Some weapons offer an ammo restrictor so that you don't need a plug. For self-defense, though, I would rather have a whole lot of rounds. If I'm confronted by an armed attacker, I'm going to treat rounds like potato chips, and they're can't have just one. And frankly, what unarmed attacker will charge me when armed with my firearm unless they're hopped up on something that merits more rounds anyway?
California already places ammo restrictions. Most of the decent pistols not too small for me to meaningfully hold (I have big paws) carry 13 rounds or more, and they're illegal in California. So I got something that takes .45 ACP, because if you're not allowed to carry as many rounds, you want them to be big. California also will ream you up down and sideways if there's a competing story, so not only do they encourage maximally lethal ammunition with their ammo limits, but they also encourage lethal shot placement with their habits in prosecution. This is what you get with "gun control" and "equipment limits".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Three rounds of .22 are not the same as three rounds of .45 or 9mm +P load.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You remind me of a friend of mine. He is the kind of person who is oblivious to the harsh realities of close quarters combat (and I'm not talking about Stalingrad, I'm talking about bar fights and muggings; not that I am an expert but I am experienced and intelligent enough to figure out quickly what can go wrong and how to avoid getting my face pounded into the pavement, and no, I don't live in South Central LA, but sometimes shit does happen), and he will always talk about those subjects as if he were an expert using facts he pulls out of his nether regions.
I do not want to sound insulting, but I am tired and sick of that kind of "reasoning" based on an absence of knowledge on this kind of situations. This guy always goes on about how a dog and a door are more than enough to defend yourself and your home (the HELL I am going to train the family dog as an attack dog), which will only actually deter the sort of people who break and enter when you leave the door open or when there is nobody home. Then again, the only time this guy got into a real fight (accidentally, by the way) I had to defend him, because he froze and didn't know even how to defend himself, which doesn't prevent him from pontificating on the use of lethal or non-lethal force and how we would all be safer if we gave up all self-defense to qualified individuals, because that's how it works in My Little Pony land. He's not a bad guy, he is just fucking clueless and has a bit of a slave mentality (he is a bit too prone on giving up his personal responsibilities to the Nanny State and the taxpayers, which is IMHO the hallmark of an immature adult and also is something I won't elaborate on in this topic).
Reading what you just typed, and I am not saying you are in the same category as my pal (that was just an angry tirade), I am guessing you have never fired a gun outside a shooting range, if at all, and I hope you never encounter yourself in a situation where you have to defend yourself, I really do. Yes, it should be the Police's job to do that, but until they are there, you are on your own.
...that should come out of the Connecticut school shooting tragedy should be this:
If anyone is planning to begin legal proceedings to have a family member involuntarily committed for mental health issues, then they must remove all weapons out of their home first.
Which is why we went into Afghanistan and Iraq and cleared out all the terrorists overnight.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Personal firearms aren't going to save you in the event of a government or foreign invasion. They'll just fly over with a drone and drop a bomb on your house.
We're not quite there yet. The drones can't quite identify who is who and what is what yet. That's useful when they know they want to kill you, but in the taking-and-holding neighborhoods phase, they're going to want to root out the firearms and they can't yet do that with drones. That is just around the corner though, and then we can have this argument all over again about militarized drones. California will ban assault drones and they'll have a long and specious list of characteristics that will also impinge upon the hobbyist aviation and rocketry communities in dozens of ways that will do nothing whatsoever to protect anyone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OK, but I'm 6'2". How is it in my best interests for someone who's 4'11" to be able to attack me with equal force? Hmmm?
Didn't think of that did you.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Adding technology such as trigger finger identification seems fairly stupid. The people who will have to use said guns are not proponents of such technology:
- From the position of army and police, you want your gun to be one hundred percent reliable.
- If you are a sport shooter on the other hand, you want a gun that's got the best trigger pull possible. Safety features come in the way there as well.
From the position of a law enforcement officer:
Grip patterns seem highly dangerous to use. If you wound someone, his pattern will change, suddenly making you unable to return fire.
Trigger finger identification is just another thing that can fail & render you unable to protect yourself. The small gain from knowing a criminal can't steal your gun & use it is fairly insignificant to the possibility of your gun not firing when you need it to.
Also, as a sport shooter:
Magazine safeties (not firing with the magazine removed) and grip safeties (not firing unless there's a hand firmly pressing the grip) are both regarded as superfluous and detrimental to the quality of the gun's trigger pull. Due to these added "features" the quality of the trigger pull is worsened. More trigger creep, heavier trigger, less clean break. Both concepts are hardly novel. The most well known guns with these features are the Browning Hi-Power (1935) and Colt 1911 (1911).
More high-tech safety measures such as grip patterns and trigger finger identification seems a good way to increase the price of guns and thus make it harder for poor people to own them. But as a European, we already have storage laws, we already have all kinds of other measures (background check, mental health check, physical health check, questioning of residents at the same address, etc). I don't think it makes it any safer otherwise.
Until we have ammunition with electrical ignition etc as something "normal" (because it already exists, but is highly impractical), I don't see any of those high-tech security features being utilized by anyone at all. Once the trigger itself is no longer mechanically connected to the sear and hammer, then yes, maybe eventually we'll start seeing such features because then we'll need to have batteries in our guns. Until then? Good luck to anyone who tries to either make money out of this or tries to enforce use of this by law.
Jesus fucking christ loser, did you even fucking RED the quote you used?
I've never encountered a situation, and am at a loss for an actual, private-citizen, real-world situation, where more than 3 rounds would be necessary except in the case of an incompetent shooter (i.e. poor aim).
Fuck you're retarded.
Ok. What's your address?
I've killed probably hundreds of times with my various guns! At least 20 deer, which I've proceeded to nom, and when I lived in Maine it was open season on red squirrels - beaning those suckers on the run is just about the most challenging shooting I've ever done.
In all seriousness though, never ever once even thought about killing a person. And I've put FAR more holes in paper than in animals.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Jesus f*ck.
As a non-american, I'm amazed of how some americans feel being able to protect their homes with lethal weapons is such a necessity.
If armed men were to break in to my home, fuck I'd crawl down and hide under my bed and just let them take what the fuck they want and let the police and insurance company deal with the fallout. No stuff in the world is worth dying or killing for.
Also, i fail to see how guns works as deterrants, it just as well "forces" the bad people to bring bigger guns themselves to the next house.
No wonder you have problems with gun violence over there.
Guns are plenty safe just as they are.
It takes a human to make them unsafe.
In a crisis I want my gun to fire every time I pull the trigger.
My sidearm has a de-cocker and can be dropped or even thrown with a round in the chamber safely.
Say we are in a crisis situation, both pinned down behind cover, I don't have a shot, but you do.
You have been shot in your dominant arm (or handicapped one armed) so you are unable to fiddle with a weapon.
I can safely throw you my weapon with a round in the chamber ready to shoot, you can pick it up and shoot with no delay.
Try that with some electronic gizmo......
Rick B.
Guns exist, period. Even if every new gun is bio metrically tied to a person that has undergone intensive psychiatric testing and thousands of hours of training, the fact is old guns exist and if someone wants to get a hold of a gun, they can. Also consider that making a gun from scratch isn't rocket science. If someone wants to use a device that can fire off projectiles that can cause death, they will find a way to do so.
Also, stupid people exist, you know, the kind of people that have an arsenal of guns in the presence of their mentally disturbed children.
Instead of gun control, focus on why there exists a society where people feel the need to draw a weapon to solve their problems. Also figure out why people are too stupid to not be able to lock up their guns or exercise common sense on whether their children are responsible enough to have access to a gun.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Even so, I wish that research into reliable non-lethal disabling weapons would increase tenfold.
We could give reliable stun guns to every teacher, and train them, without fear that students would get killed due to negligence.
We could enact gun control legislation without reducing personal defense. This in turn could cause more criminals to choose the available non-lethal weapons when committing crimes.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
actually, no, the sound of a cycling shotgun will not chase most home invaders away. Most of those types of criminals are either high enough or stupid enough not to recognize the sound for what it is - especially since they're not expecting to hear the sound at all... (and not all shotguns sound like the stock Foley SFX from the movies). But, if you start off with a very loud "I have a shotgun aimed at your head, asshole" followed by racking a round, *then* they'll know what's happening. But you've probably just ejected a perfectly good cartridge just for dramatic effect when all you really had to do was turn on the lights so he could see you coming. This gives him an opportunity to flee, which is by most accounts the best outcome, if only so you don't have to call for someone to come replace your carpet and drapes in the morning.
Of course, the most effective way to let a home intruder know that you have a shotgun, if that is the primary goal, is to cause it to make a brief flash of light followed in quick succession with a very loud bang. If you have it pointed in the proper direction, he'll even *feel* it.
+1, those are actual mechanical safeties that are reasonable to design and implement. Just because they put a magical hand reader in a gun for James Bond doesn't mean that it's a $.50 addition that can be added to every other gun but aren't because of the "evil gun manufacturers".
Some examples in fiction of weapons-user-identification systems:
- 1976 --- _Logan's Run_, William F Nolan, George Clayton Johnson
- 1983 --- _Single Combat_, Dean Ing
- 1990 --- Judge Dredd: The Megazine, Steve McManus
It'd be interesting to see a compleat list.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Really? You can't think of *one* real-world situation that requires more than 3 rounds? Here's a hint: it's the most popular activity associated with guns. It's not hunting, and it's not shooting bad guys, and it typically uses dozens - and many times hundreds - of rounds each time this activity is undertaken.
True, but how many of us actually make squirrels fly, anyway?
There are 2 simple reasons why this isn't being done.
1. Cost for the indentification unit is prohibitive. It would double the cost of the weapon.
2. It has been proven over the years that you can not make something idiot proof. I don't care if it's a weapon or a power tool, some moron will always come along and try something nobody else ever imagined and injure themselves or someone else. Look at all the safety warnings in any instruction manual and realize that someone actually did that.
Teaching people to have a respect for human life would do more to stop these mass killings than anything else. When I was in High School (class of 74) half the vehicles in the student parking lot were pickup trucks with a gun rack in the back window. There was always a rifle and/or a shotgun in the rack. We never had anyone shot at school because we knew the difference between right and wrong.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
The article is wrong from the start, there is nothing analogous between known-to-be-unsafe Ford Pintos being sold, and selling a reliable firearm that operates as designed.
I guess a lie this big wants much repetition.*
*No, I don't fucking lose .
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
OK, but I'm 6'2". How is it in my best interests for someone who's 4'11" to be able to attack me with equal force? Hmmm?
Didn't think of that did you.
The same applies the other direction: With current law (in most US states anyway), both the 4'11 and you have equal opportunity to legally acquire and train on the proper handling of firearms. I'm not seeing the problem here.
The loudest sound in the world:
``Hearing `click', when you expected to hear `bang'.''
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Shooting up schools?
(Posting AC because I'm at work and I don't log into sites from work, not because I'm about to go on a rant...)
Want to know what the problem is? It's not guns. Canadians have guns. Lots of guns. It's your society's mentality. You just went on a massive tirade about needing your gun to reliably shoot ANOTHER PERSON! And that seems normal to you. In your mind, it makes sense that your gun is for use to shoot another human being.
That.
That is your problem. It's not guns (though I do think the US needs tighter gun legislation - not banning - restrictions); it's your dysfunctional fucked-up belief that shooting another human being is ok.
It's not.
People die when you shoot them. Ever wonder why the US has an incredibly high gun mortality rate? Basically the only countries with a higher gun death rate per 100,000 are countries where drug lords rule the country, for the most part. Does that seem right? Does that seem normal?
It's not. The US is a modern, civilized western country yet its citizens are being killed at alarming rates due to gun violence (intentional or accidental).
And it's because you think it's ok.
Sorry, but that's fucked up. /rant
Gen Petraeus gave his mistress access to classified information. I don't care what the rules are, if they can be broken some will be.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The web safety at the beaver tail can prevent firing if you are unable to get a firm hand on the gun due to being shot in the hand. There's at least one documented case. The victim was shot in the hand when the mugger heard him toggle the manual safety, aimed at the mugger, pulled the trigger, got a click, re-adjusted his hand and started firing. He eventually shot the mugger once, who was later caught by police. The victim and all his friends survived, though he was shot two or three times in the process. The first shot went through his hand and into his belly.
I don't know of any documented cases of a magazine disconnect interfering with a defensive gun use, but the possibility is definitely there especially since reload is a stressful time and accidentally dropping your mag does happen. (It happens often enough in IDPA that there's rules for the penalties for accidentally dropping the magazine). There is, however, at least one documented case of someone shooting himself in the head because he was demonstrating the magazine disconnect safety on a gun that doesn't have a magazine disconnect safety. This goes both ways -- if there were no magazine disconnect safeties, he probably wouldn't have thought that his gun had one. If his gun had one he wouldn't have shot himself in the head. Then again, he did break the four fundamental rules and didn't know his equipment.
I can see how chamber indicators may be of use -- a friend of my mother shot his niece with what he thought was an unloaded gun while unwrapping it to show her -- then again, he must have also failed the four rules for that to happen.
And? There are people who have remained functional and survived multiple .45 shots. Hell, there are people who have taken a .50 BMG and kept fighting.
The problem is I don't get to retain my advantage over midgets.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
2 attackers, "double tap" is the standard training for putting down a threat, you're short a round.
I suspect you've never had any firearm training, and your statement that "I've never encountered a situation..." is just obfuscating the fact that you don't even have or use firearms.
I'm throwing this back at you, AC, in that I doubt you've had any real firearms training, either. Double taps, failure drills, etc, are NOT standard training by any stretch of the imagination, and are typically only practiced by those who kill people and break things for a living. Police, regular military, civilians leaning armed self-defense, are typically trained to shoot center mass, and keep shooting until the target is no longer a threat (i.e. until they hit the ground). I'll grant that more advanced techniques are taught in more advanced classes (I've been through a few), and many shooters have been at least been exposed to the concepts and (briefly!) run through them, but this is by no means "standard."
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
More prone to failure, and more costly.
No gun has ever killed anyone on its own. It cant jump up on its own and fire. People are the problem. What is the solution? I dont know, but blaming a tool for its owners actions is ludicrous.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's probably safe to say that the vast majority of Slashdotters are programmers of some kind or are very familiar with computers and software.
Which is why I am astounded that anyone with such a background would think putting a computer (microchip, etc) in a firearm is a good idea.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Most of these ideas are unworkable and a total joke to anyone who uses firearms regularly. Their only merit is the person with the patent is trying to make their idea mandatory to get rich.
Automatic firearms are not banned, but you need a $3000 dollar tax and the guns themselves cost upwards of $6000, plus it can take months to get through the licensing process.
You didn't kill the Taliban, young, rootless, aggressive men. You are killing a lot of actual civilians - noncombatants. People who are invested in where they live do not stand a chance against a modern army.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Any weapon will be inherently dangerous, attempting to "protect" consumers from danger doesn't really apply to something that is meant to be dangerous. The loaded chamber indicator on my SR9c is my least favorite feature; I treat guns as if they are always loaded so it doesn't make a difference in how I handle the gun, it only sticks up and gets snagged on my clothes or in my holster. I'd argue that the loaded chamber indicator actually makes my gun less safe, although it is by such a small margin it is mostly inconsequential.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
That depends on the state though.
You walk around with a pump action in yer trench coat, bro?
I have an idea for an invention that I think I could build to make the AR15 safer, but I'm reticent to do anything with it because of the dominance of patent trolls in America and their ability to squash little guys like me. The free market could likely respond with some innovative concepts if we had patent reform.
The real safety issue is the raging idiot behind the trigger.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
A lot of folks load their shells with rock salt. Criminals don't know that and it hurts like hell when they get hit.
I think it's a little disingenuous the way the PLCA is cited, here.
The PLCA was quite clearly passed to immunize gun makers from the sort of punitive lawsuit that hit the tobacco makers (which I also think was in many way unfair).
In essence, our government likes to say "You make an entirely legal product, and we don't want to face the political consequences of banning or circumscribing access to your product, so we'll just attack your industry via the avenue of clear misuse by your customers."
Now, tobacco was a grey-area case, as the tobacco industry pretty clearly was adding addiction-agents to at least some of the brands. Fair game, I say.
But the PLCA was rightfully passed in a climate (like now) of people blaming GUNS for the actions of the people that wielded them.
To make any other assertion - that gun manufacturers are nevertheless responsible for the acts committed with their products - introduces a fairly slippery precedent. Are we going to sue Nikon because some pedophile took pictures of a naked child? How about going after Ford if someone deliberately runs over some kindergartners with his van?
One COULD further argue (albeit with a disturbing lack of humanity), I suppose, that - regardless of context - guns are meant to kill things, period. If they perform their function successfully (leaving out the context of whether the target is a deer, a classmate, or random bystander), then the manufacturer holds no liability.
Now if, on the other hand, one wants to assert that the gun manufacturers (via their dealers) are making their guns too freely available without restriction, that's a reasonable point. But if they are conforming to the relevant law, then your problem is with the LAW and LAWMAKERS, not the manufacturers. And again, we have a slippery slope: if they were to prohibit sales based on (for example) mental state or profiles of likely criminals, that would seem to condemn them to an endless stream of lawsuits based on racism, etc.
Essentially the lawmakers define the playing field and rules. If you have a beef with the game itself, don't have a go at the players.
-Styopa
... without using any electrical parts, let me know.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... the problem is that in many countries about everyone can get his/her hands on a gun without any regulation or prior screening.
I hope you realize there is no such thing as non lethal weapons. The technical term is "Less than Lethal" because they can still kill or seriously injure. The military uses basically a hard core paintball gun in detention camps. It does serious damage if you shoot it in the wrong area. Ever get a frozen paintball in your eye? Tazers kill too, especially if the person has some sort of electrical implant. just google around. The argument you didn't mean to kill the person with a tazer wouldn't hold, just try explaining it to the family. It's the same as if you stabbed or shot or made someone beed somehow and they bled to death. "Well, I didn't mean to kill them I only sliced him up with my kitchen knife."
This article is totally misleading.
First, the electronic identification methods that only allow the owner to fire the gun are hugely error prone. The "idea" is great, and police departments especially would love to have them. I'd buy one. But in reality they fail to recognize the owner far too often. And when the owner pulls the trigger, that gun needs to fire. Period. Any failure at all and the owner is likely going to die (as he's likely being attacked.)
Second, most of the other safety features mentioned ARE on guns. They all seem to be specific to handguns, as grip safeties and such are not something you'd put on a rifle. But if you go into any gun shop the vast majority, if not all pistols in the store are going to have these features. They are just not required by law and the majority of gun owners want them because they are improvements over old safety mechanisms. My pistol has them and what they basically add up to is you can't fire the fun unless you're holding it correctly, and pointing it away from you. They prevent you from firing the gun while it's on the bench by mistake, or catching the trigger on your finger while you're drawing it from the holster. Then you have the "There's a bullet in the chamber" indicator... which my pistol has but is pretty much useless. You always treat the gun like there's a bullet in the chamber. Always. My pistols never been pointed at a human being, loaded or unloaded, and hopefully never will.
Here's and example of a home invasion where a jealous ex-spouse was planning a double murder + suicide. 14 shots were fired and 6 hit the perp and he lived to be prosecuted and imprisoned. The defender was a brand new gun owner who only had owned a handgun for 3 weeks, so you cannot realistically expect everyone to be as proficient with a gun as if they were a Navy Seal or SWAT team guy.
A 3-shot limit is preposterous. The bad guy is not going to stand still and wait for you to get a good aim on him like a paper target.
The 3-round shotgun limit is a federal law for shotgun hunting of migratory waterfowl... put in place to thwart unscrupulous hunters from harvesting entire flocks.
A good defense shotgun needs to hold at least 8 rounds of 12 gauge 3" magnum shells, and you might want to load it with alternating shells of 00 buckshot and slugs.
Automatic firearms are not banned, but you need a $3000 dollar tax and the guns themselves cost upwards of $6000, plus it can take months to get through the licensing process.
Ehhhhh, not sure on that. I don't own any automatic firearms, but I have friends that own upwards of over forty 7.62 rifles. No licensing or permits required. Just went down to the local shop and bought them. This is in NH and I know the laws vary from state to state.
this is not a new idea, i have heard of rfid rings that would render pistols ineffective if not within extremely close proximity about 15 years ago.
problem is reliability, in a self defense setting you will want it to work 100% of the time, a safety device that could fail could be the difference between life and death. just something to think about.
Once the police begin using these "safety" devices that prevent others from using the gun, then it should become widespread.
Extra safety measures sound great until you try to implement them. I don't know of any biometric safety method that is reliable enough to stake your life on. Grip recognition sounds great until the system fails, you don't get your "calm and collected grip", you have to use your other hand, or you get injured somehow. There are some magnetic ones that work if you are wearing a magnetic ring and these seem reliable but only work for revolvers. People who want to impose these measures don't shoot guns themselves apparently. It's like imposing efficiency standards that are unattainable.
When it's reliable enough for the police, it will be reliable enough for everyone else.
Of course you've never had to overthrow the government, which may involve you needing to kill twenty federal troops in one bloody day. If there had been a revolution, I would have read about it in the news. That doesn't mean you go around repealing amendments, though. You have the amendment, in order to inform/bluff everyone into knowing that twenty federal troops will die by your hand if they attack the states too directly, which strangely has the effect of the conflict never happening.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Good try on the car analogy though, somebody had to do it.
Thanks :-)
You can't add electronics to a simple mechanical device and make it more reliable. Electronics are less reliable than simple mechanical things, so any such change is a step backward.
Okay, even if it is a step backward in theory, in practice, are we really not able to engineer something to an acceptable level of reliability? Guns already do not work 100% of the time. They occasionally jam and misfire. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I can take a loaded gun and lay it in the middle of a street for weeks, I can throw a loaded gun off the roof of a building, I can throw it against the wall or I can put it in a closet for 100 years and it will never go off. The only times gun arent safe is when they are in the hands of someone who doesnt know what they are doing.
Making a gun safe is as stupid as saying youre going to make hammers safer because one person beat another to death with a hammer.
So you dont need to make guns safer, you need to make people safer. In switzerland every citizen is required to own a gun and is given one with ammunition and that country has the worlds lowest gun related deaths in the world and the lowest gun related crimes in the world.
Your friend may own 40 semi-automatic rifles, but I doubt he owns 40 automatic or select fire rifles.
OMG I want a GAU-8 booster for my civic! I could really burn the ricers with that ;-) I couldn't stop laughing when I saw that.
..is the indicator that the gun has a round in the chamber. And that should only be done if the simplicity (and thus reliability) of gun design can be maintained. You don't want a gun to fail because of a safety measure when you want to use it properly.
The smart grips are especially dumb:
* Annoying: While out shooting new guns... Friend: "Hey - Can I try that one out? That's awesome..." Owner: "Sorry - smart grip.."
* Tin foil hat: If you start putting smart tech in guns, how do you avoid the inevitable tracking that would be put into them by the government or others interested in "safety"? Could guns be disabled remotely?
Thanks, but no thanks... Training and safety are the smartest "smart" technologies you can invest in a gun.
When the amendment was written, what percentage of firearms were capable of holding more than three shots?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The fear is not that invaders will take your stuff. The fear is that they are there to kill/rape/imprison you and/or your family. (And yes, 'imprison' is a factor -- many gun owners expect their personal defense to protect them from the government.)
Whether it is a useful deterrent or not is in doubt. Most home invaders are either well-armed or on heavy drugs, or both.
Blame the existence of the second amendment for giving citizens that they have a chance, solo, against government forces. Also blame television for making people think that violent home invasions happen once a week.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
How would a striker fired pistol get it's non-existent trigger snagged ?
And how is firing more than three rounds in succession *critical* to target shooting? It isn't.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
These dangerous fantasies people have about stopping multiple home invaders with their glock or fighing off a government takeover are insane - what is wrong with these people and their delusions? - rarely is any home invason stopped by a firearm, you would think you would read about this in the local paper once in a while - and as for the government takeover, the last thing I would want if I was an insurgent is a firearm, I am a physicist, I could cause more mayhem by going shopping for the right stuff at home depot than I every could with an AK47, having an assault weapon would just out me as an insurgent
Show me how exactly can you aim well after getting woken up by a break-in.
The best defense against home break-ins is to move away from high-crime areas.
And the best way to afford to live in a low crime area is to be rich. So if the poor are unsafe, they should become rich! They can become rich by not wasting their money on bread and just eat cake!
"Note that gun safety features (not universally loved) like grip safeties, have been available in some form and in various combinations for many decades."
Grip safeties have been around on guns a long time. The 1911 has one, and that is a 100+ year old design that is still in prominent use today.
And the best way to afford to live in a low crime area is to be rich. So if the poor are unsafe, they should become rich! They can become rich by not wasting their money on bread and just eat cake!
I make 17k a year. Our last murder here was in the 80s.
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How about making it illegal (except law enforcement, no grandfathering) any firearm that can be fired within 1,000 feet of a school.
I'd you can ban magnetic balls then you can do this.
It's not the people on slashdot shooting people.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
Remember that when it fails, people DIE. One failure EVER is too many.
This is the kind of statement I'm talking about, though. Guns ALREADY fail.They occasionally jam and misfire. If they are not cleaned and maintained, they fail more often. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent and we can keep it that way through maintenance.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it. Nothing is perfect... but can we make something acceptable, where the benefits outweight the costs?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Here's what we need: a 1911-style grip safety, and a Walther PPK-style indicator pin that pops out close to the rear sight if a round is in the chamber. Those two things are remarkably effective, and cost practically nothing. Oh, and they've been around for decades.
And such a pistol already exists: the Springfield Armory XD.
.
Step #2, Gun manufacturers will be forced by market economics to develop a reliable interlock technology or risk the loss of those lucrative Government contracts.They will see the writing on the wall and step up their development plans. Research will finally get serious about developing it.
Step #3, Economy of scale in production of the law enforcement market makes the interlock technology more affordable, since the technology is available to all manufacturers.
Step #4, After a study of the economics of scale in the industry shows that the technology is in fact affordable, Congress creates a reverse incentive for purchasing firearms without the technology as to tip the balance away from the more dangerous firearms. One simple example is requiring that all non-interlocked firearms are stored 'disabled' by a trigger key lock mechanism at all times, and stored under lock an key. Nobody prevents you from having it; its just not very convenient to pull it out and use it on someone. Another possibility is a tax on non-interlocked firearms which directly pays for law enforcement procurement programs to make up for the initial cost of development.
Step #5, Have amnesty gun collections for firearms specifically without the proper interlocks, just to get them off the streets.
Note that the market forces do the brunt of the work, and the Government can uses its economic weight to tip the scales in favour of safer firearms. Nobody including law enforcement is forced to get rid of what they currently have, and gun collectors are not prevented from acquiring whatever arms they choose to collect. The down side is that Law enforcement carries the initial load as for the cost of developing the technology, but then they also benefit from fewer deaths at the hands of criminals. Its a trade off. If I personally had to choose between paying five dollars a year in taxes or seeing 10 offerers die, I would pay the money. No question. The benefit to society in general, as a side effect of market forces, would be monumental, though it will take years for the process to work its way through all the steps described. The market economy is a slow manipulator, but it moves things along in the right direction none the less.
What about all of the other legitimate uses of firearms? If someone has a bunch of pistols or rifles because they are a target shooter wouldn't all those complexities be a great way to mitigate accidental discharges? While you're target shooting (and maybe even hunting) you have plenty of time to move your finger to the right position or switch to left hand mode. Police can still use the "simple gun" since they are more likely to use it in a life/death situation than someone that hangs out at a gun range. Hell, keep one simple gun under your pillow in the extremely unlikely case of a break in. But if you have 20 guns for fun it seems to me there is less chance of an accident if 19 of them have some attempt at idiot proofing. Am I wrong?
Target shooting is one of the safest sports a school-age kid can participate in. There are millions of injuries in school sports every year, hundreds of thousands requiring doctors, tens of thousands requiring hospital care, permenent disabling injuries and even deaths. Sports are a major cause of traumatic brain injury in kids. Shoulders and knees are being permanently damaged daily. Among the major sports players, something like 15-30% of kids will be injured at some point.
But serious injuries involving shooting sports are extremely rare. When there are injuries, it's generally of the type a Band-Aid will fix.
Plus, it's not likely a malicious shooter will get very far in his rampage on the range.
Just to be clear, I own quite a number of guns, I know how to take them apart down to the frame and put them back together in firing order and I understand the need for a weapon to work at instance notice...but here is the thing....for 99% of robberies they are going to be done in the middle of the morning WHEN YOU ARE NOT HOME...why would a robber rob you at a night when you are almost guarantied to be there, sounds almost counter productive don't you think?
I take it you will go to the range and you will test your gun...you will want to know how it works...what are its limitations...do you need to take it to a gun smith to get it fix...ect,ect,ect
If you do this you will be ready for the 1% cases where the criminal is dumb enough to enter your house while you are there, for you know you weapon and you will be able to fire it true.
For those thinking a civil war will happen and you will need to fight red dawn style...if that happens the military will be divided...you will most likely join with that sides military...they will most likely issue a military weapon that uses common ammo that side will all use...besides your badass AR-15 will not do very well against a guided missile, tank, saw mounted on a humvee...again common sense needs to be applied here.
For the military and police, I wouldnt require these measures on their guns...and here is why...they experience that 1% much more than you or I will and you are right they wont have time for everything to be 100%. As things are tested in the civilian market and proven it can migrate into the police sector and maybe just maybe the military sector. This might be the rare case where it has to be tested by civilians before it can reach police and military.
Anyways I put up this petition at whitehouse gov
http://wh.gov/Rhbb
If we impletement this technology you may lose convenience but you might not lose the right to have your decked out toy...democracy is about give and take...you can either give up your bad ass ar-15...or you can have it slightly inconvenienced...and still have your right to bear arms.
Let the down votes begin.
Yes. Perhaps pigs can fly, too.
Stop calculating for ideal situations. If the cops were there whenever a crime is being commited, we wouldn't even be discussing this, but unfortunately they are just cops, not Superman or Spiderman.
And come standard in the Springfield XD and XDm, what I carry on a day-to-day basis.
(It has a small leaf that's popped up by the round in the chamber and becomes instantly visible if it's loaded.)
BUT this does not preclude the #1 rule of firearm safety, which has been drilled incessantly (and for good reason) by many groups and responsible owners and users: treat all guns as if they are loaded.
The 4 rules (all as loaded, muzzle control, trigger discipline and awareness) prevent 99% of accidents. The remaining 1% are due to inherent mechanical failures that plague anything that moves -- guns, cars, mattresses, washing machines, etc. And to a lesser extent, people doing stupid shit, like reloading ammunition and grossly overcharging the cases.
It's not. When some early hominid invented the idea of the club (and as the technological progression continued toward laser blasters) you started to lose your advantage. That's a done deal, and no law can ever change it. Sorry. You may, in fact, be attacked by a 4'11" person armed with a weapon some day, and if you are unarmed, the 4'11" person will have the advantage. Sucks to be you.
Gun laws are about whether or not (should you choose to adopt a strategy of opposing that 4'11" attacker with similar force, making a slightly better contest rather than you automatically losing) you will live in a constant state of fear from your government, considered an outlaw.
When the village idiot says "get rid of all the guns," we can all laugh him off, just as though he had said, "everyone should have a pony."
When a politician says "get rid of all the guns," he's actually seriously talking about attacking you, should you ever be detected having a gun.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
And what happens to your children or wife while you're cowering under your bed?
I will not depend on the kindness of someone who has already violated the sanctity of my house to protect the safety of my family.
*sigh* back to work...
Similarly, there are many documented cases of air bags killing people. We still use them though, because they save way more people than they kill.
I had a guy try to break into my apartment and I was waiting for him with my loaded pistol. Turns out he was drunk and was looking for a place to take a piss, and given the party outside I was not surprised. He left quietly.
No, I have yet to see a reasonable case for more than 3 rounds in a private weapon - i.e. non-law enforcement, non-military.
Multiple attackers. Well, if it's more than one on one, you're going to be shot by the other guy before you get three rounds off.
Gang Bangers. See above.
Poor aim. See my original comment.
Bar fight. Really? Amid a bar full of bystanders, you're going to squeeze off multiple rounds? Talk about lack of training - you should work for the NYPD.
Home invasion robbery. (1) poor aim, see original comment or (2) quit taking shots YOU DON'T HAVE
Target practice. If you can't hit it on your first three shots, you probably should stop and re-center yourself anyway. You might as well reload at the same time.
But they're non-lethal for 1-2 shots. If you're attacker is in close proximity and his/her progress isn't stopped in two shots, it's unlikely that you're going to survive regardless of the number of rounds remaining in your weapon when you get tackled and lose the ability to control your gun.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
...And as long as you get a shotgun with a large spread (larger diameter or shorter barrel), you'll not have to aim so well.
This is a common misconception among people who don't use shotguns. Unless you cut the barrel down to about 4 inches, the spread at 10' (the distance from the end of the barrel to the other side of your bedroom) will be on the order of 8"-10". That's not enough to make much difference in your chances of hitting the target, but it will make a hell of a mess out of whatever it does hit.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I worked for a place that had tried to develop electronics which were supposed to improve gun safety in such manners (for the record, whilst I wouldn't want them on any gun I own, I fully support anyone who wants the option on weapons they purchase). Turns out that actually shooting the gun is *very* hard on the electronics physically and led to many early failures (meaning the gun does not go bang when you need it to).
Possibly it might be possibly to harden the electronics against such shocks but that's even more expense and complexity. Let's have some real R&D instead of pie-in-the-sky BSing.
While I agree with the sentiment, your argument is heavily one-sided. In all of the instances of "has to fire at that exact second with no chance of causing hesitation", there's only one single time in reality that could ever apply... when you're in a situation such that your life or that of someone around yout is absolutely about to be taken with zero chance of a nonviolent outcome (ie: just give your damn wallet to the mugger).
In absolutely every other situation, such as hunting, protecting your garden from rabbits (which is essentially hunting), target shooting, aim testing, etc, you have time to adjust your grip, switch off any extra safeties, ensure that there's nothing behind your target that could be damaged or killed, and a myriad of other decisions you could make. The worst case scenario possible is that the rabbit gets away. For now. Bugger will be back, after all... there's still plants in that garden.
The only time that you absolutely need it to fire at that second, without fail, is when you intend to murder someone, either in offence or defense. And don't say you plan to just wing them, that's not the purpose of a firearm. A firearm is designed to kill. If you wanted to incapacitate someone, that's where non-lethal things come into play, such as stun guns or beanbag guns. If you're firing a chunk of lead, the designed purpose of that lead is to stop what it's going into from being alive. That's it's function.
That said, I don't disagree with your sentiment at all. Just that you're looking at only once slice of the pie.
Disclaimer: I grew up in the country and have fired many a gun (usually a .22 to take care of the blackbirds and rabbits after the garden), so unlike many, many people (one would argue the vast majority) who have an opinion on the issue, I at least have experience to bank on for my statements.
Here is a crazy idea, GET RID OF THEM. If people want to go hunting let them use bows and there is no reason to have automatic weapons and handguns.
Cops and criminals (which are all too often one and the same) have them.
Reason enough.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I feel like the popularity of the Glock shows a shift in popular thought towards safety over reliability.
Okay, AC - I read your little story, and it turns out only one shot was needed.
(1) The defender fired on an unknown assailant in pitch dark. That's actually grounds for revocation of a CC permit in about 14 states.
And I quote: "First shot grazed his trigger hand and damaged the base of his glock .40 cal causing the magazine to fall out. He didnt even realize and while running towards me pulling the trigger the only round he had left was in the chamber."
(2) The first shot disabled the opposing mans firearm, no more were actually required
(3) If he had assumed a proper defensive position, he wound't have been in an all-out shootout.
(4) If the first shot would not have hit home, it's unlikely the defender would have had a chance to fire more than three shots since the attacker was actively firing as well.
Congratulations...the ONE, unsubstantiated anecdote you found turns out to prove my point. Thank you.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
1. No chips, electronics, RFID tags. I want my gun to be functional following a nuclear strike, solar flare, airburst meteor, a bath, etc. 2. Zombies rarely travel in herds of 3 or less. I need full magazines. In all seriousness, if you can make a gun safer by some mechanical means without impacting reliability, I'd probably be for it. I've heard enough stories of people accidentally shooting themselves that I'm cautious to the point of paranoia about clearing the chamber when I clean my glock. I'm also not entirely opposed to electronics on a gun as an option. I'd totally buy an assault rifle with an led display. However, I'm strongly opposed to any electronics required by regulation. I was kinda serious about that whole EMP thing. There should always be a choice. If I had kids in the house, I might consider a chipped gun; but that should be an option to consider, not a mandate from the top. As far as limiting the number of rounds a gun can hold...meh. I'd rather spend time and effort on trying to keep people from shooting up schools at all, rather than worrying about how to limit the number of shots fired when someone does go looney. It's the difference between treating a disease and treating a symptom. Safety is never absolute. To strive for absolute safety would be foolish; diminishing returns and whatnot. Tragedy is a part of living and will never be completely eliminated. We can try to mitigate risk, but in most cases you'll find the safety gained is largely ephemeral, while the freedoms lost will never be regained.
Talking about newtown specifically, I'm sure her son would have been authorized to use the guns. he wanted to use the guns. he'd have gripped it properly. and loaded it properly. this wasn't a gun "safety" issue.
The smart feature you want is the exact inverse of the authorized person feature. You want the authorized location feature. This gun can't be fired by anyone in a school (let's say gps-based for this conversation). If zombies attack, you'll need to shoot them outside of the school.
Oh, and the semi-automatic can only be fired in a hunting area.
At that time, citizenry had about the same percentage of more-than-three-shot weapons, as the government did. I think both sides had somewhere around zero.
I believe the situation has changed since then, though. Perhaps I am mistaken. If you can assure me the 2012 government doesn't have any weapons with more than three shots, and doesn't have the capacity to quickly obtain more-than-three-shot weapons, I'll give the citizens-should-only-have-three-shots idea a second look.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
And apparently you can't fucking reAd yourself.
My rule for gun technology is generally... I'll use it when the military and/or police have been using it in active service for 10 or more years. Before then, I might not mind having it on any of my range-use-only guns, but never on a carry piece. My requirements are generally the same as a police department's, because if I ever have to use my gun it will be in defense of the same criminals the police encounter.
Here's what we need: a 1911-style grip safety, and a Walther PPK-style indicator pin that pops out close to the rear sight if a round is in the chamber. Those two things are remarkably effective, and cost practically nothing. Oh, and they've been around for decades.
Springfield XD pistols have both those features.
How would any of this stopped the Sandy Hook murders? His mother bought the guns legally. She could afford any level of license they wanted to put up.
His mother trusted him with the weapons. He was a nut case that should have been committed, but his mother had a soft heart.
None of these laws would have stopped him.
Other part - guns have to be reliable. You can't sue a gun maker for the gun working. Add a bunch of limiters and the gun fails to fire in an emergency and the gun maker will be sued. Do you have incentive to add the limiters? Add a bunch of limiters and the price must go up, do the sales of those guns go up?
Price and liablity are more important.
Look, I think it's stupid to apply a bunch of technology (e.g. biometric authorization) to a gun in the first place, on the ground that guns are meant to be simple, reliable mechanical devices when you need them to *save* lives. That biometric auth will fail orders of magnitude more often than the gun itself in legitimate use situations, either due to actual electronics failure, loss of power, or because it can't get a clear print due to the mud/dirt/blood on the user's hands in a time of need.
But, that whole argument aside, the reason it's pointless is this: any such requirement that's being required by law (or pushed by the lawsuit environment) will necessarily have to exempt/grandfather existing weapons. If you think it's hard to pass a normal gun law in this country, realize that they almost always have grandfather clauses, and it would be completely impossible to pass a law without one. Then take stock of the existing weapons in private hands in this country, some of which are *very* old technology. These things don't fall apart and get replaced every 5 years. Some of these guns were built in the early 1900s and they'll still be used long after I'm dead. Basically you can't achieve any reasonable coverage rate with these devices in any reasonable amount of time, and thus it's pointless from a pragmatic perspective.
11*43+456^2
I'm not opposed to a manufacturer making a model with extra high-tech safeties for people who don't know how to use guns and/or have kids they don't want to educate on firearms safety but I wouldn't personally buy one and I'm 100% against making anything like this mandatory.
Everyone on /. knows that technology can fail. It will just add to the weight/cost/complexity of the weapon and reduce reliability. Batteries die at the worst time, etc. Simple is best and dead-ass simple is better. "It's not how it works, it's how well if fails."
What you talk about might make sense about the time we get laser rifles. They'll have a power source anyway.
I think modern firearms are actually very safe. People are stupid or do stupid things.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Lost in space the Movie from 1997
Kind of disproves guns can make guns safe
I mean in a 9 year old gets to carry a gun and can unlock it for Dr. Smith with his voice
What's the point of the technology ?
That's what I love about the Springfield XD line. It comes with a Grip Safety, Trigger Safety, Striker Indicator Pin & Loaded Chamber Indicator. And the form factor/grip angle is similar to a 1911.
This is a common misconception among people who don't use shotguns.
You are correct on that statement. I don't own, but I do support ownership as a right. And thanks for the info.
but it will make a hell of a mess out of whatever it does hit.
And that's a good selling point IMO as a home defense system, because if there is a threat, I want it gone.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
If the device was a pacemaker then that's 3x the deaths due to failure. Why would people buy that product if it was 3x more likely to fail?
Because they gained some other benefit not quantified in the failure rate? E.g., maybe the less-failure prone pacemaker needs to be removed for battery replacement every three years, whereas the (slightly) more-failure prone one has a battery that lasts ten years?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Hammer. The word you were looking for here is hammer.
How about a handgun like the sword in the movie blade, that if you grip it and don't disable the booby-trap mechanism blades will swing out, disabling the person attempting to sue the weapon.
In all seriousness, though, making guns safe is not all that difficult. I have a TT pistol made in Yugoslavia sometime in the early 1960's; in order to be sold in the US, a safety switch blocking the trigger had to be added. The safety switch was not necessary, though. First of all, the gun is single-action; you have to cock the hammer in order to fire the gun. The hammer has a half-cock, which does two things: it blocks the trigger (basically your safe-mode--you can't fire the gun), and it keeps the hammer off of the firing pin, so that if you dropped the gun it would not fire accidentally. On top of that, it has a magazine safety--if you remove the magazine from the gun, the trigger is blocked. This is particularly useful because many people assume that a gun without a magazine is unloaded, but there may still be a round in the chamber. In the case of this pistol, no magazine = no firing. If the hammer is pulled back and there is a round in the chamber, you can drop the magazine and prevent the gun from firing; then you can pull back the slide and eject the round. The hammer can also be manually decocked, which is very dangerous if the gun is loaded, but doable if for some reason you had to disarm it without ejecting all the ammo.
My point here is that this gun, which is at least 50 years old, is actually very safe to handle and operate. I don't really think we need fancy technology and shooter-identification systems. Hell, the M1911 features a safety-grip so that you cannot pull the trigger unless you're firmly gripping the gun. To make guns safe, you just have to not do anything that is extremely stupid and you're fine. Don't keep a gun loaded when you don't have to. Adding safety features and technology won't prevent violent crimes--the shooter in the recent mass shooting was using a rifle that he purchased himself and was firing it intentionally, so no safety feature would have made a difference. People make a big deal about how the shooter used an AR-15, an "assault weapon," but in reality it was just a generic semi-automatic rifle. Any hunting or sport rifle could do the same, so in order to prevent shootings you'd basically have to ban all firearms of all kinds, and even with the ban shooters would still get and use them. I doubt a suicidal or insane shooter would care too much about breaking a firearm ban if he already had intentions of committing mass murder. Even with a bolt action rifle, he could have done the same or greater damage (bolt action = increased accuracy, better aiming).
I believe that you are wrong, and I'll use an example from computers:
What happens when people have 20 passwords/authentication methods they have to remember or maintain? They adopt habits which render those protections worse than not having them in the first place. Those 20 passwords become variations on each other at best, and more likely, simply become reused among sites. Even worse, if one changes frequenty, people tend to make their passwords very simple to barely meet the requirement.
If I had 20 'RFID' rings to match me with 20 of my firearms, I'm pretty sure that within 2-3 cases of bringing the wrong dongle to the range, I'd do the same thing I do with my shotgun choke tubes and keys. I'd get an elastic harness for the firearm, and keep it right on the gun.
The result is that you now would have 20 firearms, with the 'lockout' mechanism taped right to the side of the firearm, and the benefit is lost.
(I also don't even want to get into the terror of having a battery within my firearm would cause me from a risk of corrosion standpoint, so any firearm I'd store I'd have to always remember to remove the battery)
Firearms are mechanical devices. A safe is a hell of a lot better of a system than any sort of electronic interlock.
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True, but how many of us actually make squirrels fly, anyway?
Well, it takes 75000 rounds to stop a freight train.
Idiots are some of the most dangerous and creative individuals on the planet (though most of them don't know it).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What chance do you really think a consumer-legal weapon will have against the US armed forces?
An example: the Syrian government is doing pretty well at keeping their rebels at bay, and their rebels have far better weapons than those that are legal in the US, and big powers are enforcing a no-fly zone over the whole country. Who is going to enforce a no-fly zone in the US? Are your weapons with *greater* than 3 rounds going to be exceptionally useful against an M1 Abrams?
And, let's be honest, if some nut job takes over the White House, or the Army, or Marines - what is the chance that all of the men and women of the armed forces are actually going to go out and start killing US citizens? If you know your history, you know that the intent of the armed populace was really the prevent oppression from a power like the British monarchy - we were freshly off of a war with that government, which had not been "our own" for more than 100 years.
I'm all for an involved citizenry with checks and balances, but the conditions you appear to fear exist only in Hollywood and other entertainment venues (of which I count talk radio). If the conditions really DID exist that the people would get into a skirmish with the US military, I can guarantee you who I'd be placing my bet on. And it ain't the guys with the 90 round AR-15 magazine they bought from Cabelas.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Giving teachers tasers may be a bad idea though. "Johnny, if I have to tell you to be quiet one more time... ". Teachers have a difficult job at least as far as maintaining sanity goes. Let's not give them that satisfying of an alternative to keep those brats in line.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Do you really think the liberty of millions of Americans is worth twenty children?
<golf clap>
Very well done, though you crossed over into Poe's Law territory which makes it undecidable whether you are really moonbat crazy or merely trolling. Unfortunately, there truly are a lot of insane leftists who really believe this is a legitimate & desirable trade. And, of course, because no matter what form the impending ban will take, it won't prevent another massacre in the future.
So...
Do you really think not pointlessly sacrificing freedom simply in order to feel better & ineffectually validate our grief is worth twenty children?
FTFY. And yes, these tragedies do happen. Evil exists, Santa Claus is a lie, the Tooth Fairy is your parents, etc, etc.
There's one guaranteed way to make a gun safe; don't entrust it to a human being.
I won't own any firearm with electronics in them. For the simpler reason of EMP! IF there was ever to be an EMP discharged...elctronics would be fried...chaos would ensue. I NEED my weapons to function.
In the event of a 'real life situation' involving your own self defense, missing three times is quite possible. In some cases one or two (poorly placed) hits won't stop an attacker.
That whole 'shoot them once and they go down' is pure Hollywood stuff.
Have gnu, will travel.
Those should be optional. People have different reasons for wanting them, especially the loaded indicator. I know people that want to carry an unloaded gun just so that they can brandish it in case of emergency, but they know they wouldn't be willing to pull the trigger and they aren't comfortable carrying a loaded gun. If indicators for chambered rounds were required, even standardized, then you'd never be able to do that.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Seems that Hideo Kojima and the writers from Metal Gear Solid are visionaries. While i understand that guns should be reliable and actually fire when needed, it would be nice if the gun only fired from his legitimate owner. Maybe some exception for the military guns, since that wouldn't work on warfare.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Might be better to create a biometric mechanism that "excludes" people from using the firearm. That way if it detects your child holding it then it will not fire. For you, your wife, whoever else it will work normally. Just thinking out loud....
I saw, many years ago, a program on maybe TLC, where the person wore a ring that activated the gun. I thought that was cool.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
I have friends on FB who appear to think that our current political situation is just as dire as in the Civil War, with things so important being argued that fighting could break out at any moment.
It's worth pointing out that we are currently arguing (aside from the Sandy Hook aftermath) over (1) whether everyone should have to have health care (2) whether the taxes we all paid back in 1999 - half of what they were in the 70s - should be reinstated (3) Whether the money we send to Washington should be spent on the elderly, the infirm, and the indigent, or should be reallocated to personal pet projects more suited to each representatives district and (4) If gay people can get married.
The actual political distance between the parties is rather wide, and yet the two candidates in the last election are so close together politically *based on their actual actions* you could have swapped them. Obama had the balls to call in the raid in Pakistan, is bombing the shit out of everyone he can point a drone at, and signed legislation to extend tax cuts and to allow firearms into national parks. Romney basically created the Affordable Healthcare Act when he was governor.
We, as a country, are arguing about - really - mostly trivial things. And yet everyone gets whipped into a frenzy about them because you've got to fill 24 hours of news somehow, and the only way to get people to do anything is to create a fever pitch over it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In fact, if you do even one day of actual defense training, one of the exercises you do is shooting with a two-handed grip in the "A" stance, then shooting left handed "side stance" and then right handed "side stance".
This simple exercise would be impossible with some kind of electronic garbage that prevents firing based on grip signature. Also, I'd rather not have to worry about if the batteries are dead if I need the gun.
Here's what we need: a 1911-style grip safety, and a Walther PPK-style indicator pin that pops out close to the rear sight if a round is in the chamber. Those two things are remarkably effective, and cost practically nothing. Oh, and they've been around for decades.
Springfield XD has both of those features....should check it out
Sounds like you should worry about using a bit more parental authority.
I never sneaked out of the house...never ever, ever, because we had guns in the house. For that very reason I would never sneak out of the house.
From a very young age, my parents let me know where the gun was, I wash taken and shown how to use it properly. I also had the fear of God put into me if I ever even thought of touching it when not appropriate. I also knew not to sneak out to risk being shot as an intruder.
One time I was home alone...it was raining, and some bum started ringing the doorbell, wanted some water, etc.
I went to their bedroom, got the gun, cocked and loaded the chamber and safety off....and held that as I yelled through the door for him to leave immediately.
When he finally left, I took the clip out, took the round out of the chamber and back into the clip, clip back into gun with safety on...put it back in place and immediately called my Mom at work to tell what had happened.
Can you not trust your kids to be as responsible?
If not, then I posit the problem is not guns...but a little more parental guidance is needed by the offspring.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
One of the places they'll look is under your bed; a lot of people "hide" valuables there.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Non-lethal is only useful when there isn't an immediate threat to someone's life.
When you absolutely need to be sure someone won't kill someone, there's only one way to do that. That's why police don't wield tasers when confronting an armed criminal. They wield them when confronting someone who is acting wildly, but is not an immediate threat. (A Youtube video comes to mind where someone is going bat crazy at a police officer for writing her a ticket. She starts slapping him so he tases her.)
Using a taser against someone carrying a shovel is one thing. Using one against someone carrying a full-auto M14 is another.
To your point though, I'm not sure if keeping any gun/taser in a classroom is a good idea (unless it was on the teacher's person, in a holster). Too much can happen and a student can gain possession before the teacher can do anything.
We don't live in Shouldland.
I doubt a lot of folks do that, and outside of television I've never known anyone who did that. And it's a stupid idea. Rock salt doesn't make a gun non-lethal. Someone is either a grave threat or not. If they aren't a grave threat, you have no business shooting them with anything.
When the amendment was written, what percentage of firearms were capable of holding more than three shots?
So when we eradicate guns back to muzzle loaders only, because that's when the second amendment was written and that's what the founding fathers meant. Sometime later, someone will blow up a school with a keg of black powder, instead. Then someone will say that when the second amendment was written people couldn't get access to kegs of powder and only a table spoon. So we'll ban everyone to a tablespoon of black powder. Then someone will use propane instead of black powder and blow up another crowd of people. Then someone will say, when the second amendment was written, our founding fathers never intended for us to get fossil fuels, homes should only of been heated with fires and steaks only cooked over logs. So we'll ban Propane and Natural gas. Then someone will blow up a bus with match heads in a tube. Then someone will say, when the second amendment was written, our founding fathers only intended for fires to be started by rubbing sticks together. So we'll ban matches and lighters. At this time Somalia will invade and conquer the US, but we can all rest assured that the founding father's wishes were followed.
Your friend may own 40 semi-automatic rifles, but I doubt he owns 40 automatic or select fire rifles.
Nope, all autos and select fire. I actually reload ammo for him. That number doesn't include shotguns, Mosin Nagants, and pistols either. Once a week he and his wife purchase something in larger quantities for storage. One week it was TP. The next it was water. So on and so forth. He's a "prepper" for sure.
While a lower rate (football alone) isn't American Football responsible for approximately 25 deaths or catastrophic injuries per year?
(4+ direct deaths such as severed spines, 9+ indirect deaths like heart attacks, and an average of 13 injuries such as total paralysis)
I'm not saying this as a plea to ban football in HS. (However, I think we do put our HS players in too much danger), but to illustrate that I believe people are wildly overreacting to the actual threat. Mass shootings average 100 deaths per year. That is an astonishingly small number when you factor in the population size, and when you also consider the risk due to things that are completely avoidable like HS football.
The hysteria just bugs the hell out of me.
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The vehicle death rate has increased since seatbelts and aribags were made mandatory; people feel safer, so they're more prone to do stupider shit.
That's simply empirically false. This chart and the associated statistics show that while the absolute number of deaths is increasing, the frequency of deaths is declining, a trend evident since the late 1960s at least.
Cars have clearly become more complex over the same period, and so there is no simple correlation between increased complexity and increased frequency of death.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Yes, that's why Afghanistan and Iraq were cake walks for the US military. Never could private citizens with ak's and explosives stand up to the infallable US military!
There was at one time a mechanical interlock device for guns which used a magnetized ring worn by the user. Without a strong magnet on the grip, the gun would not unlock and fire. It wasn't that popular, but did work. Some gun users with kids at home liked it.
Gun safety systems have improved, and there should be minimum standards in that area. Col. Dave Hackworth (WWII, Korea, Vietnam, highly decorated, quit the Army after Vietnam over war policy and became a noted critic) was involved in evaluating replacements for the M1911A1 pistol. He mentions that Army records showed that weapon had killed more US soldiers through accidents than enemy soldiers. (Bear in mind the military approach to pistols - pistols are carried by people who don't plan to use them. When you're looking for trouble, you carry a rifle or heavier.)
With the M1911A1, you can remove the magazine, but if there's a round in the chamber, still fire the weapon. Most modern semi-auto pistols are interlocked against that, which tends to reduce "I didn't know it was loaded" accidents. The unloading process is more complicated than one might expect, and involves disengaging the safety and pulling the trigger.
That class of problem can be solved by design. It may take legislation, just as it did to get auto transmission quadrants to all be PRNDL. In the 1950s, General Motors used a different sequence than Ford and Chrysler, leading to "I didn't know it was in reverse" accidents.
If there was a reliable way to disable and contain a murderous attacker on a violent rampage without killing him or her that is at least as reliable as a firearm, I'm pretty sure everyone, including dysfunctional US citizens, would be interested.
That would actually be a pretty disruptive technology, and would make bloodshed obsolete.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Never said it was non-lethal. Just less lethal. I had rock salt for awhile. But I just changed to buckshot. I know a few people that have rock salt. Some people don't want to live with the fact they took someone's life. Rock salt being less lethal, allows for the suspect to have a better chance of surviving and facing prosecution.
Automatic weapons are regulated at the federal level.
He either has a million dollars invested in guns between the tax and guns themselves,
or he has been buying his guns illegally,
or you are mistaken.
Most home invaders are either well-armed or on heavy drugs, or both.
Blame the existence of the second amendment for giving citizens that they have a chance, solo, against government forces. Also blame television for making people think that violent home invasions happen once a week.
First, most home invaders are not heavily armed. and second, my home has been broken into twice (not often, 20 years ago and 5 years ago) However, I once held someone at gunpoint after they chased me down the street and into my home. I was able to grab a shotgun and hold them at bay until they ran off. Thankfully for me, they didn't realize that I only grabbed the shotgun and didn't have any ammo for it, but damned if it wasn't a terrifying moment.
I had no chance to call the police until after the guy ran away. I didn't know what he had, or what he intended, other than the fact that he kept trying to coax me to put down the gun and come outside. I didn't want to move an inch or distract myself to try to grab the phone, and I wasn't going to let him out of my sight to try and find some ammunition.
Home invasions do happen, obviously it isn't TV, but then again, TV doesn't exactly portray gun owners in a positive light either.
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Would you mind posting your address? I'm looking for a televsion...
I think it's funny you brought up the EMP scenario, since I mentioned it one of my other comments. I recently read Lucifer's Hammer... not an EMP, but a comet creating a post-apocalyptic world where guns were very important.
In large part I agree with you... gun violence, and violent crime in general, is on the decline, and so maybe we shouldn't do anything at all. How much effort should we exert on relatively rare occurrences?
As I've mentioned elsewhere, the most striking thing about this conversation (on /.) is what seems to me to be an anti-advancement attitude. Did musket owners feel the same way about self-contained ammunition? Will future people feel that way before phasers or whatever are widely adopted?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
And when they drag your wife out from under the bed for a good rapin'?
It was "standard" in my concealed carry class along with "night shooting" (lights out) and lift to fire (from the table to shoot)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
In a situation like that, you aren't aiming to destroy a tank with your small arms. You are only making it harder for them to achieve their goal. It's nuisance warfare. If you keep the military forces busy for even a short period of time, others can build up required tools to combat the forces. (IEDs, etc.) If you just throw your hands up and give into the military might there's no possible way to win.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
... is that they'd be relatively simple to disable (and for safety's sake, disabling them would be critical except for firing range only toys.) Guns are simple mechanical devices; if a gun required a battery to work (say, a solenoid firing pin), I wouldn't touch it under any circumstances.
The worst thing, aside from adding cost and size for no benefit whatever, would be the greatly increased chance that a gun wouldn't work when needed (i.e., the battery was dead, the registered husband was just killed and his wife needed to defend herself.) Manufacturers would realize quickly that a gun that caused the death of its owner by failing to work would be a legitimately sue-able defect (and their only defense would be that the owner wasn't smart enough to illegally disable their electronics.)
Adding more and more silly safety devices comes from the growing desperation to avoid admitting that a human was responsible for anything.
"The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY. "
Absolutely. And the system described, according to their paper, in it's own words,
"The average success rate is 89.44%."
That's with a huge box of electronics attached to the gun via wires, in ideal, controlled conditions.
The ONLY way I would even begin to want to own such a thing is if there were NO external encumbrances, and it worked at least 99.9999% of the time, under varied and chaotic conditions, and doesn't rely on flaky batteries.
I might add, the newspaper had a picture of some Taliban guys in for talks, and they were carrying WW1 era bolt rifles.
"Even so, I wish that research into reliable non-lethal disabling weapons would increase tenfold."
Regular "stun guns" are not always reliable, and the more specific "Taser" type of stun gun is not "non lethal". It is "less lethal". That is why they are only supposed to be used when the only alternative is deadly force (shooting the suspect).
Granted, many law enforcement agencies have abused them, and used them in lieu of any kind of physical confrontation rather than only in lieu of deadly force; nevertheless, the latter is the way they are supposed to be used.
According to Amnesty International, Tasers are responsible for at least 10,000 deaths.
"The technical term is "Less than Lethal"...
No, the technical term is "Less Lethal". Not less than lethal.
When that amendment was written, civilians were allowed to own the same level of firepower as the military.
Protip: Try to invalidate your own stance, before you say it. It will help you prepare for easy counter arguments.
So lets make people safer.
Hallelujah! Glad to see there are still some people on /. that get it.
" (A Youtube video comes to mind where someone is going bat crazy at a police officer for writing her a ticket. She starts slapping him so he tases her.)"
See, this is what is wrong. That is an inappropriate, abusive use of the Taser.
Tasers are not "non-lethal". They are "less lethal". They are only supposed to be used in lieu of deadly force (i.e., as an alternative to shooting the person). Anything less than that calls for different measures.
In the case of the slapping woman, she should have been physically detained (whether by wrestling with her or with police club or tonfa if necessary... that's even MORE "less lethal") and handcuffed. But a Taser is grossly inappropriate at that point.
As I have said before: I know that some law enforcement agencies use them that way, but that does not make it right or proper.
Not to mention as we've seen in the Arab Spring uprising, it's one thing to use your military against a foreign nation, it's a totally different thing to use it against your own population. Soldiers generally don't like pointing their guns at their bothers, sisters, neighbors and friends.
Its questionable whether grip or magazine disconnect safeties save more people than they kill though. It's not a well-studied topic. Unlike air bags or seat belts.
When the first amendment was written, did email exist? no? well then, by god, REPEAL IT!
Would a trigger identification system introduce additional latency to the gun firing? Any latency would reduce the effectiveness.
Tell that to the Afgans, Syrians, etc
Automatic weapons are regulated at the federal level.
He either has a million dollars invested in guns between the tax and guns themselves, or he has been buying his guns illegally, or you are mistaken.
Not really sure where he got them. He had them before we met. Since we've known each other he's gotten a few more. He trades a lot. We buy our firearms from friends and stuff. I get mine from an FFL dealer in town. I do have several of my own but none are automatics and I don't have that many. I do reload though and carry a decent amount of ammo and supplies. We are in a small boonie town in the woods. Not much happens here. Not common to see trucks with gun racks in them. Its pretty redneck. But I love it.
If you are in a situation where you actually have to fire your sidearm, you die if it doesn't work right that time.
Meanwhile, in the US, where 88% of gunshot wounds are either unintentional and/or self/family-inflicted, you're more likely to have your life saved by non-functioning gun than lose your life because of it.
A gun in the US is 8 times more likely to be used to commit a crime than be used to prevent one.
In the US, children of gun-owners are 47 times more likely to be killed by gunshot than children of non-gun-owners.
Guns don't save lives; they end them. The cowboy vigilante hero fantasy is just fantasy. The reality is death by accident/theft/etc. It's like cancer...no matter how careful and responsible you are, it still happens. The most effective way to prevent yourself and your family from being the victim of gun violence is by getting rid of your guns.
But you won't do it...for the same reasons people play the lottery. It doesn't matter that more people die driving to buy a ticket than win the jackpot. The fantasy of winning is so strong, it suppresses the capacity for rational thought. The fantasy of stopping a crime gives you such a hard-on that you can't accept reality anymore. It's really sad.
It was "standard" in my concealed carry class along with "night shooting" (lights out) and lift to fire (from the table to shoot)
As addressed in my comment, you are one of the 'many shooters" who have been "exposed to the concept." I'll ask directly:do you habitually practice these techniques? The answer may be yes (I know several people who do), but the most likely answer is "no." I still stand behind my statement that this is not the "standard training for putting down a threat."
Also, if your "concealed carry" class (by which I assume you mean the class that many states mandate before you can obtain a carry permit) is teaching this, it's definitely not your run of the mill class, because no state requires such training, thus most classes (honestly, none that I have ever heard of in the state of Tennessee) don't teach it. If you're talking about a level I or II defensive handgun class, this is more normal, but I'll guarantee you spent a LOT more time on other things like basic accuracy, retention, malfunction drills, cover, etc, and did not spend the necessary time training muscle memory.
"Shoot it to the ground" has been harped on in every defensive class I've ever taken. NOT, "Two to the chest, one to the head" or similar.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Grip safeties that prevent fire based upon the hand controlling the firearm must be smart enough to know the owner's right hand from their left, and permit firing by both. Otherwise, what happens of someone breaks your shooting hand? .22 pistols).
Loaded chamber indicators can catch on clothing, holsters, etc., and force the barrel of the firearm into an undesirable position, potentially sweeping yourself or others.
Magazine interlocks require that the magazine be in place before the trigger can be pulled. A SERIOUS safety breach when it is necessary to pull the trigger to dismantle the firearm (see Ruger Mark series
The majority of firearm owners follow a few simple rules that help to prevent non-intentional discharge of the firearm.
1) All firearms are presumed loaded. - even after verifying the firearm is 'safe' and unloaded, I will never allow the barrel to sweep across another human being.
2) Keep your finger OFF the trigger until it is time to fire. - Modern firearms rarely, if ever, go off on their own. Something had to depress the trigger first.
3) Know your target and WHAT IS BEYOND. - Those rounds go somewhere. Know where they are going before you pull the trigger.
4) Never point a firearm at anything you don't intend to shoot.
These basic rules have allowed MILLIONS of legal firearm owners to posses firearms without mishap.
Well, when Ralph Nader gets up in front of Congress and lies with the goal of killing babies, people accept it as the truth, after all, how much of a nutjob would you have to be to lie, knowing you lie would kill hundreds of babies?
Airbags were declared "safe" by Congress. The statistics showed Congress was wrong. But it was a case where pi was legislated to be 3, and everyone went along with it. Every objective measure indicates airbags are a failure. But the government can *never* be wrong, so airbags are mandated when they don't help. So we alter reality to fit our opinion. Statistics forged, lies in congressional testimony, and "airbags save lives" is out there. But that doesn't make it true.
If you use your seat belt, you are more likely to be harmed by airbags than helped. Though in the large number of cases where it neither helps nor harms, the numbers are written down in the "helped" category. As they "depowered" airbags, the number of deaths went down, and that was used as proof that they were then more helpful, when it was statistically more like removing them from a percentage of cars.
Airbags were a huge mistake and should never have happened. Same with daytime running lights and the center brake light (both proxies for solving something else, and they did a poor job, DRLs are useful only when the sun is low, so they should be on at those times, and not be low-powered high-beams, as some were, and CHMSL was an issue of reaction time/expectations, and the real "fix" was shown to be body-colored stop lamps, but the designers didn't like that, so we put the looks of cars above our safety, or at least Congress did).
Learn to love Alaska
Yes, you are. When you are hunting, ready to take the shot, you don't want to wait 5s to understand why the firearm is not going off. When I got a good shot at my target, I want to take it NOW, not 2s later, which could be too late. Moreover, how are you forbid policemen to commit evil with their "simple" gun if they want to, or how are you expect a felon to commit another felony by stealing a cop his/her firearm ?
All in all, you only make life harder for law-abiding citizen.
Anyone who shoots himself in the head while trying to demonstrate a safety feature really shouldn't be in the gene pool anyway.
That's a Darwin Award winner for sure.
I would never say that someone like that doofus *deserved* to die, but I do laugh out loud when I hear about them.
No, we can't have different solutions for different circumstances. That is too logical. We hope and pray for dead children so we can push our pet cause further. Nothing moves a cause like dead children. Why not have the cops have the guns that are unsafe, but teathered to them. One of the issues with police firearms is theft of the gun from the cop. More than one place has the guns teathered to the cop. Other places have systems where if a cop falls over, an alarm goes off, signaling an officer down without him having to call anyone. Use those for the cops, to cater for the edge cases for their firearm use. Except for the speed shooting competitions, target shooters are generally tolerant of misfires and delays. So put the more complex safeties on the more casual use weapons. And no safeties on bolt action weapons. If you want to take out the president with 3 bolt action shots in 8 seconds, that's your right, right? After all, that's the purpose of the 2nd Amendment.
Learn to love Alaska
Not going to bother "debating", as I'll just point out the errors you made and let other readers decide if they want to continue paying you any mind.
While expanding gas actually does expel a bullet out of a firearm's barrel, what you're referring to by ejection is the spent cartridge's casing.
Perhaps English is not your first language - that might explain why it appears you erroneously stated that gas is required to fire a loaded firearm.
In America, the word "automatic" is synonymous with "machine gun", which is a firearm that fires and loads itself repeatedly as long as its trigger is depressed and ammunition remains in its magazine. "Semi-automatic" is a self-loading firearm that fires a single round of ammunition per each pull of the trigger. The BATFE's definition (I know, I know) is the one governing America's gun laws and it echos the above explaination.
Unfortunately guns will always kill way more innocent people than the people they save. All the little girls whining about technology getting in the way are forgetting that technology improves. In TFA they talk about a technology that can be set so the gun can be used by up to 50 people. So anyone in a particular platoon or police force group could use the same gun.
An indicator is not needed. The first rule of handling firearms is to treat each one as it's loaded. If I'm handed a weapon that I see the clip removed and the slide is open when the weapon is handed to me, I still look into the chamber to verify for myself the weapon is indeed not loaded and safe for me to handle.
Basic safety is all that's needed.
I grew up in a house where there were firearms everywhere and easily accessed by me if I had wanted to. My father took the route of taking me to the range and teaching me how to use them safely and that when a firearm went off whatever was hit would be dead. He stressed never point it even unloaded at anything you did not intend to shoot and taught me how to clean and maintain them. The result was when playing around the house if I came across a firearm, I left it alone. There was nothing in it I hadn't had dealings with. I never tried to take it outside and play with it, it wasn't after all a toy and I knew that.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The point about lawsuit immunity is as follows...
You make kitchen knives.
Someone stabs a kid to death.
Congrats! you just lost a 10 million dollar lawsuit because your kitchen knife made the murder possible.
Change "kitchen knife" to "hunting rifle" and "stabs" to "shoots"
or, for more fun, "baseball bat" and "bludgeon"
You last fired this gun 59 seconds ago.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If something is wrong with a car and people die the carmaker gets sued. Toyota had some issues recently.
The problem with guns is not rational rural users it is primarily irrational urban users. I don't know (or even know of) anyone who has defended him/herself with a gun. I know friends of friends who have had gun-related accidents or who have committed suicide with guns. Statistically in Canada that is not surprising. Gun-related homicides are pretty much organized criminals killing each other, but lots of people have guns and they are a significant suicide option. Violent crime is pretty low because enforcement pretty much leaves burglary and such to the insurance company but takes home invasions and other violent crime seriously.
Gun ownership without training is completely insane. Why would anyone want this?
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
That's why we need the research. I'm certain that you can't make any weapon that can't kill or seriously injure, but surely weapons can be made that are both more effective and less lethal than current technology, for a price similar to a handgun.
Gun accident rates were at 0.2 per 100,000 population in the U.S. (according to this article, based on 2006 data). If we can arm 10 times as many people while pushing the accidental death rate farther down, I call that a win for the good guys (people who aren't gunning down people in schools and theaters and the workplace and religious institutions).
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
LEOs are private citizens. An important fact that's often overlooked.
Is it not about time the sad sad tossers that are the NRA and it's supporters accepted that guns are not the right thing to have available .
You may as well just spray the entire population with nerve gas and be done with it .
Guns ban them totally get caught with an illegal gun life behind bars .
The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY
Unfortunately, no tool can be more reliable than the person operating it, and there is a wealth of empirical data demonstrating that untrained (ie typical) handgun owners are extremely unreliable.
Handgun proficiency is hard. Anyone who has even moderate experience with firearms knows this, and knows that handgun proficiency declines dramatically under pressure and when the person has not been actively, regularly and recently (as in, the past few weeks to months) training for combat/emergency response. This is why cops are required to maintain proficiency through regular training, and it's easy to find firearms experts who are critical of how low those proficiency standards are.
People who argue for concealed carry and the use of handguns as a defensive tool for untrained or poorly trained individuals who are not required by law to undergo weekly or monthly refreshers are arguing for something that is dangerous, unreliable and virtually useless as a means of defense against attack of any kind.
Again: anyone familiar with the actual proficiency requirements for the effective use of handguns in emergency situations is an advocate for strictly limiting them to highly trained individuals who undergo regular proficiency maintenance. To argue otherwise is simply to declare your ignorance of the vast amount of empirical data that demonstrates just how hard it is to use a handgun reliably.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
So the stat I want to know is how many people are saved by guns vs murdered in cold blood. You talk as if guns are made for defending the innocent against "bad guys". You completely neglect the fact that guns are made to kill people - innocent as well as bad.
Make guns trackable with very stiff fines for an untrackable gun, say 10 yrs max for first offence.
"He killed younglings".
Need Mercedes parts ?
The way I see it, the more guns people have the more likely you are of getting shot.
The real issue with guns isn't more safety regulations or control laws, it's just slapping a band-aid on the real problems: Proper training to use firearms, proper storage of firearms, and a lesser realized but very important factor is mental health.
The main problem with the magazine disconnector is that it turns the mag-release into an off button for the gun. Let that soak in.
In a defensive scenario, I do not want a button that effectively disables my gun. I wouldn't mind it if the bad guy had one though.
I carry a Glock 26 concealed every day. It's like putting my cellphone in my pocket. Just another part of my routine but it's beside the point.
An attacker that can get to my mag release can drop my mag out, but at least I'll have 1 round in the chamber. This isn't the case on a pistol with a magazine disconnector.
As for various electronics... no thank you. I don't want to have to wear a ring to bed and hope that the batteries are charged in my shotgun.
The same goes for a scenario if you've had to shoot a gang of attackers. You find cover and reload before running empty, it's nice to have one in the chamber (knowing you can use it if you fumble the reload) while you insert another magazine.
Now, the idea is to make my gun not work if it's been gripped differently? Stupid. If I have to depend on my gun, I want to know that it'll go "bang" even if I get a funky grip on it in the heat of the moment.
Another problem is that the added complexity/more moving parts makes the pistol harder to disassemble (eg Ruger MKIII).
These additional safeties are just ways to make stupid people feel less of the blame for failing to obey the basic firearms rules.
I'll repeat them:
1. Treat firearms as if they are always loaded.
2. Don't point the muzzle at anything that you don't want to shoot.
3. Keep your finger off of the trigger until you're ready to shoot.
4. Know your target and what's behind and immediately around it.
5. Maintain positive control of your guns at all times. This means a safe, On your hip, or otherwise locked up where kids or robbers can't get to it.
CCW 1. Be aware of your surroundings. Pay attention
CCW 2. Don't do stupid things in stupid places with stupid people
CCW 3. Don't draw your gun unless you're someone has the ability AND intent AND opportunity to do you serious or fatal physical harm.
But watch Movies/TV shows and see how many times the above is blatantly ignored. Yeah, I know it's just TV and it's supposed to be entertaining, but that's all of the firearms experience many people get.
And you talk as if you could wave a magic wand and cause every gun in the world to disappear at once. Guns are a reality, and have been for 400 years. Criminals don't give two fucks about so-called gun control laws, because THEY ARE CRIMINALS. If they get guns, I want a gun too so I can make it a fair fight.
And if I get a gun, you bet your ass that I'm going to learn to store and use it properly, and safely.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
After Hillary Clinton pressured Smith and Wesson to install locks on the revolvers, the consensus is that the lock is a massive failure.
The lock (basically a hole in the side plate) locks the gun until it is unlocked. The problem is that it locks up in firing, irregularly. This is very, very BAD.
Its bad (and dangerous) at the local gun range at the firing line. It is disastrous when say, using your Smith and Wesson to hunt wild boar, or for protection against Bears (basically the .44 magnum or Smith and Wesson .500 models); and bad when using it to say, defend against a break-in in the middle of the night (a lot of people buy revolvers, stored in gun cabinets under the bed for this reason). Even the .38 special models lock up.
The problem is recoil can cause the locking flag to simply move without the key being turned. And that's a mechanical system.
Any digital system is likely to cause the gun to fail, and with catastrophic consequences (and massive lawsuits by say, families of dead policemen whose guns failed in a firefight), simply because of the stresses of recoil, cleaning solvents, and carbon particles in firing a gun.
California mandates a drop safety requirement, a gun for sale (new) cannot fire when dropped onto a concrete floor from ten feet. I like this. There are many ways to meet it (often a titanium, low-mass firing pin) and I like the idea that if I accidentally drop a gun at the firing range for any reason, it won't go off. But safety is hard. Any safety adds can make the gun catastrophically fail to fire with horrible results. Including of course, lawsuits by survivors. Or police agencies.
I agree that proper safety training is a must, and makes the indicator somewhat superfluous. However, it costs nothing to have it there, and if it saves even one life from a careless accident, it's worth it. Why would you argue against having such a simple feature if it adds nothing to the manufacturing cost?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Like many gun laws, it's to keep the riff-raff from getting too powerful.
1. Licensing requires local police chief permission
It's not a "shall-issue" situation, it's completely discretionary. Good luck getting this if you're not well connected. Which class of people tend to be well connected? Hmmm...
2. No automatic weapons made after 1986
That means that the supply of "transferrable" weapons is finite and potentially decreasing. This artificially inflates the costs. Last time I looked, I saw a regular run of the mill M-16 at around 12 grand. Who can afford to drop that kind of cash? Hmmm....
3. Easier to get license through a Trust instead of as an Individual
Pretty obvious who's going to have a trust...
It's really sad because it's a parallel like everything else in society. The wealthy, of course, do what they want. They can afford private schools and private security, while the peons have to settle for 18 minute police response times and gun-free zones. Gun control enthusiasts want to stamp out the ol' Saturday Night Special, when really the small caliber enables low cost materials and that makes guns cheap enough for poor folks who just want to even their odds against the gang bangers.
Oh wait, they do have a massive problem with smoking anything other than tobacco.
And the liberals have a *MASSIVE* problem with you smoking tobacco, even though it's legal. They're the ones who are the driving force behind the smoke-free workplace, smoke-free public open spaces, and now the new healthcare policies where "if you use tobacco (all forms, not just smoking), you can't work here anymore" rules that are popping up in offices and institutions all over the country.
The problem is that lethal / non-lethal is not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. And it correlates pretty closely with ability to stop / incapacitate. In other words, the higher the likelihood of some weapon being effective at stopping an attacker, the more potentially lethal it is.
Guns should have a small memory+clock+battery embedded to store the time of all shots.
That wouldnt make guns directly safer but would prevent and solve many crimes.
Exactly right!
When I took hunter safety years ago we did some of that....it's one of the reasons I like revolvers over semi-autos, since some semi-autos have all the switches/levers on only one side vs. thru-and-thru.
All this stuff would do is get people killed.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Right, but whether magazine disconnects and grip safeties save more lives than they harm isn't settled. There's no good statistics on it either way.
That could save 400 lives a year. So why aren't gunmakers making safer guns?
400 lives a year isn't all that much (assuming that all these deaths come from legally owned guns too). Especially, considering that most of these probably were partly responsible for what killed them. And as usual with such proposals, the costs associated with the cure aren't discussed. Moneywise, there probably is some justification as long as the cost doesn't exceed oh, $2-4 billion a year (roughly the liability payout for accidental deaths in the US court system).
But we also need to consider the deaths that come from guns not working when they need to be working. It is worth noting that guns remain, at least in the US, a legal tool for self-defense and that these are commonly used as such. All these safeguards make it less likely that a gun will work when it is needed.
As sad as children being killed with a gun is, it was just over 1% of accidental deaths in 2009. It would be a much better idea to work to lower the main causes of accidental death, just as: automobiles (41%), suffocation (21%), and drowning (15%). Lessen one of those and you will save many more lives. Nobody will ever notice however, because those types of deaths don't mean big news ratings and newspaper sales.
28 Deaths is a tragedy, 28,000 is a statistic.
When humans get all emotional, all reason goes out the window. That's why with the past shootings there hasn't been much action to restrict guns. Quite the opposite. It has been proven that as more people are trained in, and carry weapons, violent crime goes down. Murders may stay the same, because you can't stop someone who is determined to die, but many muggings, robberies, and rapes get stopped and are never reported to the police.
I've seen police reports where several trained officers fired dozens of rounds at a criminal during a standoff, and none of them hit. Then take your average person scared for his life, adrenaline pumping, hands shaking, firing down the hall at an intruder.
It's precisely when you don't really need more than three rounds that you could live with three rounds: relaxing on the range, target shooting. But then constantly reloading gets very annoying.
It depends on the discipline. There are kinds where you take your time for every round, and then there are thing such as cowboy shooting or IPSC and IDPA shooting, which measure timing as much, if not more, than accuracy.
When the amendment was written, what percentage of firearms were capable of holding more than three shots?
Why does it matter? The amendment doesn't say "right to keep and bear arms, only so long as they remain functionally equivalent to what we know today".
it has to fire, or an innocent person dies.
And what exactly are they innocent of?
Not to mention as we've seen in the Arab Spring uprising,
Which BTW was done without firearms, since Tunisia had the lowest gun-ownership rate in the world when they overthrew their dictator.
Sure mine may have been different (It was given by a former JAG officer) but I do at least one clip of each type whenever possible (the lights out can be tough when you don't have the whole range) on my trips to the range. I mainly bought the gun for the target practice aspect and I find that the point and shoot practice helps me with my normal sight shooting by getting me accustomed to the weapon. We were taught two shots. One to the chest and the second should have a better chance for a head shot because of recoil. With my normal practice sessions, I find that I end up a body shot both of them, but I can understand someone with less practice could not compensate for recoil on the second shot.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Butterfly nets? Large laundry bag? Of course if they are shorter than 3" then you have real problems:
http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?t=77398
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Nothing is worth killing for? I disagree. Hint: it starts with 'fam', and ends with grief counseling.
You mean like the Springfield XD?
Do customers have any say?
I don't buy a gun for "technology" or for the ways it stops itself from doing what it is supposed to do. I buy a gun for reliably doing what it is supposed to do.
That's why improvements such as firing pin or transfer bar safeties have been widely adopted. And why with the Browning Hi Power which has had a magazine safety for decades, the number one modification is to remove said "safety."
Keep your hands off my guns.
sdb
I can't comprehend analogies unless they involve cars. As for the 20 tags/20 guns, I thought that the goal was to register a gun to a user, not sell RFID tags. A single tag could unlock all the user's guns. Maybe he can even have a spare in case one gets lost....oh oh oh....like how you often get two keys when buying a car....but thats only for one car....perhaps you can shoot me back a better car analogy?
Sell the safety technologies at a premium at first, high enough that it covers the costs. The nanny do-gooders (who push for all this safety stuff) will pay almost any price for them. I mean, no price is too high for them if it means saving just one more life, right? Think of the children!
From there, you can either slowly lower prices so more people can afford them, or you go the Apple route and keep it as a premium item and a status symbol. Oh of course a lot of poor people will have to go without, but just like how nobody cries over poor people not getting iPhones, nobody's gonna mind a few poor people have to make do with less safe guns (and nobody's gonna mind a few poor people dying from them... hey it'll mean less poor people around!)
> The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY
If reliability was the only feature anyone ever wanted, everyone would be using Linux. They aren't.
Linux is a powerful tool for fairly advanced users. Guns are the same way. If you want to get more guns out there, then you need guns suited for a NOVICE.
The simple fact of the matter is there are people out there who WANT guns, but CAN'T have them. This could be for any number of reasons, but the most popular ones are "the wife" and "having kids". If a gun manufacturer wants to sell guns to families, then they need a gun that deals with the family man's most common fears.
I flip the safety off and squeeze the trigger it works it needs no improvement.
Got Code?
Government employees that take people's children should be murdered.
It is not your right and you should die.
The only time a person can take a child is when a man rapes a little gil, in that case the man keeps the girl and pays the father. Deut 22 28-29.
Death to women's rights.
Down with the feminist culture and society. (Since victorian times)
Empire of the whore.
I take it you've never heard of Libya or Syria? Not saying that in some situations a peaceful revolution can't be successful, but at the same time I don't believe it's the only means of doing so. American history shows that both ways can be successful, but it really depends on the leader.
So.. You almost shot a guy in the face when you were a kid and consider that to be 'responsible'?
Seriously, what do you think you would have done if the guy actually came into your house and proceeded towards your kitchen to drink water and/or rob your house?
Do you really believe calling 911 and running out the back of your house would have been worse?
I was in canada for a few years, I watched a guy pull out his pistol and show it to me (I don't know if this was legal). He did target shooting and speed courses, he explained to me that he always had to have the trigger lock on it while at home. When he wanted to go to the range, he had to call up the range warden to tell him he was coming, drive straight there and straight back after he was done. If he decided to pick up some groceries on the way back and got caught he would end up in jail. About 3 months previous to this about 7 RCMP's died because a guy shot them with an assault rife and a shotgun, these types of guns were not legal so how did this happen? What happens to the average joe when someone like this breaks into his house and he has to get his key out to unlock his gun? You will never be able to eliminate bad people without causing some serious collateral damage to freedom.
A defensive weapon has to work every single time.
Exactly, I would never own a weapon that might decide not to fire simply because I burned myself on the BBQ last night and I'm "not holding it right". If I ever have to draw down on someone it means they are inside my house and my families and my lives are in dire jeopardy.
As always, it's the simple common-sense reasons and not some crypto-fascist evil corporate gunmaker conspiracy to control the population by putting "murder machines" into the hands of psychopaths. Occam's Razor.
A gun that only fires it if recognizes your grip? um, so when you get injured trying to fight-off a thug before finally resorting to the gun, and your throbbing/bleeding hand makes you hold the thing a little differently - oooops! the thing won't fire!
A gun that indicates whether it's loaded or there's a round in the chamber? dumb. Many Americans have held home invaders, would-be rapists or muggers, etc at bay with unloaded guns (this is safer than keeping the weapon in the nightstand in a fully-loaded and chambered state, and the doubt is often enough to stop a bad guy)
A gun that only fires for the registered owner? Stupid. Somebody breaks into your house, knocks you down, and - oh, wait - your gun won't fire when your wife needs it!
Many of these stupid schemes to make a machine NOT do the very thing it's intended to do just add cost and extra risk, while often being offered by some inventor who hopes lawmakers will mandate his new invention (so he can get rich from the royalties every gun maker will be ordered to pay). Just imagine all the patent litigation and all the royalty checks! Just the added IP activity our society so-desperately needs, right? These things are then also waved before a gullible public by politicians whose real goal (not a conspiracy, many are on-the record for bans/gun-siezures) is tighter gun control (often by either making guns too expensive or so useless that most won't buy them, or by convincing voters that gun makers are evil (since it's obvious that it they were good else they'd already be including the "features"))
These things are not in current guns because most gun buyers are not dumb enough to want to buy a gun that costs more in exchange for crippled functionality - it's just that simple.
The entire thing's a distraction. Your'e supposed to notice the things and not notice your rights shrinking while the rights of crazy/evil people are expanded. Americans used to be able to own fully-automatic machine guns (before congress made them illegal for law-abiding citizens in response to misuse by criminal gangs in the 1930's) and up until much more-recently, many American boys used to carry guns to school (some schools in rural areas had gun clubs, and some boys went hunting before or after school). We NEVER used to have mass-shootings in schools. Before the 1980's we used to keep lunatics in asylums (the ACLU won a legal fight to end that) and it used to be that a thug did not KNOW that a school was an easy place for a massacre ... until the morons in government passed a bunch of "gun-free-zone" laws. We did not need armed school employees (the simple doubt about whether they MIGHT be armed was marginally deterrent) but since all those laws passed everybody KNOWS a school is a place where nobody will shoot back. There are many complex reasons for the massacres of the past few years, but stupidly constructed and rapidly passed laws are not the solution. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US and many millions of "violent video games" and DVDs of "action movies", but only a tiny number of massacres; in any politics-free zone, the obvious point would be that none of these physical items make a 99.999% of the population commit murder; these physical objects are not the common thread. Only an evil bastard opportunist who is grinding some other axe would try to penalize all the law-abiding people by depriving them of their rights, while refusing to go after the tiny screwed-up minority who are the actual common denominator in all these crimes - and wrap it all in the shroud of a bunch of dead children.
Is there anybody on this site who does not know that within the next decade or two we will all be able to design and 3D-print any sort of firearm we can imagine???
So-called "gun control" is a fantasy of two groups: left-wing politicians and activists who are living in the 1960's, and totalitarian governments (how shocking is it that Putin and China have both chimed-in on the subject?) who believe that they will be able to control their populations by controlling access to firearms (a scheme that used to work) while stupidly imagining they will be able to have modern competitive economies without rapid prototyping systems.
We have a very short time to solve the real problem: how do we deal with the small portion of any population who either refuses, or is incapable of, controlling it's own behavior.
Just consider the fact that you do not _need_ a gun, at least not in the civilized world. You'd only have a gun to hunt or for fun, in either case you do not have to worry about accidentally not being able to fire it because of a dead battery.
How is a device designed for saving lives, but accidentally killing someone _similar_ to a device designs for killing people (or living things, anyways), but with some added safety features? Apples and oranges ...
There is no such thing as an accidental discharge with modern firearms. They are NDs (Negligent Discharge). If a round is fired, it's because you pulled the trigger.
We've had the proper tools to mitigate the risk of ND for years, courtesy of the late Col(R) Jeff Cooper: the four rules. If someone gets hurt, you violated AT LEAST two of the four.
GG
We could give reliable stun guns to every teacher, and train them, without fear that students would get killed due to negligence.
Why do people think that these weapons are non-lethal? Please read:
http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2009/01/4188/first-study-test-real-world-effects-stun-gun-use-raises-questions-abo
Just another day in Paradise
That is why you get a pump shotgun for home protection. The sound of the cocking of a pump action (geez, that looks bad) will chase most folks away. And as long as you get a shotgun with a large spread (larger diameter or shorter barrel), you'll not have to aim so well.
http://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/best-gun-for-home-defense/
Highly recommend this article to anyone thinking that a shotgun is the best home defense weapon. Some quick points from the article:
The pattern from a shotgun at short range isn't much larger than the barrel, making you just as likely to miss as with a pistol or rifle.
The capacity of most shotguns is tiny (typically 4+1) in comparison to many handguns.
Typically, smaller people may have trouble handling the kick from a suitable size shotgun...12 gauge
In close quarters, your opponent may be able to push the barrel out of the way...much more difficult to do with a handgun.
Just another day in Paradise
I see this bullshit posted so frequently that I have to respond.
Please remember that the military is made up of people who volunteered. Except in the event of an all out civil war, they are never going to be used against our own civilians. Even if they were ordered to, I think you'd find that most would disobey that kind of order. And for the record, YOU are not important enough for the government to waste a $60-$70k Hellfire missile on. The history of war over the last hundred years has shown how much damage individuals can do to well armed armies...please go read and learn something.
Just another day in Paradise
Yes.
I would have shot and tried to kill a home invader. Same as I would do today.
I do not have to retreat inside my home, and that's the case in most states.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Which, if you've not shot one, is a fine weapon. I like it a lot better than any of the Glocks. I used the 9mm XDm on my CHL qualifying exam.
I'm a fan of the XDm line but I don't own one because I also wanted a manual safety/decocker similar to the H&K USPs or the Beretta 92's.
Can you not trust your kids to be as responsible?
Responsible enough to threaten a homeless man with a loaded gun? Hopefully not...
When humans get all emotional, all reason goes out the window.
This. I wish we had it built into the Constitution that Congress was banned from passing (or even debating) any legislation for 60 days after any national tragedy.
If my child was alone at home, and some unknown man wanted entry? Uh, yes?
Ideally, I'd prefer the person would leave when asked.
If not, I hope a call to 911 would work out.
If not, I hope my child would successfully defend themselves IF the person entered the house against person.
Seriously, you think it's not responsible ABLE to defend himself or herself from an unknown guy attempting entry while no adult is home? Thankfully, and usually it is the case, the guy left and nothing further happened. It could have been different. If it was guaranteed that the guy only wanted water, or to loot the place, maybe it wouldn't warrant even potential lethal force. But you have NO idea what the intentions are of someone breaking into your house. Could be just to steal stuff. Could be to steal stuff... That happened to turn into rape and torture. It can and does happen. Too often. Go look up rape statistics, and then tell me it was not responsible.
"What chance do you really think a consumer-legal weapon will have against the US armed forces?"
I was in the US military. I spent most of my time in Eastern Europe during the whole Balkans thing. I was in the military during Iraqi and Afghani invasions.
By themselves? Not much. In a prolonged insurgent war? Quite a bit. The average Iraqi marksman is... subpar. However, I am aware that tens of thousand of civilians here in the US are significantly better shots than 99.99% of US military service folks. Ten thousand deer rifles, used by folks that really know how to them and have a high level of dedication, could wipe out a fair part of the operational and forward support structures of military. But more realistically, grind down the will to fight. You'd end up with Iraq. Massively armored turtles (FOBs), with limited operations in the villages and towns. Bottlenecks the invasion force.
OTOH, it'd be easy to trump insurgents with only small arms. If the aggressor is willing to accept civilian casualties at near genocidal rates. Starvation or massive bombardment of civilian population. Biafra comes to mind.
Insurgent warfare is not to win. It's to not lose, and hopefully you outlast the other guy's will.
Of course, if elements of the US military revolt or mutiny, things get quite a bit more interesting. How do you handle an insurgency with ballistic missile submarines, with hunter-killer escorts? Or control of the drone networks is controlled by the insurgents? What if the NSA goes rebel? Heck, what if the majority of upper tier technicians at the telecoms side with the insurgents? Ideally, firearms are like nuclear weapons, best as deterrents. Enough to give the other guy a pause and keep things from getting out of hand. If civilian ownership of firearms gives US politicians even a moment of pause and an ounce of caution, they more than paid for themselves.
And that is why you are considered a barbarian.
Adding complexity certainly does make economic sense.
More people employed to make them.
More built in obsolescence for more repeat sales through software "upgrades" and "performance enhancements".
More people employed to fix them when they break.
More people employed to plug the holes in peoples' faces when they look down the barrel to see why they're not working and go off unprompted.
All on top of the existing funeral directors, lawyers, and arms manufacturers.
Etc.
The NRA is demanding armed guards in every school in the nation. http://news.yahoo.com/nra-calls-armed-police-officer-every-school-162851713.html
But as experience in Afghanistan proves, you cannot always trust those armed guards. A bad guy with a desire to gain infamous immortality? Get a job as one of those "Good Guy" armed guards. Hang out for year or so, and set your own record.
So it is inevetible, we need to have children carry their own heat. This will be a big growth industry. I can forsee pink Hello Kitty semi auto rifles for the little girls, and a whole range of GI Joe action assault rifles for the little boys.
All black humor aside, do we really think that this is a path to go down? You really won't be able to stop a determined assailant with an assault rifle and one armed offecer. You would need multiple guards at every ingress/egress point. You would need windowless buildings with solid metal doors on all entrances and exits. A prison essentially. We would need to turn our schools into prisons.
And all this because some folks thing that banning assault weapons is somehow a bad thing? And that the answer is a gun version of the old Soviet-American arms race? Will thse folks support the inevetible tax increases?
Make no mistake, banning assault weapons will not put an end to school or other shootings. Probably nothing will, and certainly 1 armed officer at each school won't. What it would do is first, make it a little more difficult for the crazies to be so efficient, and then if you saw someone wallking down the street with their AR-15, you would know that are a bad guy, and not just on their way to a Tea Party rally.
As a gun owner, I think we must move past the knee jerk reaction whenever there is any mention of firearms of dubious public use being banned, of "Jack booted thugs" (the NRA's words, not mine) breaking into your house, confisticating your guns and ammo, and then sending you off to a FEMA concentration camp. It doesn't follow.
People should be able to own rifles and sidearms, and use them for hunting and self protection. A Bushmaster? Not quite as much.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The 1911 is anything but reliable. They have problems with primarily extractor tension and feedway stoppages. They have all sorts of safeties in the way of you pulling the trigger. They're very complex guns. They're popular because they have excellent triggers, have a lot of inherent accuracy, and are very pretty to look at. Other than that, I agree.
I think that is extra safe, even when the safety is off.
Amen. Preach it son.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You of course realize that means there would be no Patriot Act right now?
What are you, some sore of terrorist?
Let's see those papers citizen!
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Treating every weapon as if it were loaded is a safety rule. That's rather different than a chamber indicator, which serves a QOL function for the operator. The indicator isnt meant to replace the safety rule, and it shouldnt. But the PPK style indicator is a classic ease of use function that makes the user's life a little easier, say in the case of a mis-feed or jam when the round doesnt load.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Perhaps randomly shooting in the dark in your own home when you're too tired to aim isn't such a smart idea.
Very little. That's an argument against the three-shot weapon idea, no?
If simulations (and common sense) show that in Government-vs-People, People will lose, then do something to the power of one or both sides. Repeat until projected outcome is that People will win.
What's funny is that (over-simplifying) Democrats propose making the People side weaker in that contest ("gun control"), and Republicans propose making the Government side stronger (strong "defense"). I think both of these folks totally misinterpreted my "do something to the power of one or both sides" suggestion, above. *facepalm* It's almost as though they're not on our side.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Lots of countries have nuclear weapons. Should I be able to own my own nukes if I don't want to rely on my government's nukes to protect me? If not, why?
Doesn't matter really what I'm considered...as long as I'm the one left still standing, breathing and able to reproduce (optional).
If it is between my life and ANY other human life on this planet, MY life is always the most important to me.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
lol
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
This should get modded up. A lot.
I would submit that the reliability of brakes on cars is far more important to the public than the reliability of guns, but that has not prevented anti-lock brakes, which are clearly more complex than drum brakes.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Admire the naivette and ingenuity... Guns had only one purpose: make harm. Do you want safety from guns? Do not allow guns. Period. Simplier solution ever. It works.
I'd rather accidentally shoot my daughter with a taser when she sneaks in after curfew and watch her crap her pants than shoot her with a pistol and watch her bleed out.
And I'd rather my daughter have the means to at least have a chance of defending herself if she's someday dragged into an alley by gang rapists / murderers. Self-defense is a basic human right.
My other UID is three digits.
Soon enough all the gun owners and wanna-be gun owners are properly dead, and the world is a safer place. The gun-shop owners can now shoot themselves and their family and children. Send their estates to the victims of gun crime.
Simple gun safety!
What? Are you protesting that it's your constitutional right to bear arms? So fucking what - it's too fucking dangerous to let civilians have guns. Sheesh, don't you get it yet?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
All my handguns do have grip safeties and disconnects if the magazines are removed, as does my 55 year old semiautomatic 30-06 Many firearms have included these devices for many years contrary to the content of many articles touting the devices, however they do not have the very expensive "smart gun tech" Mine are always loaded and all should be assumed to be so until proven otherwise. Otherwise Darwin's law becomes paramount.
Doesn't matter really what I'm considered...as long as I'm the one left still standing, breathing and able to reproduce (optional).
That is exactly what a barbarian would say.
If it is between my life and ANY other human life on this planet, MY life is always the most important to me.
You assume the 'home invader' was going to kill you, which according to statistics (and even more so according to your story) is really unlikely (in the US): http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/vdhb.pdf
About 24,000 burglaries yearly lead to serious injury, which is 8.5% of all violent burglaries and 0.6% of all burglaries. And I'm pretty sure things like a broken arm or serious concussion are counted as serious injuries, but this is speculation, of course.
By the way, I do agree on choosing ones' own life over that of another (barring relatives), but I also strongly believe in a civilized society and a civilized judicial and enforcement system. I.e. no vigilantism.
Just take away the bullets. A gun collector buys guns for what purpose. For the technology. Do not allow automatic weapon type bullets into the hands of gun owners, but do allow the bullets to be available at gun ranges. Count the shells to insure all bullets are accounted for.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Is it possible to have guns that are electronically disabled in 'safe zones' ie. schools, malls, movie theatres etc.. ? My wife says if people quote the 2nd amendment as if it was handed down from the almighty, they should also only be allowed those guns prevalent at the time the amendment was written! I was wondering if it's poosible to make guns that only stun 'whoever' they hit. So enough to knock out a deer for an hour but then they wake up.. Or are hunters too sqeamish to actually take a knife to bambi's throat ? I think people who own guns by definition aren't the kind of people who should own one. There are no guarantees in life. If someone breaks into your house, they most likely are looking for money and you don't want to start a shooting match with them, 'cos probably you'll die not them ! ALL THE NRA CARES ABOUT IS SELLING MORE GUNS, NOTHING ELSE.. save your money..
Self defense isn't about vigilantism, there's a 45.5% chance if you are confronted by a stranger in your home he will be armed, why shouldn't you be as well? Yes 3/4ths of the time he's just going to run away and not mess with you when he realizes you're home. In that instance no you're absolutely right shooting him would be wrong. If he doesn't run away there's a very high likely hood that he will be armed himself. Why don't you dilute your numbers even further since that seems to be your goal. with 114,761,359 households in America that means only 3% were burglarized, door locks must be useless then right? or look at it this way. There were 266,560 thousand people in that study who were assaulted, or raped in their homes. That is absolutely barbaric and those people absolutely have the right to protect themselves. You are presumably not one of those people so I doubt you know what it's like to be victimized like that. I've met a great number of the people doing the murdering raping and robbing and I absolutely will use a firearm, or whatever means available to protect myself from them. Now I will use appropriate levels of force. I wouldn't shoot someone in the face for knocking on my car window begging for money when I stop at a red light. But if someone smashed in my window or opened my car door at an intersection they are quite likely to get a face full of pepper spray, and if they persist beyond that I will most likely end them.
No, it isn't.
Your wife is wrong, for two reasons: First, nobody "quotes the 2nd Amendment as if it was handed down from the almighty" - that's a strawman argument. Second, the amendment says "arms", not "muskets" or "cannons". It's perfectly clear that it means weapons in general, not any particular type of weapon. And please don't suggest that the educated men who wrote the Constitution failed to realize that new types of weapons would be developed in the future.
It is, sort of (tasers). And those have their place, but they are for different situations than "real" guns.
Why would you want to do that?
Given that hunters are perfectly happy to clean and dress the carcass, it's a safe bet that they aren't squeamish about it at all. But what are you hoping to accomplish here? It seems like you're trying to engage in emotional blackmail against hunters for some reason.
You're objectively wrong.
Which is exactly why gun ownership is legitimate. There is no guarantee that you will never need to defend yourself, nor that other people will always be available to defend you.
But you said it yourself: "there are no guarantees". If you catch someone breaking into your house, you shouldn't assume anything about why they're there until the situation is defused. Ideally this will not involve violence, but if it does then you want yourself, not him, to be the one successfully applying it.
And on what basis do you make that claim? Particularly since you've clearly demonstrated you know nothing about either guns or gunfights?
The NRA doesn't sell guns.
Saving your money isn't mutually exclusive with owning weapons.
Self defense isn't about vigilantism, there's a 45.5% chance if you are confronted by a stranger in your home he will be armed
No there's not. That percentage is for what turned out to be violent burglaries. Only in ~35,000 of ~1,000,000 burglaries (~3,5%) committed by a stranger, a weapon was present.
Yes 3/4ths of the time he's just going to run away and not mess with you when he realizes you're home. In that instance no you're absolutely right shooting him would be wrong. If he doesn't run away there's a very high likely hood that he will be armed himself.
No there's not. That is to say: according to which numbers?
Why don't you dilute your numbers even further since that seems to be your goal. with 114,761,359 households in America that means only 3% were burglarized, door locks must be useless then right?
No, in fact, most of that percentage (~2 percent points) were burglaries into houses with unlocked doors or windows. Locking doors and windows could very well prevent a lot of burglaries. But then again, who locks their doors during the day?
There were 266,560 thousand people in that study who were assaulted, or raped in their homes.
Yes, most of them by relatives, ex-lovers and other people known to them. Also note that the number includes everybody who was punched firmly in the arm or kicked in the balls during the burglary.
That is absolutely barbaric and those people absolutely have the right to protect themselves. You are presumably not one of those people so I doubt you know what it's like to be victimized like that. I've met a great number of the people doing the murdering raping and robbing and I absolutely will use a firearm, or whatever means available to protect myself from them. Now I will use appropriate levels of force. I wouldn't shoot someone in the face for knocking on my car window begging for money when I stop at a red light. But if someone smashed in my window or opened my car door at an intersection they are quite likely to get a face full of pepper spray, and if they persist beyond that I will most likely end them.
I completely agree with this behaviour. Well, up until the "if pepperspray doesn't work, I'll kill him."
Why not just shoot him in the knee? Or the shoulder or the lungs or the gut. I mean.. Does it have escalate that quickly?
No there's not. That percentage is for what turned out to be violent burglaries. Only in ~35,000 of ~1,000,000 burglaries (~3,5%) committed by a stranger, a weapon was present.
You keep quoting those numbers as total burglaries and ignoring that I'm saying the burglaries where they confronted someone in their home. I'm not likely to be in a situation where I would be defending myself from a burglar when I'm not even there. However the numbers in the report you posted show that in 45.5% of the burglaries where they were confronted by a stranger in their home that stranger was in fact armed.
I completely agree with this behaviour. Well, up until the "if pepperspray doesn't work, I'll kill him." Why not just shoot him in the knee? Or the shoulder or the lungs or the gut. I mean.. Does it have escalate that quickly?
Because when I qualified with a weapon at the academy I was trained to aim for center mass. It's a larger target. Lungs are a kill shot, gut is an awful kill shot. Aim for the head, or knee or arm and your bullet is likely to go off somewhere else and kill an innocent. Center mass is the target. Guns are lethal force no matter where you shoot and must be justified as such (and treated as such) If I'm shooting someone then lethal force is called for. Anti-gunners like yourself seem to think people properly trained in gun use are going to pull guns outside of lethal force situations, you don't and it's a felony to do such. Most states you can get charged for brandishing even if you don't fire a round. The pepper spray I carry if someone keeps coming at me after being hit with it it means he's on drugs most likely and lethal force very much would be warranted. I would fire at center mass until he ceases the actions that lead to my use of deadly force. If it warrants deadly force then you use deadly force. If it doesn't warrant deadly force you don't cripple a guy for life, that's still deadly force and you would end up charged with attempted murder.
However the numbers in the report you posted show that in 45.5% of the burglaries where they were confronted by a stranger in their home that stranger was in fact armed.
Nope. Look again. Violent burglaries only. Whatever total you use, the absolute figure of ~35,000 burglaries in which someone was confronted with a weapon (not even a firearm) will not change.
Lungs are a kill shot, gut is an awful kill shot.
No, they're not: http://www.shootingvoodoo.com/index.php/articles/gunshot_wounds_and_you/
Mortality rates from being hit in a single organ in the gut are as low as 4%.
Anti-gunners like yourself seem to think people properly trained in gun use are going to pull guns outside of lethal force situations, you don't and it's a felony to do such.
Are you kidding me? You were the one who said: "But if someone smashed in my window or opened my car door at an intersection they are quite likely to get a face full of pepper spray, and if they persist beyond that I will most likely end them."
Adding something along the lines of 'if he doesn't stop when pepper sprayed, he's on drugs, so killing him is fine' doesn't really help your case.
You can pin the 'anti-gunner' misconceptions on your own cowboyspeak, buddy.
If it doesn't warrant deadly force you don't cripple a guy for life, that's still deadly force and you would end up charged with attempted murder.
No, it doesn't and no, you wouldn't. What the hell makes you think that deliberately shooting someone in the knee isn't different from deliberately shooting someone in the face?
Nope. Look again. Violent burglaries only. Whatever total you use, the absolute figure of ~35,000 burglaries in which someone was confronted with a weapon (not even a firearm) will not change.
Confronted by a stranger implies violence, you need to learn to read what you're responding to. If they aren't confronting you they're running away and any level of force would likely be unwarranted. If you're using any form of physical force when they're running away you'll likely end up in prison yourself.
No, they're not: http://www.shootingvoodoo.com/index.php/articles/gunshot_wounds_and_you/ [shootingvoodoo.com] Mortality rates from being hit in a single organ in the gut are as low as 4%.
Hit someone in the liver they'll drop dead almost instantly. Hit them in the lungs they'll drown in their own blood. Hit them in the intestines and they might survive but they'll spend a lot of time in the hospital and then the rest of their life with a colostomy bag. Shooting someone when the situation does not call for deadly force is a horrible thing to do why do you keep insisting people do that?
Are you kidding me? You were the one who said: "But if someone smashed in my window or opened my car door at an intersection they are quite likely to get a face full of pepper spray, and if they persist beyond that I will most likely end them."
So someone smashes in your door, you pepper spray them and they charge at you... you don't think killing them is appropriate level of force?
Adding something along the lines of 'if he doesn't stop when pepper sprayed, he's on drugs, so killing him is fine' doesn't really help your case.
Killing him wouldn't be ideal but to me my life is more valuable than his life as such I would end it. That doesn't make me a barbarian to value my own life above someone trying to hurt me. That makes me human.
No, it doesn't and no, you wouldn't. What the hell makes you think that deliberately shooting someone in the knee isn't different from deliberately shooting someone in the face?
Yes busting someones knees is deadly force. You will go to jail if you shoot someone in the knee and the situation does not call for deadly force. That is in the law. Take a class on concealed carry or get a job in law enforcement, they'll tell you right away. I would not shoot someone in the knee if the situation did not call for deadly force, to do otherwise is barbaric. The bottom line is if you shoot someone you must intend to kill them. You do not shoot someone in the knees, you do not shoot someone in the gut thinking "well this will stop him without killing him." Either deadly force is justified or you don't use a firearm. A small child all alone with a stranger breaking down his door is justified deadly force. It's called disparity of force. You absolutely cannot use a firearm if the situation does not call for deadly force. In fact in training academy we were told not to even use intermediate weapons if it didn't justify deadly force. Intentionally breaking bones whether with a firearm or intermediate weapon or just with your bare hands is deadly force. ANY blows to the head are considered deadly force. That means if you punch someone in the face legally you may as well have just shot them. You can't shoot someone in the knees and say "well it wasn't deadly force because he lived!" people get shot in the head and live. I am saying I would shoot someone if it called for deadly force. I'm not saying I would shoot someone to end any confrontation, just those that call for deadly force. At that point shooting them in the knee caps would be against my training and likely would end up getting me in hot water in court "why didn't you follow your training?" "uhh well I didnt want to kill him" "So then was deadly force not warranted?"
Confronted by a stranger implies violence, you need to learn to read what you're responding to
Lol. You should really look at that percentage of 45.5% you quoted and what it stands for.
I'll spell it out one last time. There were an average of ~266,000 burglaries in which violence was involved. In a subset of those cases, the burglar was a stranger (~74,000 cases). In a subset of those cases, the 'burglar' had a weapon (~35,000 cases). In a subset of those cases, it was a firearm (~17,000 cases).
It's not that hard, really. Look at page 10 of the linked pdf. Take your time.
Hit someone in the liver they'll drop dead almost instantly. Hit them in the lungs they'll drown in their own blood.
You have a hard time with understanding facts and statistics, don't you? Read the page I linked again or provide your own sources. Right now, you're just babbling.
So someone smashes in your door, you pepper spray them and they charge at you... you don't think killing them is appropriate level of force?
What you were replying to was proving that you yourself are responsible for people thinking you'll whip out your gun at the first sign of trouble, but whatever.
No, I do not think that killing them is an appropriate level of force. Seriously, I could stop a guy with pepper spray in his eyes with one hand. I mean, it's a different story if he has a weapon, but even then, I'd shoot to incapacitate, not kill.
You can't shoot someone in the knees and say "well it wasn't deadly force because he lived!" people get shot in the head and live.
I read up on the US definition of deadly force and it is apparently as black and white is you say it to be. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that if you are found to have used deadly force erroneously, it makes a difference whether the assailant died and whether you intended to kill him.
If not, it should. Cops over here are instructed to attempt to incapacitate rather than kill when shooting.
Lol. You should really look at that percentage of 45.5% you quoted and what it stands for. I'll spell it out one last time. There were an average of ~266,000 burglaries in which violence was involved. In a subset of those cases, the burglar was a stranger (~74,000 cases). In a subset of those cases, the 'burglar' had a weapon (~35,000 cases). In a subset of those cases, it was a firearm (~17,000 cases). It's not that hard, really. Look at page 10 of the linked pdf. Take your time.
So what you're saying is in 45.5% of the cases where the burglar was a stranger and confronted them he had a weapon. exactly what I said (actually your random numbers comes out to 47% but they aren't the numbers in the pdf so we'll go with 45.5% like I and the pdf said)
You have a hard time with understanding facts and statistics, don't you? Read the page I linked again or provide your own sources. Right now, you're just babbling.
The section of the organ that says single organ is Factors Affecting Mortality and Morbidity in Patients with Abdominal Gunshot Wounds Adesanya A single organ hit to the abdomen is likely to be the intestine which yeah wont kill you but will ruin your life even if it doesn't kill you. Your lungs aren't in the abdomen and a liver shot is less likely but will kill you very fast. There's a lot of blood in your liver I've seen animals die faster from a liver shot than from a head shot. Liver shots kill instantly.
What you were replying to was proving that you yourself are responsible for people thinking you'll whip out your gun at the first sign of trouble, but whatever. No, I do not think that killing them is an appropriate level of force. Seriously, I could stop a guy with pepper spray in his eyes with one hand. I mean, it's a different story if he has a weapon, but even then, I'd shoot to incapacitate, not kill.
I've had people think that and then when they're in cuffs on the ground after pepper spraying me they change their tune fast. Pepper spray is annoying but it doesn't stop everyone
If not, it should. Cops over here are instructed to attempt to incapacitate rather than kill when shooting.
No officer is instructed to shoot to kill, they are instructed to shoot to stop, or shoot to disable (it varies depending on the local laws.) However they are always trained to only shoot if killing is justifiable.
Lol. You should really look at that percentage of 45.5% you quoted and what it stands for.
I'll spell it out one last time. There were an average of ~266,000 burglaries in which violence was involved. In a subset of those cases, the burglar was a stranger (~74,000 cases). In a subset of those cases, the 'burglar' had a weapon (~35,000 cases). In a subset of those cases, it was a firearm (~17,000 cases).
It's not that hard, really. Look at page 10 of the linked pdf. Take your time.
So what you're saying is in 45.5% of the cases where the burglar was a stranger and confronted them he had a weapon. exactly what I said (actually your random numbers comes out to 47% but they aren't the numbers in the pdf so we'll go with 45.5% like I and the pdf said)
Don't be an idiot. Look at page 10 of the pdf. Closely. Reread the above. Slowly.
You have a hard time with understanding facts and statistics, don't you? Read the page I linked again or provide your own sources. Right now, you're just babbling.
The section of the organ that says single organ is Factors Affecting Mortality and Morbidity in Patients with Abdominal Gunshot Wounds Adesanya
A single organ hit to the abdomen is likely to be the intestine which yeah wont kill you but will ruin your life even if it doesn't kill you. Your lungs aren't in the abdomen and a liver shot is less likely but will kill you very fast. There's a lot of blood in your liver I've seen animals die faster from a liver shot than from a head shot. Liver shots kill instantly.
Sources?
"None."
The linked percentages do not lie.
Case closed.
What you were replying to was proving that you yourself are responsible for people thinking you'll whip out your gun at the first sign of trouble, but whatever.
No, I do not think that killing them is an appropriate level of force. Seriously, I could stop a guy with pepper spray in his eyes with one hand. I mean, it's a different story if he has a weapon, but even then, I'd shoot to incapacitate, not kill.
I've had people think that and then when they're in cuffs on the ground after pepper spraying me they change their tune fast. Pepper spray is annoying but it doesn't stop everyone
Let me guess. They tried to pepper spray you in the balls?
If not, it should. Cops over here are instructed to attempt to incapacitate rather than kill when shooting.
No officer is instructed to shoot to kill, they are instructed to shoot to stop, or shoot to disable (it varies depending on the local laws.) However they are always trained to only shoot if killing is justifiable.
Yes, we already agreed on that. You have not yet indicated whether you would follow those guidelines when faced with a 'home invader'. If I recall correctly, shooting him in the knees would be 'barbaric' and the next action after trying pepper spray is to 'end him'.
Don't be an idiot. Look at page 10 of the pdf. Closely. Reread the above. Slowly.
reread what I said, in 45.5% of the instances where someone was confronted by a stranger (Read VIOLENCE) in their own home the stranger was armed, exactly as the pdf says.
Sources? "None." The linked percentages do not lie. Case closed.
Source is your own linked percentages. It specifies abdomen shots, not torso shots which excludes heart and lungs. The report you quoted does not specify single organ and any organ it just says singe organ. A liver shot is way different from a intestine shot.
Let me guess. They tried to pepper spray you in the balls?
Pepper spraying in the balls? Where are you getting this shit? In case you haven't figured it out I was an officer of the law (Got fed up with supervisors and left to pursue other higher paying careers. So In academy and out in the real world in the face. I'm one of those lucky bastards with a very high tolerance for both OC and CS.
Yes, we already agreed on that. You have not yet indicated whether you would follow those guidelines when faced with a 'home invader'. If I recall correctly, shooting him in the knees would be 'barbaric' and the next action after trying pepper spray is to 'end him'.
Yes if lesser degrees of force have failed, ending him would be the next step. You don't knee cap him and risk hitting someone else (knee caps are way smaller targets than center mass in most instances). The reason you aim for center mass is as much about effectively ending the threat as it is not being a moron and injuring someone else. You end the threat and move on with your life, you don't put targets beyond the threat at risk just so you can cripple someone for life.
confronted by a stranger (Read VIOLENCE)
So you really are an idiot. Try a course in reading comprehension.
Source is your own linked percentages. It specifies abdomen shots, not torso shots which excludes heart and lungs. The report you quoted does not specify single organ and any organ it just says singe organ. A liver shot is way different from a intestine shot.
"gut is an awful kill shot", AC, 23rd december.
Woops.
Let me guess. They tried to pepper spray you in the balls?
Pepper spraying in the balls? Where are you getting this shit? In case you haven't figured it out I was an officer of the law (Got fed up with supervisors and left to pursue other higher paying careers. So In academy and out in the real world in the face. I'm one of those lucky bastards with a very high tolerance for both OC and CS.
I'll be honest with you, I am not aware of anybody that does not have problems seeing for several seconds when pepper sprayed in the eyes. I'd really have to see some statistics on how probable it is that one would meet someone with such capabilities. That, or the pepper spray you bested was actually deodorant.
Yes if lesser degrees of force have failed, ending him would be the next step. You don't knee cap him and risk hitting someone else (knee caps are way smaller targets than center mass in most instances). The reason you aim for center mass is as much about effectively ending the threat as it is not being a moron and injuring someone else. You end the threat and move on with your life, you don't put targets beyond the threat at risk just so you can cripple someone for life.
So you see the 'shoot to incapacitate' directive as pretty much irrelevant and equal to 'just shoot the fucking bastard'? Nice. You're a great cop.
Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that there are some (if not many) situations where you need to aim for the biggest target. When the guy is 3 feet away however, you'd have to be a really lousy fucking shot if center mass was the only part you could hit.
So you really are an idiot. Try a course in reading comprehension.
confrontation
/känfrntSHn/
/v()lns/
Noun
A hostile or argumentative meeting or situation between opposing parties.
violence
Noun
Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
Strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force.
There si overlap there and in terms of filing reports you use terms like confrontation or altercation to indicate violence you don't use terms like fight.
"gut is an awful kill shot", AC, 23rd december. Woops.
Deadly force, as defined by the United States Armed Forces, is the force which a person uses, causing—or that a person knows, or should know, would create a substantial risk of causing—death or serious bodily harm. In most jurisdictions, the use of deadly force is justified only under conditions of extreme necessity as a last resort, when all lesser means have failed or cannot reasonably be employed.
ANY use of gunfire directed at their person even to the kneecaps is considered deadly force, if you're shooting them you are in the eyes of the law attempting to kill them. You don't shoot in the kneecaps if the situation does not call for killing. You do not shoot in the gut if the situation does not call for killing them. Shooting them in the gut is attempting to kill them.
I'll be honest with you, I am not aware of anybody that does not have problems seeing for several seconds when pepper sprayed in the eyes. I'd really have to see some statistics on how probable it is that one would meet someone with such capabilities. That, or the pepper spray you bested was actually deodorant.
http://www.defensivechemicals.com/product_info.php?products_id=4?osCsid=gkcdvnfllwvl It's not altogether uncommon to be capable of functioning after exposure especially if you're already acquainted with it
So you see the 'shoot to incapacitate' directive as pretty much irrelevant and equal to 'just shoot the fucking bastard'? Nice. You're a great cop. Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that there are some (if not many) situations where you need to aim for the biggest target. When the guy is 3 feet away however, you'd have to be a really lousy fucking shot if center mass was the only part you could hit.
If the situation does not call for killing the person you do not draw your gun. To do otherwise is irresponsible. You don't aim for the head, you don't aim for the knee caps, you aim for center mass. If the only target that presents itself is the head that becomes center mass. You don't aim for the head if it isn't center mass, you don't aim for the guys kneecaps if it's not center mass this is elementary shooting knowledge. Self defense is not hunting it's self defense you shoot for the biggest target and shoot to end the threat. To do otherwise is irresponsible and barbaric. Why do you shoot for center mass? Well the short answer is because thats what everyone gets trained to do. More importantly you shoot for center mass because you need to be sure of your target and what is beyond it. Aiming for the smaller target opens you up to hitting what is beyond your target. Modern self defense ammunition is designed to open up and expand preventing over penetration. When you aim for a smaller target it has less of an opportunity to expand and will have a tendency to continue on and potentially cause casualties beyond your target. This is in addition to the increased risk of missing your target. So would you think its a good idea to aim for someones kneecaps after you've put a bullet in your neighbor living below you thinking you were being humane by maiming a guy for life when the situation didn't in your eyes call for killing him but you felt deadly force was needed?
I have shot one, my brother in Oregon has one. It's a fine weapon.
I prefer my Sig Sauer P229 though.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Talk about a ridiculous argument.
First, define "lots". There are eight declared nuclear states, and one probable undeclared (denoted with *):
United States
Russia
China
England
France
Pakistan
India
North Korea
Israel*
Second, when you use a gun, you shoot a single bullet that can destroy a single target effectively with one trigger pull (unless you're talking about class-3 weapons). With a nuke, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people with one "trigger pull". If a nation uses a nuclear weapon against another nation, or as you ridiculously claim, against your back yard, your nation (and the rest of the world) are going to pound that nation into dust. If someone jacks your car at gunpoint, the police aren't going to do a damn thing about it other than file a piece of paper and say how sorry they are.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yeah, and then step back to reality where there are 300M guns in my country alone.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yes, that's called a Springfield XD. Grip Safety, Loaded Chamber Indidcator.
confrontation: [...] A hostile or argumentative meeting or situation between opposing parties.
violence: [...] Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
There si overlap there and in terms of filing reports you use terms like confrontation or altercation to indicate violence you don't use terms like fight.
Nobody cares how you file reports. The pdf (and reality, I might add) clearly separates the two situations. You've failed.
"gut is an awful kill shot", AC, 23rd december.
Woops.
[irrelevant story about deadly force]
You claimed that shooting somebody in the gut kills someone. I've shown proof it does not. You've failed again.
http://www.defensivechemicals.com/product_info.php?products_id=4?osCsid=gkcdvnfllwvl
It's not altogether uncommon to be capable of functioning after exposure especially if you're already acquainted with it
I'm assuming the link points to the product that you were able to function in spite of. Because it doesn't really say anything about how 'common' it is to function when hit with it. Again, not saying it is impossible and in fact I am very interested in how easy it is to do so. Is it a matter of training by being hit with it (say) 10 times? Is it something 1% of the population can do with training? 80%? 100%?
If the situation does not call for killing the person you do not draw your gun. To do otherwise is irresponsible. You don't aim for the head, you don't aim for the knee caps, you aim for center mass. If the only target that presents itself is the head that becomes center mass. You don't aim for the head if it isn't center mass, you don't aim for the guys kneecaps if it's not center mass this is elementary shooting knowledge. Self defense is not hunting it's self defense you shoot for the biggest target and shoot to end the threat. To do otherwise is irresponsible and barbaric. Why do you shoot for center mass? Well the short answer is because thats what everyone gets trained to do. More importantly you shoot for center mass because you need to be sure of your target and what is beyond it. Aiming for the smaller target opens you up to hitting what is beyond your target. Modern self defense ammunition is designed to open up and expand preventing over penetration. When you aim for a smaller target it has less of an opportunity to expand and will have a tendency to continue on and potentially cause casualties beyond your target. This is in addition to the increased risk of missing your target. So would you think its a good idea to aim for someones kneecaps after you've put a bullet in your neighbor living below you thinking you were being humane by maiming a guy for life when the situation didn't in your eyes call for killing him but you felt deadly force was needed?
You keep saying that maiming is worse than killing. The judicial system disagrees with you.
Anyway, 'center mass' still includes the gut, which is still different from 'ending him'. I think it is extremely irresponsible for a cop to shoot to kill instead of incapacitate. Just recently there was a story about a teenage kid getting shot in the neck. Considering the situation, the officers very probably shouldn't have shot him at all, but I bet there are very few people that would say "well, he's lucky he wasn't shot in the gut".
You mean like, "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Yeah, no Americans would ever do that.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
That is an interesting thought experiment. It is, of course, completely abstract. If what you described were the totality of the difference (and if it didn't introduce other insidious failure modes not included in your list), then it would be a reasonable tradeoff.
However, I doubt that standard will ever be reached or anything will even come close. Fundamentally, I don't want to have to worry about my firearm's batteries' state of charge during a life or death situation. Perhaps you could make it nuclear-powered, but that just seems like it would give the liberals yet another reason to freak out: "radioactive murder weapons!"
You see, my home defense weapon is shelf-stable for years to decades at a time when loaded with quality, "positive function" ammo. I'm hard-pressed to imagine that the inclusion of electronic "safety" (for whom?) mechanisms could meet that standard.
Furthermore, all the real implementations to date have introduced substantial complexities/points of failure, like having a watch or ring the user wears that communicates wirelessly to the firearm. What could possibly go wrong with that?
So, yeah, give us all James Bond's PPK from Skyfall that recognizes his palm print 100% of the time. I mean, who would ever have dirty hands during a life or death struggle? Cleanliness is next to godliness, you know...
Note that gun safety features (not universally loved) like loaded-chamber indicators, grip safeties, and magazine disconnects are constantly evolving and have been available in some form and in various combinations for many decades, so gun makers seem to have some incentive to produce and improve them, and that the PLCAA does not prevent consumer safety lawsuits, but does shield gun makers from suits based on criminal conduct by gun buyers (though imperfectly).
Do you know why these so-called safety features can't be found on police or military firearms?
Because they're dangerous and get people killed. I wish that were overly dramatic, but it isn't: I've personally had a built-in "safety" features fail (the built-in safety lock found on some guns) and I'm not exactly what you'd consider a die hard shooter or gun owner.
We're talking about devices which are often required by professionals to go shoot anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 consecutive problem-free rounds of ammunition before they consider it 'reliable'. If the firearm has a failure, they start back at zero. By adding electronics to the mix, it adds one more point of failure. There is no beneficial trade off: firearms need to be as simple as possible because they have to do one thing, and do it every single time: accurately, consistently, and effectively propel a bullet from the barrel.
Think about it for a second. Do you really think it's a good idea to put miniaturized biometrics on a device which will be banged, dropped, get wet, be in constant contact with an acidic sweaty meat sack, etc.? They also sit untouched for (sometimes) decades. How long do you think the MTBF will be? 10,000 hours? 5,000? That'll make the handgun or shotgun in Grandma's closet or bedstand she uses for protection somewhat useless, won't it? The shorting battery will cause a couple issues for the security guard who gets jumped, too.
This isn't just the raving of some gun nut: this is pretty simple logic. If firearm manufacturers were able to make guarantee (or at least provide a reasonable method) that the person who owns the gun is the only one who can shoot it, they would, because there would be a market for it. Not only would there be a market for it, but it would be exceedingly lucrative and/or (potentially) remove them from any legal liability for someone's actions (because the person would have to go through a gov't background check to purchase that firearm).
This isn't about "gun safety". It's about denying firearms to the common person on the grounds of safety - for our own good.
This is "gun safety" like the kind of "knife safety" which resulted in the invention of the butter knife: it makes the device uselessly crippled and only applicable to a very small subset of reasons why people legitimately purchase firearms.
People scream about the evil of SecureBoot on Slashdot but yet there are so many people who would willingly require people to have something like this on a firearm. Really? Are you seriously making that argument? Are we really having this discussion with a straight face? "It'll protect legitimate users!" *sigh* And yet, it's so much more than just "freedom" we're talking about here.
If we want to talk about "gun safety" why don't we talk about putting firearm training in schools? The physical safety of firearms is already pretty damn high.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Something I'd throw in- the simplicity, durability, and reliability of the best firearms isn't because of any lack of technology or sophistication, or engineering thought- it's because of it. Those simple mechanisms are in many cases extremely precisely made; the design has been rigorously thought out, tested repeatedly, optimized... that very simple mechanism that's so reliable has had a *LOT* of "evolution" applied to it. Gun mechanism design is viciously Darwinian.
Making a complex mechanism that's unreliable and failure prone is easy- making something that works and yet is simple can be very hard.
And the metallurgy, coatings and surface treatments, manufacturing processes, that's amazing as well.
No, government does not allow its citizens to protect themselves against them. That is a misinterpretation of the constitution.
I don't know where you're from, but the US government does not ALLOW anything. It is allowed a certain amount of power that is carefully delineated in our constitution. The Bill of Rights is there to keep the government from taking specific rights that the people have always had, and will always have, not to give them those rights.