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New Smart Gun Company Hopes To Begin Production This Summer
Lucas123 writes Safe Gun Technology (SGTi) is hoping it can begin production on its version of a smart gun within the next two months. The Columbus, Ga.-based company uses relatively simple fingerprint recognition through a flat, infrared reader positioned on the weapon's grip. The biometrics reader enables three other physical mechanisms that control the trigger, the firing pin and the gun hammer. The controller chip can save from 15,000 to 20,000 fingerprints. If a large military unit wanted to program thousands of finger prints into a single weapon, it would be possible. A single gun owner could also temporarily program a friend or family member's print into the gun to go target shooting and then remove it upon returning home."
When I pull the trigger, I want the gun to fire. I doubt this will be reliable enough to depend upon.
People often wear gloves when shooting pistols. And in combat situations, fingers may get dirty, or even partially damaged or burnt. This strikes me as a REALLY bad idea. Lives will be lost to this.
I'd prefer a fool-proof gun over a smart gun.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If this fingerprint scanner works as poorly and as slowly as the fingerprint scanner on my Thinkpad, there's no way in hell anyone would want this on a gun.
If on the other hand you want to make sure no one can ever fire the gun, this sounds great.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
..about buying this equipment for my guns.
I don't care much about the false positive rate, because I keep my guns locked up. What I need to know before I buy is, what's the false negative rate and the response time? I own some guns for sporting purposes, and a couple of big clunky rifles for hunting. A false negative or a laggy response time on those isn't necessarily a big deal. OTOH my wife and I also have guns for self defense and home defense. A false negative or laggy response time on those could get us killed.
Finding God in a Dog
"You do not have permission to fire this gun."
"sudo Fire gun!"
*BLAM*
That's called 'transfer of firearm' and is illegal in many places thanks to our politicians. Creating technology to circumvent the law sounds like a sticky place to go.
is now real.
This technology could cause accidents by people assuming the safety function is operational, similar to when electric carving knives were introduced they had a pressure activated on switch on the blade.
It may also lead to the assumption that a gun is safe when it can still accidentally fire for other reasons inherent in a firearms mechanism.
It's cold where I live for most of the year. I wear gloves a lot.
Oh really?
If I really need my pistol to function, and I have blood on my hands, I don't think I'd trust one of these.
Upon pushing the trigger a display on the gun prompts:
Are you sure you wish to fire this gun?
[ok][cancel]
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Then why exactly cars haven't been banned yet?
Even worse, breathing air causes millions of deaths every year, let's ban air!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You select the target with your iris and eye gestures, recognized by cybereye or goggles. Target gets a highlight/targetting frame.
You move the gun so that the reticle (based on gun-mounted camera) on your HUD enters the defined targetting frame.
The moment the gun detects the match (reticle enters the frame = the gun is aimed at the target), it fires, hitting the highlit target.
This is how a smart gun is supposed to work. Not some shmancy safety feature.
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From my experience, unless you are in a career field that requires you to have a weapon every single day, you may never get the same weapon twice from the armory, even if you are being armed multiple days in a row.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
So when your one assigned gun breaks, you want to be totally disarmed during combat?
Sounds risky.
Are you comparing hundreds of accidents per hundreds of millions of firearms, to 30 ingestion incidents per, what, a hundred thousand magnets? MIght that be at all relevant? While we're at it, backyard pools kill far more kids under 6 than guns do. Is that reason to ban pools?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
you've never been on a battlefield before, have you?
or had to think about:
being overrun
swapping weapons when they break
manning the most casualty-producing weapon when the crew became casualties
or any of the other stuff you have no business pontificating about.
THL phish sticks
Pulls trigger. Nothing. Notices blinking LED by trigger. Looks at six character LCD display scrolling past. "15 updates are available, would you like to download now? Please tap once for yes, twice for no."
A smarter society would be a much better solution.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I cannot imagine what a nightmare it will be to manage weapons access thru fingerprints into a large military unit.
Nowhere near the nightmare caused by all the soldiers that would die when their weapons refuse to fire. Or when an enemy figures out that a relatively cheap EMP generator will disarm an entire unit.
False negative are the problem. False positive are OK if they are low enough. Effectively even if there is a 20% false positive rate, that means 80% of the time somebody not you trying to use your gun will fail. Better than the current 0% failure 100% sucess today. Bad guys would find the gun less interresting to steal, if they can't get their hand on the reprogramming tech or it is too expansive (and it would still be easier to steal a classical one not needing reprogramming).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
According to Miller, had smart gun technology been available to Nancy Lanza, she could have programmed her guns so that only her fingerprint could have activated them; she could have enabled her son to shoot them at a firing range and disabled them upon returning home, or she could have enabled them for her son to use all the time, Miller said.
"So without the technology, we went from zero percent chance of preventing the shootings to having the technology and a 66% chance of preventing it," Miller said. "Those are much better odds."
Wow. How...what...really? "There's three scenarios related to this event I can think of in my head right now and two of them would be better ergo 66% chance of improvement?"
When I walk outside I can either be hit by lightning or not be hit by lightning, so 50% chance right? What the fuck?
Someone picking up a dropped gun in a fight and using it against its owner? Probably. But someone like Lanza from stealing his mom's guns, opening them up and jamming the solenoid in the 'enabled' position? I doubt it.
Guns are remarkably simple mechanical devices. Stolen guns will have their interlock mechanisms filed down or superglued and placed on the black market.
Have gnu, will travel.
An expensive firearm locked inside of a safe has zero value. The intruder can come in, shoot you in the back while you're attempting to open the safe, then walk out with the safe, to open it up at his leisure at the auto wrecking yard.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Luckily, given the distinguishing capabilities of modern fingerprint scanners, once you've loaded a few thousand fingerprints into the unit you'll have a high degree of assurance that any random person who picks up the gun will be considered authorized to shoot it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's not a failure. That's a negative match.
Failing to match the authorized user is a failure. Failing to match an unauthorized user is success. Both cases of "failing to match" are indistinguishable.
Failure means the CPU isn't responding.
That's another kind of failure.
In the case of an EMP, the CPU won't function and therefore it has "no lock at all."
An EMP is a minor consideration when talking about failure modes and how the weapon deals with them. ESD or EMP may cause the memory to fail and create a "failure to match" kind of failure, as well.
But, let's assume the only failure we care about is an EMP that takes the CPU out. If this failure results in function, then what electronics detects that the CPU isn't working and allows the gun to function, and then, what good will the trigger lock be when a criminal who steals the gun knows all he has to do is fry the CPU to get the gun to work? "Hey, Bob, look a whole case full of them smart guns we can't shoot, and a rack display of stun guns we can use to make them work fine..."
Now the tricky question: is it a Good Thing if a husband is physically abusing his wife and she picks up his handgun to defend herself, and all it does is enrage the husband into demonstrating the kewl trigger lock that means she can't shoot him but he can shoot her?
The danger of this kind of development is that anti-gun zealots will point at this product and say "why can't they all be that way", and then a tragedy that this system didn't prevent will come along and the emotional strings will be played so that this kind of lock will be mandatory. Worst of all worlds. Guns that fail to function as they are intended but criminals can get to work just fine for them.
A safe and a lock to put the gun has a much lower MTBF than above. Going by this you would rather leave your gun outside a safe than secure ?
Are you saying that a gun on his hip (or my hip) is not secure? Or one on my computer desk (no kids in the house) within arm's reach? And no intelligent gun owner uses gun locks. All they do is force a thief to take the gun home to break the lock. And trigger locks are dangerous, because the possibility of a negligent discharge goes up dramatically when you stick things in the trigger guard.