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New Smart Gun Company Hopes To Begin Production This Summer

Posted by samzenpus on from the smarter-shooting dept.

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."

12 of 632 comments (clear)

  1. I won't be buying one... by jsrjsr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I pull the trigger, I want the gun to fire. I doubt this will be reliable enough to depend upon.

    1. Re:I won't be buying one... by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Precisely. If there is any chance at all that my gun will simply refuse to fire when I pull the trigger, I don't want anything to do with it.

    2. Re:I won't be buying one... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 5, Informative

      "When I pull the trigger, I want the gun to fire. I doubt this will be reliable enough to depend upon."

      More to the point: if you want it to be reliable, then the fingerprint technology has to be loose enough to be UNreliable. We already know this. With today's technology, if you want to allow access with fingerprints reliably, you have to make your parameters loose enough that false positives slip in too easily.

      Which means that in order to be near 100% reliable for an "authorized" shooter, this thing provably can't do what it's intended to do: reliably block the UNauthorized.

    3. Re:I won't be buying one... by DJ+Jones · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "We've dedicated well over 10 years to come up with this solution. We have a lot of people in this company who've put a lot of blood sweat and tears into it and never gotten a penny out of it. If we were in it for the money, we would have been out of it a long time ago. "Our motto is ... if we save the life of one child, it's a miracle to that child and everyone that child touches."

      If they were true to their motto they should have dropped the project and donated their funding to a children's hospital 10 years ago.

    4. Re:I won't be buying one... by bellers · · Score: 5, Informative

      a spring and a lever have a MTBF measured in millions of cycles. RoHS-compliant electronics made with commodity parts do not.

      And I buy guns with as few extraneous safeties as possible.

      --
      This space for rent.
    5. Re:I won't be buying one... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Qualifiers:

      When I say "near 100% reliable", I'm not joking. 99.9% just isn't good enough for something I'd trust my life to. But if it approached 99.99%, then it's getting near the reliability of the gun itself, and may be good enough. That's approximately 1 error in 1000 rounds. Even that is pushing what I view as acceptable limits.

      And even just given that it's battery-powered, it probably will never reach that goal in the foreseeable future.

      As for its intended purpose (blocking unauthorized users), I have no doubt that it would work some of the time. But how often, given that it has to be that accurate for the authorized? I'm not confident that it would be that good at its job. It's a very difficult balancing act, and I would need a lot of convincing.

    6. Re:I won't be buying one... by PortHaven · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except for all the accidental trigger pulls that have gotten Glock wielders shot. Like DEA agents. ;-)

      Sorry, a Glock is designed to be utilized in a holster. I do believe it is unprofessional and irresponsible to carry a Glock without using some sort of holster/trigger protection.

    7. Re:I won't be buying one... by ByOhTek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or ricochet into spots higher than the person's foot? Or does he avoid walking on surfaces that would cause a ricochet?

      If you are carrying a gun in a way that it can go off without you intending it to, then you are being irresponsible, and the concerns of the anti-gun crowd are quite warranted.

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    8. Re:I won't be buying one... by swillden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't see a problem if he wants to carry that way.

      I do. I think a case could be made for reckless endangerment, and if it goes off and hurts someone I would definitely support criminal negligence charges.

      He should just get a holster. There's really no reason not to use a holster. If nothing else one of those ultra-minimalist holsters that covers nothing but the trigger guard.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    9. Re:I won't be buying one... by interkin3tic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm guessing you mean any increased chance, since we live in the real world where everything always has a non-zero chance of not working as advertised. How much of an increased chance do these things have of failing? I'd be interested to see real data rather than conjecture. If this thing fails one out of every, I dunno, one thousand trigger pulls, that could be more reliable than your average Saturday night special.

      I think you'd also want to compare, if possible, the chances of you needing to shoot someone with the chances of someone shooting you with your own gun, before concluding you're worse off with this. Whether or not you're safer with a gun in the home is controversial and heavily written about, the risks of being shot by your gun vs the likelihood of you shooting a would-be-attacker. I don't have an opinion on the subject as I'm not prepared to wade into the literature, but it seems like this tech would avoid the chance of the former while still giving you the chance at the latter. That could be a net benefit even given the chance of the gun refusing to fire when you needed it.

      Either way, these are just hypotheses, we'd need hard data. I know its fun to not use data when discussing public policy and especially gun control, I certainly don't have any.

  2. I would have serious reservations... by MAXOMENOS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ..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
  3. Re:How about gloves? by j-stroy · · Score: 5, Funny

    I am sure that duct taping an authorized finger to the scan pad would hack the system. The rest of the authorized individual is redundant.