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House Bill Would Mandate Smart Gun Tech By U.S. Manufacturers
Lucas123 writes "U.S. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass) is pushing a bill that would require all U.S. handgun manufacturers to include 'personalization technology' in their weapons. Tierney said he got the idea for The Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 from the latest James Bond film, Skyfall. In it Bond escapes death when his handgun, which is equipped with technology that recognizes his fingerprints, becomes inoperable when a bad guy picks it up. 'This technology, however, isn't just for the movies — it's a reality,' Tierney said. Tierney pointed to a myriad of cases where the smart gun tech could prevent children from being harmed or killed in firearms accidents. Jim Wallace, executive director of the Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League, the official state association of the NRA, said he knows of no gun owners who would want smart gun technology on their weapons. Wallace said any technology that may impede the proper function of a weapon is a problem. He pointed to the fact that any integrated processor technology would also require a battery of some kind, which could pose a system failure if it lost power."
Finding God in a Dog
Its easy to make a trigger that doesn't fire when the wrong person holds it. Its harder to make one that also does fire all the time when you hold it.
We already HAVE passed the point of sensible gun control. First point to make, violent crime is falling in this country, including crime where the criminal used a gun. Second point to make, perhaps if the government enforced the gun laws already on the books, we could determine which ones actually work, which ones should be repealed and whether there is any reason to create new ones.
Since Obama took office, the percentage of violations of current background check laws which were prosecuted has fallen.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Judge Dredd's gun 'executes' anybody else who tries to fire it. Are they going to implement that feature, too?
No sig today...
Cops in Minnesota in the dead of a winter snowstorm are just gonna LOVE this tech.
Yep, this is what happens when people who hate guns, and so have never touched a gun, probably never seen a gun, think they are gun experts and should be writing the rules and regulations about how they should be manufactured, sold, and used.
I'm not a doctor or pharmacist, so I don't have any opinion on proper methods manufacture, store, or otherwise handle various classes of prescription drugs.
I have no idea what regulations make sense. It would be STUPID of me to comment on how a pharmacy must be run since I don't know anything about the subject.
Why is it that people who have no knowledge at all, people who don't know the difference between a machine gun and a pistol, want to decide on gun regulations?
This is a fact - anti-gunners, including congress-critters, REGULARLY confuse an automatic (machine gun) with a semi-automatic (pistol). They claim to be
trying to "ban automatic weapons" (machine guns), but their bill bans pistols and varmint guns, which are semi-automatic.
FTFY; some of us wised up to that some time ago, and thus only vote for third parties (if at all).
Is that working out as well for you as my one-man air-travel boycott is for me?
I am not a crackpot.
Regardless. Any policy driven technology adoption should be first forced upon the police and the military before it's forced on civilians. If a cop wouldn't want this technology then it's not something that anyone else should have forced on them either.
Mandating that civilians can only own guns that don't work is just a transparent attempt to side step the law.
Let cops and soldiers adopt this stuff first.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's the non gun owning liberals who propose this legislation.
For the record, I'm a non-gun owning liberal (though I've fired a few handguns, rifles and shotguns and have some minimal training) and I think this kind of legislation is dumb.
Firearms are tools with a specific function and purpose. They need to work when they're suppose to work and it's the owner's responsibility to ensure they're safe otherwise. If you have children in your house, lock up your guns/ammunition and teach your children firearm safety when they're able to understand. If you can't do these things and/or you cannot operate your own weapon safely, don't own/carry firearms or come to terms that you and or your child may become Darwin Award winners.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You willing to bet your liberty in a (snip)
No, he probably just looked up the statistics on the number of people that have been killed with their own gun. This is why police officers are trained to always keep their hand on their weapon during a traffic stop or during any other time when they're questioning someone who isn't in custody, and why once their gun has been drawn, they typically move away and don't holster it again until backup arrives and a second officer can approach and subdue. The risk is very real.
self-defense case on microcircuitry that is never checked or maintained
Your computer has tons of microcircuitry. Far more than this technology would require. If your life depended on being able to complete a call to the police using a VoIP product, do you think you could do it as fast as with a regular, land-line phone, assuming you had the software already installed and configured?
The fact that something isn't checked or maintained is not an indictment against its reliability. Maintenance usually happens on a schedule -- days, weeks, years, even decades. You don't just assume your car is going to run out of oil because you haven't checked the oil since the last time you started it -- you know that as long as you check it every 7,000 miles, or whatever the manual says, you do not have to worry about that. Why would a gun be different?
a lens that might be obstructed or smeared,
You know, you're working this technology all crabbed. A police officer could be issued a gun with a RF component in it that operated around 800 MHz or so. At this frequency, the signal clings to a person's skin and clothing. A low-power, short-range transmitter, perhaps embedded in the officer's radio, could complete the circuit. Thus if the officer was not in physical contact with the gun, it wouldn't fire.
Biometric identification isn't the only way of securing a weapon.
and the assumption that if there isn't a perfect picture, you're hiding some kind of guilt?
That's a social and legal problem, not a technical problem. Let's try and keep on topic here; This is a feasibility study, not an exhaustive analysis of "what if" scenarios...
"Mr. Johnson, how do we know you didn't put your blood all over the end of that gun before your wife used it to murder a poor, helpless transient you two had lured to your home for deviant sex? There's no picture. You must be trying to hide something."
Strike my last; ... not an exhaustive analysis of conspiracy theories.
Now, as has become increasingly common on Slashdot (I miss the old days), nothing in what I've said is either for or against whatever political cause or position you're advocating. It is simply, and purely, an engineering analysis. What Congress is, or isn't doing, or whatever your political beliefs are, or even mine, are irrelevant here. This about answering IF we can do this with the technology available today, not should we do it.
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