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'Smart Gun' Firm Wants You To Fund Its Prototype
Lucas123 writes "After striking out at getting private investors to fund a new prototype, Safe Gun Technology (SGTi) is hoping it can generate $50,000 through a crowdfunding effort to build an assault-style rifle with fingerprint biometrics technology. Handgun and shotgun prototypes would follow shortly thereafter, the company said. SGTi, which is using the Indiegogo crowdfunding site for its Fund Safe Guns campaign, has so far raised just over $1,600. Several companies are working on developing smart gun technology, which can identify an authorized user through fingerprint, handgrip or RFID recognition techniques. Last week, a Massachusetts congressman submitted a bill that would require all U.S. handgun manufacturers to include smart gun technology in their weapons." I'm looking forward to the best car analogy that anyone can come up with on this topic.
What gun nuts like you fail to understand is that anything we can do to make it harder for criminals and the irresponsible to use firearms outside of their intended purpose is a good thing.
There is no way of ensuring with perfect precision that nobody uses them illegally, but effective regulations do work. Australia went for over a decade without any mass murders before the recent one. And that, IIRC, didn't involve a firearm.
And sure, they might be hacked, but it's far more difficult to hack one of these firearms than to use one that has not safety features at all. Plus, hacking the firearm cannot be done on the spur of the moment, it requires deliberate action, which means no shooting somebody with their own firearm.
Lastly, if you're that concerned with reliability, you wouldn't be using a semi-automatic, you'd stick with a simple revolver or a blunt instrument.
No, he couldn't have easily stolen the stuff necessary to make the smart guns work. This kind of "thinking" is why the debate will never resolve in a sane way. You can't assume that effective gun control isn't possible, it's been demonstrated to work in Australia, amongst other places. It's just in the US where the gun nuts can't fathom the notion that we don't need perfect to make a difference where things aren't working.