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Hardly Anyone Is Buying 'Smart Guns'
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The technology is here. So-called 'smart guns' are being programmed to recognize a gun owner's identity and lock up if the weapon ends up in the wrong hands. Entrepreneurs and engineers have been developing technology to make safer guns since the early '90s, and by now we've got working prototypes of guns that read fingerprints, hand grips or even sensors embedded under the skin. But after 15 years of innovation, personalized guns still haven't penetrated the marketplace."
Guns are life-saving
You must be American...
You're in a firefight, and your gun gets damaged, so you pick up the gun of your dead/wounded buddy to stay in the action, pull the trigger and go f**k as it doesn't fire at the advancing enemy hordes....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Drunk Man At Party Accidentally Shoots And Kills Himself In Los Angeles
Gun Falls Out Of Holster, Wounds Man In Wal-Mart Parking Lot
Texas Man Wounds Girlfriend While Confronting Ex With Shotgun
6-Year-Old Shoots 5-Year-Old While Playing Cops And Robbers
12-Year-Old Shoots 9-Year-Old Brother, Then Shoots Himself In Ohio
Three Handguns Found In Room Where Ohio 3-Year-Old Was Shot And Killed
In gun-nut-land, where you are John Wayne/Rambo/The Lone Ranger, only the "bad guys" are ever hurt by guns. Here in the real world, guns cause immense amounts of damage.
Use of army weapons and private firearms for suicide and homicide in the region of Basel, Switzerland.
There is a reason that you cling to your guns, and use phrases like "a stupid fucking idea". Your unadmitted goal is intimidation through the threat of violence. You are a bully/coward, and gun ownership is fundamental to your violent fantasies. Even as you read this, you are wishing that you could jam a gun in my face and make me back down.
You're not alone. I've already had threats of personal violence here on Slashdot for saying pretty much the same thing. The last genius called me out for hiding using internet anonymity. He challenged me to give my real name so he could find me and hurt me in an unspecified fashion, I assume using a gun. Of course, he was hiding his identity as well, which was a good thing for him because gun ownership and violent threats are a potential federal crime. Des Moines Man Sentenced to Prison for Internet Threats of Violence and Possessing a Firearm During Threats of Violence . Just remember that before you reply.
Why is Snark Required?
The problem here is that we, as humans, are very bad at working with probabilities. When asked "how likely is ... ?" we mentally substitute the question "how easily can I think of examples of ... ?"
Try it yourself. Which of the below do you think is more likely:
* A child or teenager in the U.S. is kidnapped by a stranger (not a family member or aquaintance.)
* A child or teenager in the U.S. is killed or injured in an accident involving a gun.
If you're an average American, and unless you googled the statistics first, you probably said that stereotypical kidnappings are more common than gun accidents. After all, we hear about it in the news all the time, and you can probably name a few children that were abducted. Therefore you'd worry if our child goes out by himself, but feel quite safe leaving him unsupervised at home with a gun in the house.
In fact, gun accidents are much more common. There are about a hundred stereotypical kidnapppings a year in the U.S. but about a thousand gun accidents involving children and teenagers. (If we only look at fataiities, there are also more children killed in gun accidents than by non-family, non-aquaintance kinappers.)
When it comes to guns, we can very easily think of scenarios where we pulls out our gun and save the day. This happens all the time in movies, and although it happens rarely in reality it gets much publicity when it does, so in our minds it is a common occurence.
We have a much harder time imagining the statistically more likely scenario that someone else gets hold of our gun and hurts somebody with it.
A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a completed or attempted suicide (11 times more likely), a criminal assault or homicide (seven times more likely), or unintentional shooting death or injury (four times more likely) than in a self-defense shooting. (Source)
Statistically speaking, a gun with a personalization system that is so bad that it never allows the gun to fire would still be safer for the gun-owner and his family than a gun with no personalization. Still people worry about the remote possibility that "the gun might not fire in that critical moment."
One of the safest places in the world is a gun range
And yet people do get murdered at gun ranges. Do you have any evidence to back up your proposition that gun ranges are actually safer than average? I couldn't find any actual statistics as to whether you were more or less likely to be shot at the gun range, but my gut instinct says it's probably slightly higher than average because besides the occasional murders and suicides, there's also accidents to account for. It's simple mathematics, since the gun range has a much higher concentration of guns than most other places, the per-gun murder, suicide, and accident rates would have be substantially lower than other locations to balance out the higher concentration.
because you don't start a fight knowing that everyone is armed.
Often enough people do because they're angry, stupid and/or crazy. The problem when everyone is waving a gun around, how do you know which one to shoot?
Fanatically anti-fanatical