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."

Comments

Smart guns are a silly idea.

[maroberts]

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....

Biased thinking

[Sqr(twg)]

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."