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A Look at Smart Gun Technology
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget takes a look at smart gun technology currently available and what the future might hold. From the article: 'While the idea of a gun that couldn't be turned on its owner seems like an obvious win for everyone involved, there are a number of problems with the concept. Chief among those worries: the safety mechanism will fail when it's needed most. If you're relying on a weapon for defense, the last thing you want is another avenue for failure. Electronics aren't perfect. Sometimes cameras can't autofocus. Cable boxes freeze up when browsing the channel guide. The equivalent, seemingly small glitch in a smart gun could be the difference between life and death.'"
You forgot that any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass the technology.
Just like many of the current rube goldberg-ish "less-lethal weapons", the tech to make a "smart gun" just isn't there yet. Every entry in this field has it's list of failures and impracticalities.
That's not to say we shouldn't stop trying. We'll probably get there eventually. It's just not something we can do right now. At the very least progress has clearly been made. I remember years ago they'd talk about "smart guns" and they'd involve special clips or holsters which would have been absolutely ridiculous in the kind of scenarios where you'd want a gun. At least now the ideal case seems practical and we are arguing about reliability.
Might want to try a playthrough of Metal Gear Solid 4 before going all-in on this idea.
Well actually an idiot with a soldering iron will probably "brick" the weapon. It might make a nice club or hammer afterwards. Now a skilled technician with a soldering iron is another matter.
Hey, let's see who can copy down first all the tired arguments from the discussion from a couple days ago?
They can put a camera on the gun today. That's what they ought to focus on. Maybe someday we'll have guns smart enough to only take disabling shots, or phasers on stun. But today, we can at least establish where a gun was pointed when it was fired, and get an idea of the situation in which it was fired which doesn't depend on testimony. These ought to be mandatory on cop guns, and optional everywhere else to start with. Maybe you need a camera on your gun for it to be legal to also possess the ammo at the same time anywhere but private property with permission, for example.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because I can get a decent handgun for about 500 bucks, or I can buy a $2000 smart gun and ruin it with my soldering iron?
I wouldn't mind buying a smart gun if it was a good, quality firearm. Choices are good. I just don't want it to be the only kind of gun I can get.
You know The Party will demand a killswitch on your smart gun, right? And telemetry metadata on where the gun has been. Perhaps a smart round that the gun owner must digitally sign with two-factor.
the last thing you want is another avenue for failure
That's not a very bright statement. What you should wish to avoid is for something bad to happen. One way that can happen is indeed for a gun to fail when it needs to work, but there are others, for example having an unseen companion assailant seize the gun and shoot you with it.
It's all about the probabilities of various scenarios, and anyone failing to incorporate that that in their evaluation is not worth listening to. (For the record, I have no opinion about what those probabilities are, but live in such a safe place that I don't consider bothering with a gun.)
[bad guy disarms person with smart gun] "Wait, hang on"... [he pulls out soldering iron]... "I'm gonna shoot you".... [soldering].... "hey where are you going?"
This probably isn't going to be a popular post but as someone who lives in a country where guns aren't allowed, having a gun or not is not a difference of life and death. Like not even remotely.
That sentence makes it sound like where the poster lives he has to deal with gun violence daily. Like going to a supermarket might have you end up in a gunfight where you better be prepared to go Rambo on someone's ass.
That's not a place I'd want to live in and luckily I don't.
Surely this is scaremongering right? Or does anyone actually worry about such scenarios on a daily basis?
Firearms owner and avid shooter here. If a company can make a "smart" gun that people want to buy, more power to 'em. Go forth and do so, but, without any government subsidies or other such nonsense propping them up. As for myself, I'll stick with my tried-and-true, old-fashioned guns for my shooting enjoyment and the defense of myself and family, thank you very much.
The question, then, becomes obvious: Is it more likely that the perp will take your gun and shoot you (there has got to be statistics for this somewhere) or that the identifying electronics will fail and render the gun inert?
Furthermore, should it be obvious to the guy being aimed at that the gun is inert? Just the threat of being shot might be enough to deter a lot of people.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I'll start using "smart" guns when the police and military issue them as primary guns. Any reason for those organizations to use or reject them applies to the citizens.
Gun enthusiasts have no interest in this technology. Who wants something that will reduce reliability and increase price?
The only people pushing for it are those who dislike the idea of civilian firearm ownership.
That's more than enough to make me suspicious.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The odds of your gun being grabbed and used against you are high. The odds of your toddler picking up your gun and using it on family or friend are significant - it happens at least several times a week in this country. So any instances of this new tech failing and depriving you of use of your gun when you need it should be balanced against the lives saved, including your own, by the tech working as designed.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
So, we should ignore all of the accidental shootings that could be prevented because of the chance that a few legitimate ones that might possible be affected.
And isn't brandishing a gun typically enough to stop a crime? How often does it actually need to be fired?
1. We need smart guns because people die, even if it's just for fun and not mandated, let's try to build them!
2. Injury data from smart vs non smart guns is used to show how amazing they are.
3. Mandate that every *new* gun is smart but old non smart guns are allowed to be held.
4. More data showing older non-smart guns are now hurting people.
5. Ban all non smart guns.
6. CIA/NSA/FBI conspire and decide they need a global "smart gun kill switch".
7. Armed forces and national guard roll tanks and APCs down civilian roads and enable the kill switch.
8. Look at Russia vs Ukraine to see how simple this would have been. Russia rolls in, their covert commandos attack the building controlling the kill switch signal and suddenly the whole nation is disarmed and ripe for the plundering.
How many disarms have you ever heard of???
Hard to disarm me when I'm firing center of mass.
This topic keeps coming up, but there isn't a market for this product. Are the target audience also people who want:
Bicycles for fish
Mouse traps that don't kill mice, but embarrass them into moving next door
Any item advertised via spam
A sign that all this legal posturing is not about what it claims is the perpetual exemption of law enforcement from being subjected to technological gun-tracing / -smartening efforts. The lives of police are no more important than ordinary citizens'. If it's not good enough for the boys and girls in blue, it's not good enough for civilians. After all, civilians are almost always closer to the place & time of crime than the police.
When the bullet detonates your brain bucket, you'll be wishing it came from a smart gun. Remember, when the law is passed requiring all guns be 'smart', only criminals will possess the unlocked guns and will use them to do great bodily harm to your children.
Ever heard of anyone calling out of work because the computer controlling their car is broke?
Should that battery die, the gun could fail to fire. In fact, most models designed for civilian use are designed to fail if the battery dies. It's been suggested that smart guns designed for law enforcement should automatically disable the safety if the battery dies.
If a government agent won't carry a default-LOCKED "smart" weapon, why should anyone else have to? The people pushing for such mandates apparently slept through Civics class.
How about this: If a person wants to buy a "smart" gun, let them; if a person wants to buy a regular gun, let them. If a person wants to use any weapon of any kind to harm another in a non-defensive manner, let them suffer the previously agreed-upon social consequences (i.e., jail time, fines, death, etc.). Thus freedom is preserved, and only those who are actually guilty of harming others are punished, rather than the population as a whole.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
What does it matter if somebody demands a kill switch? If somebody adds that in, then we are free to not buy the gun. If they leave it out, then the smart gun is more appealing. In any case, I don't yet see anyone who matters who is demanding this kill switch feature in the first place. Way too much tin foil hat.
the phrase 'smart gun' is an oxymoron.
It is what it is.
That's the only "safe" thing I need on a gun. I know the risks of my gun being taken away from me during a break-in/robbery/assault or anything else that a criminal can perpetrate against me and mine.
The ONLY thing I want to have to deal with or worry about is "Did I flip the safety off?" Most guns are purely mechanical in nature and I see no reason to introduce electronics into making them "safe," do you? Let's add in additional points of failure into what should be a mechanical object that needs to JUST WORK.
This falls under the "Just because we can do a thing, should we do a thing?" category. For fuck's sake, leave guns alone. If you don't like them, feel you don't need them, or just don't understand them then please sit quietly in the corner while those of us that do defend your life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever the hell you want to do.
And remember one thing: Criminals are criminals BECAUSE THEY DON'T FOLLOW THE LAWS ALREADY. One more isn't going to make them change their mind. Removing guns from the hands of (mentally stable) citizen's is absolutely not the answer. It is a path to disarmament, oppression of the people, and a new class of slavery. Read your history.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
. . . shouldn't be messin' around with guns.
Folks who know even less about guns . . . shouldn't be legislating about guns.
If you do want to learn about guns, visit a nearby shooting range. You'll be surprised how friendly these "gun freaks" are, and how polite and patient they are with newcomers. It's just like any other sport. People like to show off, when they know a lot about something, and are good at it.
All these smart guns ideas . . . well, we know where that's coming from, and where it is going . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
[bad guy disarms person with smart gun]
Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
"Wait, hang on"... [he pulls out soldering iron]... "I'm gonna shoot you".... [soldering].... "hey where are you going?"
I think OP's contention is that the criminal is going to steal the gun and, at some later point, disable the disabling mechanism, at his leisure. Hell, mayhaps someday there will be groups of criminals that specialize in de-smarting firearms, presuming there's ever an actual market for the damn things to begin with.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If you are defending yourself with your smart gun and the person takes it away from you, I'm pretty sure that if they can't shoot you with it that they will still be able to beat you to death with it. And if they are the kind of person who can and will disarm someone then they probably can beat you up, too. Either way, I'll take my chances that someone else might get my gun over my gun not firing when I really need it to. I can train to deal with misfires, not with electronic malfunctions.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Um, except for the intruder/burgler. Not that I'm pro-intruder/burgler, but... "everyone involved"?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
(good guy has smart gun) (bad guy has normal gun)
Wait, hang on, I need to scan my finger before we can have this duel!!!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Sometimes cameras can't autofocus. Cable boxes freeze up when browsing the channel guide.
But fly-by-wire airliners, military radios, targeting systems, medical implants, even Internet backbone routers all have absurdly high reliability stats and are all based on electronics, sensors and firmware.
So don't buy your smart gun from a factory in China producing crap for Comcast or Sony. Buy it from someone who knows how to build high-reliability electronics for the military, like Siemens or ATK.
Would you leave your house unlocked all the time because you might lose the key while you were being chased by a mugger? No, because on the other 30,000 days of your life burglars will come and go as they please. It's the same with a gun, where it is easily stolen or grappled from you before you use it, or worse, found by a child.
Remember, when the law is passed requiring all guns be 'smart', only criminals will possess the unlocked guns and will use them to do great bodily harm to your children.
If you're trying to imply that the introduction of "smart" gun mandates will magically cause the cops (who won't be required to have them) will instantly become a pack of criminals... I'd say that horse has already left the barn.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Keep up on the laws, multiple states have laws in place that require this technology be installed on all handguns once it's available. Whether it works or not doesn't matter, just if it's available.
Note to self - start proofreading your own proofreading, dork.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Fools look at software designed for PC's and think no. I look at software built into home electronics and say yes.
The differences are simple: 1) PC's are designed to take any software, not just proprietary. So the OS may not work perfectly with the hardware and may not be tested on it, let alone designed for the hardware.
2) PC's are accessible - you can download things to it, plug USB devices into it, etc. That creates many potential problems - including but not limited to intentional hacking.
3)PC's are designed to do many, many things - they are general purpose devices. So they can never be tested for all possible conditions.
The concept of a smart gun is simple. It runs one program on hardware designed and tested for it with no possibility of changing the software or hardware. It won't be connected to the internet or easy to hack - at least not any easier to hack than it would be to remove the firing pin from a weapon.
Once it is proven to work once, it will work the same way FOREVER.
The only question is what to decide for the default position without any power - fireable or not fireable. If you make it fireable without power than you have to lock the battery into the gun so it can't be removed or disconnected. If you make it not fireable than you can let the battery be easily removable and replaceable.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I wonder just how often the "bad guy shoots gun owner with his own gun" situation comes up. That aside, though, part of the motivation for this comes from the all-too-common tales of kids who get at their parents guns and accidentally (or purposefully) shoot someone. To solve this, though, we don't need smart guns, we need smart gun owners. (Disclaimer: I'm not a gun owner*, but I've heard the following from gun owners who seem to be smart about their guns.)
1) Never treat guns as toys. They aren't toys, they are potentially deadly weapons. Just as you shouldn't drive on the wrong side of the highway because "dodging cars is fun," you shouldn't waive a gun around and pretend to shoot people because you're playing around.
2) Treat every gun as if it is loaded. You checked that the gun is unloaded, right? Double-checked? Still act as though the gun is loaded and will fire at whatever you are aiming at.
3) Don't aim a gun at something unless you intend to shoot it. This might seem like it's repeating 1 and 2, but it's important enough to be a point on its own. Don't point the gun at your brother/sister/mother/father/kids/neighbor/etc unless you actually intend to shoot them. (And if you actually intend to shoot a person with a gun, it had BETTER be for a good reason like self defense - not because "they played their stereo too loud.")
4) Keep all guns locked up and unloaded. This will prevent accidental firings because you forgot that the gun was on the coffee table when your neighbor's kid came over and they thought it'd be fun to pretend to shoot you.
5) Teach everyone in the house how to use a gun safely. If someone is too young to be taught (e.g. a toddler), #4 should keep everyone safe until they can be taught.
If you can't follow these steps or don't see them as important (e.g. if you think pointing a gun at someone and pretending to shoot them is too much fun to give up), then perhaps you shouldn't own a gun.
* Part of the reason I'm not a gun owner is because I don't trust myself around them. I'm a notorious klutz and being a klutz around a gun would NOT be a good combination.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
While the idea of a gun that couldn't be turned on by its owner seems like an obvious win for everyone involved[...]
NANOMACHINES
Yeah, it's my understanding that the majority of disarmings happen at the funerals of the gun owner who committed suicide.
In other words, total nonsense.
Private citizens, carrying concealed?
I don't think I've ever heard of a disarm and shoot.
Or you get a *click click click* just a second mugger. My smart gun isnt working.. no dont stab m.........
In the gravest extreme, when my life is on the line and I am defending myself against an attack I cannot avoid and cannot retreat from, do I want to be relying on a) electronics, or b) mechanical-chemical systems? I'll take (b) for my continued existence. The mechanical/chemical system of the trigger, sear, striker/hammer, firing pin and fulminate primer is FAR more reliable than any electronic system can be.
Moreover, the chemical/mechanical system is not subject to being disabled by a government who does not want me to have my right of self-defense.
P.S I know there are people on /. who will say I have no right to defend myself against a potential murder (whether by a criminal or by the almighty state), but those people don't have power where I live (thankfully). I carry a pistol (at least one) every day.
Nothing but a kill switch for the authorities to use. Make everything you own electronic, and a convenient EMP will shut it all down.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We have congressman and senators who couldn't tell a mouse from a bar of soap legislating Net Neutrality. The FBI put Kevin Mitnik into solitary because they were worried he could whistle into a phone and launch nuclear missiles.
Almost *all* of American History is folks who don't know what the F they are talking about deciding what the rest of can do, say, read, or think. Especially when the church is involved. If the Christian Taliban had their way, America would be forced back to the stone-age. Except we'd have plenty of guns... and that's about it.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
oh Zardoz! Look, it's another bloody brutal crawling out of the woodpile!
The sanctity of the Vortex must be protected.
I was recruited by a company working in this area, to help them fix their electronics & firmware. Seemed like the classic case of a product that started as a prototype by one guy in the company as a side-project or skunkworks, then management saw a bandwagon they should jump on.
The quality of the engineering was horrible. Most of my work is in safety-critical or life-critical applications, and I've seen it all, from poor to excellent, but this was appalling. Needless to say, I ran! (Yes, I see the jokes coming a mile away). But seriously, I was worried about getting sued if somebody got injured, and even worse, I was worried about somebody getting injured or killed by defective electronics or firmware. This isn't the kind of industry I work in anyway, but I thought I'd give it a look out of curiosity, and man was I shocked.
I know this is anecdotal, YMMV, blah blah blah... just thought I'd provide a little "real world" insight based on my (admittedly very limited) experience and exposure.
You've watched too many Hollywood movies.
Bludgeoning somebody is a very hard action compared to firing a gun.
Which states? I googled a bit, came up with nothing.
Sure nobody can jam a pretty weak signal. Once you have electronics especially with an RF pickup nobody with openly or worse clandestinely require that it safety itself when it see some broadcast. Openly I can see it be something like will not fire within 400 yards of a school think of the children BS. Nobody will figure out what the broadcast is. If you really want this it needs to be open hardware/software so it can be fully vetted, considering some of the silicon level back doors people have come up with I'm not sure that is even possible.
Make the cops use it for a couple decades and work the bugs out they are after all paid to put themselves in harms way.
No sir I dont like it.
A smart gun that could not be fired outside of a firing range or as a second option at a human would be a much smarter choice. The right to bear arms
Instead of calling them "smart guns" we should call it "biometric safety" or something like that. It is a more accurate definition.
A smart gun sounds like one that will somehow be self aiming or stabilizing.
It's called "glove box"
Chief among those worries: the safety mechanism will fail when it's needed most. If you're relying on a weapon for defense, the last thing you want is another avenue for failure
Fail when it's needed most? Isn't the *actual safety mechanism* needed the most when a child has the gun (300 people in the US shot and killed by children under 6), or another family member pulls the trigger on someone in an angry rage, or even themselves (guns kept in a home increase the suicide rate for all family members and 75% of teenage gun suicides are with other's weapons stored in family homes).
How many of these preventable deaths stopped per one person whose smart gun doesn't fire in self defence makes it worthwhile?
You could even say the same thing about keeping a gun unloaded and locked in a safe, what's the point of doing that if your gun isn't going to be under your pillow "when you need it the most" ?
source for gun statistics
So your requirements for a gun's reliability are higher than for a pacemaker?
Well when you consider that current smart guns only need to be near the rf transmitter to work the crook only needs to hold it near the watch or ring or whatever to shoot the owner.
Yeah, but we're talking about gun ownership so this is all about fantasy. You might as well have the cool sort of fantasy where the bad guy takes your gun with trigger lock, can't fire it, then you kick the crap out of him with your awesome martial arts skills.
> Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
Yes. The argument often made for women not to carry firearms is that it'll be taken away from them and used against them. (...which is a bit condescending and sexist but let that pass for now.) Although I don't have my copy of the book in front of me, I think it was Paxton Quigley that pointed out the difficulty of finding instances where this has actually happened, as opposed to the quarter million or so of women yearly who successfully use firearms in self defense. In other words, the "smart gun" appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That specific scenario seems unlikely. Stolen guns being "unlocked" by professional gun traffickers on the other hand seems much more likely.
To me, the big potential advantage of smart gun technology would be to decrease the black market for guns. If you have a gun and in a confrontation, it gets taken from you and you get shot, I don't really care to be honest. That's your problem. The societal problem I care about is criminals buying guns on the black market. If smart gun technology could make stolen guns useless, I'm all for it. It seems like guns used in crimes are generally stolen (judging from a google search, there's far more bullshit and propaganda than there is hard studies on the subject, and I'm not willing to spend time getting to the bottom of it to be sure).
To me, it seems pretty unlikely that smart gun locks will do much of anything with the black market. Screen locks haven't really prevented a thriving black market for stolen smartphones. So I suspect that smart gun technology is pretty dumb for everyone but the patent holders and their lobbyists, and maybe REALLY incompetent gun owners.
It's nothing more than a theoretical discussion, anyhow, but putting aside all of the various arguments for and against gun ownership, if the primary concern here is whether a "smart gun" is a compromise between safety of the gun owner over safety of everyone else, I would prefer if a gun owner had two smart guns over one conventional gun.
I don't think the technology is there yet anyhow, but if it could guarantee a gun could only ever be fired by a legally registered gun owner, then I think that's a good thing. If you don't trust the gun to misfire in a critical situation, carry 2 of them.
This preserves the right for legal gun ownership, whether it's for hunting, sport or civil/self defence, while vastly reducing the consequences of unintended and unauthorized use of the weapon.
Realistically, It won't do dick to limit the manufacture and illicit sale and trade of non-smart guns, or to limit sociopathic use of a legally registered weapon, so it's a moot point.
You misunderstand the market for smart guns. They appeal most to inexperienced and/or untrained people worried about self defense, as well as people with kids, worried what might happen if those kids start messing around with stuff they shouldn't. (I'm not necessarily endorsing their parenting skills here.)
[bad guy disarms person with smart gun]
Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
Right, and after they provide those statistics, they can also provide a stat showing how this smart gun + watch technology would have prevented said shootings. The gun will fire if it's within 10 inches of the watch. In an up-close scuffle (you know, the only kind where a disarming is plausible), would the distance be great enough to prevent the criminal from shooting the owner once he grabbed the gun from the owner's hand?
I wouldn't count on it.
This is a "solution" in search of a legal mandate to force people to buy it. Welcome to modern capitalism: "building a better mousetrap" is secondary to regulatory capture.
The ONLY thing I want to have to deal with or worry about is "Did I flip the safety off?"
Fair enough. Electronics can be a sort of safety but I agree that a simple, reliable safety is an important consideration and if you are in a situation where a firearm is actually necessary you definitely do not want to be dicking around with lots of frippery.
Most guns are purely mechanical in nature and I see no reason to introduce electronics into making them "safe," do you?
The first half of that sentence has little to do with the second half. The mechanical design of most firearms alone has nothing to do with whether or not we should introduce electronics in the interests of safety or for any other reason. There is at least one VERY good (theoretical) reason to introduce such electronics, presuming they are sufficiently reliable. About 2/3 of firearm deaths are suicides and a non-trivial percentage of these are with firearms not owned by the user. Introducing electronics to prevent unauthorized users from discharging the firearm may result in a meaningful reduction in deaths by suicide. There is a lot of evidence that many/most suicides are impulse actions so if the impulse can be stymied then the suicide can be prevented. In practice I doubt it is possible to retrofit enough firearms for this to really matter even if the technology actually worked - which it doesn't.
Let's add in additional points of failure into what should be a mechanical object that needs to JUST WORK.
Adding electronics does not necessarily make a device less reliable. There are innumerable examples of electronics making machines more reliable than their mechanical only counterparts. All other things being equal a simpler device is more likely to be reliable than a more complicated device but that is a statistical correlation only due to fewer opportunities for failure. You can easily have a simpler device that ends up being less reliable due to the likelihood of the available failure modes even given that there are fewer of them. Your argument has some validity in that firearms tend to be quite reliable and so any electronics added would have a high bar to clear to improve reliability. I'm merely pointing out that it is actually possible for electronics to improve reliability.
I love how all the people staunchly arguing against it on ground of gun rights heavily imply that these guns should be banned.
How the heck is that insightful?
That's just stupid. I mean, criminals are stupid, but they arent that stupid.
He wont pull out a soldering iron. He'll pistolwhip you. Doh.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The next step they'll insist on is that not only can only the owner fire the weapon, but that special people, places, and situations can automatically disable the weapon.
I'm sorry your weapon has been disabled because you are within 1 mile of a school, 100ft of a police officer, or because you don't have the special EPA approved enivornmentally sensitive ammo loaded.
New Jersey in particular: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...
You're going to need to provide citation for that absurd quarter million claim.
"Well actually an idiot with a soldering iron will probably ..." ...buy a stupid gun.
They are only mandating smart features, not kill switches, according to the article.
There are, thankfully, not many cases where you need a gun for self defense (I say this as a gun rights advocate and gun owner). Also the few cases where it does happen, it isn't likely your gun will get grabbed unless you are very silly about things.
Most of the actual cases of a "gun getting grabbed" (which are quite rare) are when someone pulls out a gun without the intent/will to fire it, and thus someone can approach and take it away.
Having your gun grabbed and used against you is just not a real likely situation.
How often do you pick up a battery powered device from a drawer to find the batteries in it are dead? And just when you need it, like a flashlight?
i am pretty sure guns already have a kill switch, it is generally called the trigger.
The equivalent, seemingly small glitch in a smart gun could be the difference between life and death
Because no small glitch has ever happened in the opposite direction, causing a weapon to fire where you didn't want it to. Oh, wait, that happens thousands of times a year.
Like all things security, in the end the math is simple. X people die if we do A, Y people die if we do B. If A > B we should pick Y, if B > A we should pick X.
But security is highly emotional. That's why people took the car instead of the plane after 9/11 and as a result, more people died in the additional traffic than had died in the WTC. When Joe Redneck could (maybe, theoretically) saved his family from (potential, alleged) deadly danger, but then the safety feature malfunctioned - that's a nightmare and we get emotional. That the same safety feature prevented ten times the number of accidental deaths is a statistical number that we don't get emotional about.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The kind of person that can't be bothered to keep their guns locked up is probably the same person who isn't willing to spend 4x the price for a smart gun.
I never said bludgeoning a person was easy.
. I said that someone who can and will disarm a person with a gun probably has the skills to then beat the crap out of you with your gun if it for some reason does not fire.
Although it is not "easy" to bludgeon someone to death, it only takes the right kind of strike to knock a person unconscious, at which point the perpetrator can take their time pistol whipping the limp body.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
You can keep your "smart firearms" to yourself. People who argue that "smart" firearms will keep them out of the hands of criminals obviously have never dismantled a firearm before. The main elements that make a firearm are the barrel, the chamber, and the firing pin. You load a shell into the chamber, the firing pin strikes the shell igniting the primer and powder, and the bullet is expelled from the shell into the barrel and outward.
Safeties on firearms typically disable the ability to pull the trigger or to allow the mechanism to engage the firing pin. All a "smart firearm" can do is to build some complex mechanism that acts as one of these safeties. If I were to open up a firearm for maintenance I could easily remove the "smart" portion of the firearm and replace it with some normal "dumb" components. Which thanks to 3D printing and relatively cheap machining equipment could be produced at home. Criminals will still steal weapons, they will pay someone some money to disable the smart portion, and they will continue on their way.
Here are some other problems I see with a "smart firearm."
- Batteries, ok, now I need to change the batteries in my firearms before I can use them
- Fingerprint scanners are useless in states that have cold weather, ever hear of gloves?
- Fingerprint scanners are also useless in most cases if your hands are too dry from things like woodworking, or a number of other hands on trades
- RF Bracelets? Umm... ever hear of RF jammers? If I'm a criminal and I want to rob people all I have to do is get an RF jammer that works on the approved frequencies and I suddenly render all firearms (except my own hacked one) useless. (If you want to point out that such jammers would be illegal I'll point you back to the fact that criminals don't follow the law.) And, I guarantee you the police will demand they can jam the frequency so the tech will be out there and it won't stay in police hands.
Yet somehow most European police forces manage just fine with their policies of disabling shots before lethal force. It's almost as if you're making things up.
If engineering wants to upgrade guns, do it and describe the improvements openly. Unfortunately, the smart gun concept has the stench of the Democratic Party's worst elements on it -- lefty loons and expansion of the nanny state,. If this is just another "holier than thou" attempt by the nanny state to harm personal freedoms and liberties, then flush it down and take it as more evidence that the Democratic Party needs major, fundamental reform.
Idiot adult forget to close safe to gun (or it is in a shoe box) young kid use it and play with it and it follows fatal shooting (happens sadly far more than it should) or young teenager suicidal thought get gun out of hiding and use it. Both mod of failure which could be stopped or even lowered by smart gun. I am sure we could come up with more.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They don't mean it is "life and death" to not have a gun. They mean that if there is a situation where you need your gun, it IS a life and death situation and thus you want it to work first time, every time.
You have life and death situations like that in your country. I don't know where you live, but I don't need to. Every country has murders, rapes, home invasions, etc. Those are the kind of situations where in the US, and some other nations, deadly force is justified.
So if you are in one of those situations, and you have a gun, you have the option to use it to defend yourself. However it'd damn well better work. If it doesn't it'll make things worse. It's reliability is life and death.
So no, having a gun in the US is not a life and death thing. Most people are pretty safe. The murder rate is reasonably low and lower still for the general population (the murders are more concentrated to certain subgroups, like people involved with the drug trade and so on). You can happily live your life without owning a firearm, indeed about half of the families in the US do.
Folks who know even less about guns . . . shouldn't be legislating about guns.
The flaw in this reasoning is that it is quite possible to know a lot about guns and still believe it is a good idea to restrict their usage. I can introduce you to quite a few people who are firearms experts (including some cops, former military, etc) who think that overly permissive firearm ownership laws are a bad idea. I myself am fairly knowledgeable about firearms and I don't have any problem with requiring registration and training for firearms to roughly the same level we require for motor vehicles. I have no illusions that my firearm ownership keeps me safe from our government but I do think that private citizens should be allowed to keep and (when appropriate) use firearms.
It's just like any other sport. People like to show off, when they know a lot about something, and are good at it.
If you are talking about competitive target shooting then I'll agree that it is a sport. A fun one too - I love target shooting and trap shooting. However most firearms are not sold for that purpose. Most are sold for hunting and/or self defense, neither of which should ever be described as "sport". Nothing fundamentally wrong with those activities but they aren't games.
There's been a lot of discussion that I've seen already on these 'smart' guns.
Let me try and recap some of the most prominent against them:
>The RFID transmitter to unlock the gun requires batteries and has a limited range
>The RFID signal to unlock the gun can be jammed by a strong/close enough jammer
>The RFID receiver in the gun may require a battery if it has to move any mechanical parts
>The electronics are significantly less resilient than the metal construction of the rest of the gun - I've heard claims of replacement/repair of the firearm after just 2000 rounds fired
>The RFID receiver could be engineered with a 'back door' (Either mandated through legislation or not) which the government could use to lock up your gun (For example: A 'gun free' zone could have transmitters that tell all guns to lock up within range.)
>Depending on how integrated the 'smart' systems are with the mechanics of the gun, an exploited system could allow for things like intentional slamfires/rapidfire, feeding issues or other hazardous effects to the owner - remotely.
>Mechanical or electronic locks can be easily 'jailbroken' by the owner. If the safety of the firearm works by putting something between the firing pin and the cartridge, removing that piece of metal would make the gun less safe, but capable of working even if it is 'locked'. It's also a pretty trivial modification that could be done almost literally by anyone with a room temperature IQ or greater.
>Water could damage the circuitry and prevent the weapon from operating properly.
>Legislation can be introduced mandating that all firearms must be 'smart' guns. (In fact, this has already happened in New Jersey.)
>Smart guns cost significantly more than current firearms (A $500 pistol is now a $1500+ pistol), making it that much harder for the common person to purchase a firearm, especially if legislation makes the sale of non-smart guns illegal.
And what do gun owners gain from any of this? A firearm that - if someone grabbed it off you - wouldn't work? Look, let's not just ignore the elephant in the room here: This isn't about making guns safer. There's no added value in this for your common gun owner. No, this is simply an end run around the Constitution's second amendment - especially if, as in New Jersey - you start forcing people to buy smart guns and make normal firearms illegal. If widespread adoption happened, I guarantee you this type of legislation would be pushed everywhere.
Only the naive are buying into these things. Especially considering the growing distrust and discontent for our Government amongst the NSA/Snowden revelations, worsening 'war on drugs', loss of civil rights from the 'war on terror', bailouts of banks and corporations, and multiple seemingly pointless wars in the middle east.
People are really starting to get antsy about all of this stuff. The idea that the US is turning into a police state used to be laughed at. Today, the US has the largest prison population on the planet - exceeding China and Russia, it spies on its own citizens, tortures 'enemy combatants' and conducts extra-judicial targeted murders on American citizens abroad without due process of law - let alone citizens of other nations, such as the Australian citizen that was murdered this way just a few months ago. The first amendment is a joke when reasonable people can't get any airtime on ANY of the news networks and 'political correctness' groupthink is stamping out valid criticism or opposing viewpoints - even amongst those people who have made such comments in their own privacy. The right to peacefully assemble is a joke when you can only peacefully assemble where you're 'allowed' (and can be peacefully ignored). The two-party system is fundamentally flawed from the get-go, but especially so with the massive amount of corporate bribery and lack of any real investigation or punishment regarding corruption amongst our 'representatives'.
Q
From the user manual for the Armatix iP1:
"The iP1 pistol is intended for target shooting only and will not function if it is not within 10" of the referenced iW1
wristwatch and the PIN code entered, or it or the referenced iW1 wristwatch do not have sufficient battery power, or
communication between them is blocked. It should not be relied upon for purposes of self-defense."
CA will make all guns that do not have "smart gun technology" illegal to purchase unless you are a cop.
http://leginfo.legislature.ca....
SB 293 would require guns submitted for testing to incorporate owner authorization ability starting two years after two “smart guns” have been approved for sale. The Armatix iP1 is the first of the two.
As other pointed out there are guna ccident which would be lowered or avoided with that tech (suicide from a person in the family not the gun opwner, young kid finding the gun and playing with it (if I recall correctly there is about 300? gun death from kids below 12 per year) or being disarmed by an oppponent (which can't then use the gun)). A not-so-gun-enthiusiast person aka one which only see it as a tool but take no pride or fun into it, may be interrested into avoiding those mode of failure.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
And I'm sure no gun control proponent has threatened to kill gun owners, right? No gun control advocate would suggest dragging politicians behind a truck until they "saw the light on gun control", right?
.... right?
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
even if it is only 1, that is more important.
If cases of a man strong arming a woman to take her gun are lower than the number of females who use the gun in self defense, then as the poster said, this is a solution looking for a problem
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Are illegal. Gun owners are supposed to shoot to kill and not to draw the weapon if they don't intend to kill someone. IANAL.
Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
I agree that this is a silly concern for the average citizen; for policemen it's a real concern -- in that they often have to grapple with resisting people while their sidearms are in plain sight -- and it's telling that police departments are totally uninterested in smart guns.
Yes, there will be bugs in the first smart guns. They will improve over time. The question you should ask is not, "are they safe?", but "are they safer?".
Thanks for the link, but there is no indication of mandatory remote kill switch.
Actually I vaguely recall IMEI blacklisting has quite significantly reduced phone theft in parts of the world where it was deployed. But anyway, phones are a very poor comparison. Smartphones are full blown computers that have massive complexity and surface area for attack, and their security features exist in a minimally regulated and cutthroat market in which time to market and price matters hugely, and in which nobody chooses their device based on how unstealable it is. This is the worst possible environment for building a security system.
Smart gun locks would be much more comparable to auto immobilisers. Even though this is also a largely unregulated space with the resulting "absolute minimum we can get away with" design specs, immobilizers have absolutely slaughtered car theft rates over time and as a result are unquestionably a good thing.
Negligent discharge rates (and corresponding injury/fatality rates) amongst law enforcement and military are not significantly different from the general population.
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
Government, or any entity other than the human holding the firearm, having this capacity is a terrifying and highly dangerous prospect.
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
Really? That's pretty sad if true. Do you have a citation?
The best I can find is stats on gun fatalities in homes not linked to self defense, and they are pretty high (over 10 times), but I do not see any stats out there regarding a gun owner being killed with their own gun while it is in the hands of someone else.
However, looks like there is stuff out there regarding accidents or suicide using someone else's gun, and gun locks have a rather mixed track record. So while it would be less dramatic, a better argument for smart guns might be 'stop your kids from shooting themselves'.
Now, a device that would really save lives would be something that could stop people who are drunk from firing....
The absurdity of the premise behind "a gun that can't get turned on its owner" is almost beyond the pale.
Why?
Because guns don't generally get turned on their owners. It isn't a common occurrence, not here in the US, or anywhere else. If it was, we'd see a lot more "man shot in home by intruder with own gun" than we do.
It's an urban legend, up there with other silliness told by high schoolers to get their dates to snuggle close.
There is one and only one pragmatic use for limiting who can use a firearm: restriction of effective force into the hands of the "right people". The right people will always be those who have power, and want to keep you from it. Consider that for a moment before embracing so-called 'smart guns': the people pushing these want to restrict firearms to only the military and police.
That's worked out so well for people throughout history already, hasn't it?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So you are fine with being prevented from buying ANY firearm except this one?
Especially when the manufactures themselves state:
"The iP1 pistol is intended for target shooting only and will not function if it is not within 10" of the referenced iW1
wristwatch and the PIN code entered, or it or the referenced iW1 wristwatch do not have sufficient battery power, or
communication between them is blocked. It should not be relied upon for purposes of self-defense."
BTW, the question being answered here didn't ask about kill switches. Why are you moving the goal posts?
Are we this primitive?
I haven't needed a gun my whole life and the day I need one it probably won't matter to the outcome. I don't see people running to the store to get a bullet proof vest yet it would seem to be the more logical option for most people.
A recent report by Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states "“almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.” (Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013.)
I've never seen a gender breakdown of defensive gun use, but with a lower bound of a half million annual, the 250K number is not unreasonable. Even the extremely anti-gun Violence Policy Center estimates average annual defensive gun uses at around 67K.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I think it is less a solution looking for a problem, and more a solution to a dull problem with a sexy one getting more press. The chances of one's gun being used against them in an assault or home invasion is vanishingly low. However the chances of someone's gun getting into the hands of kids who play with it or a family member during a domestic dispute is pretty significant. Unfortunately talking about those issues tends to be marketing and political kryptonite and gets much less attention then the TV-worthy image of attackers and home defense.
im all for individual freedom, not being told what I can and cant do.
So you are an anarchist then? Personally I prefer to live in a civilized society where we have meaningful and ongoing debates about what rules we should all live under including those relating to weapons. I'm generally a supporter of the right to bear arms but I also recognize that there are significant real world issues with how to manage weapons while simultaneously ensuring people's rights to life and security. "Anything goes" is not a sane position to hold on the issue.
Without doing that, all gun regulations are unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you and their interpretation of the law is the one that actually matters.
The question asked concerned this statement, not kill switches:
"Keep up on the laws, multiple states have laws in place that require this technology be installed on all handguns once it's available. Whether it works or not doesn't matter, just if it's available."
This is very, very important: It should not be relied upon for purposes of self-defense.
.45 ACP, on the other hand, CAN be relied upon for purposed of self defense.
My Springfield XD-S in
You're very naive. Someone that will charge a drawn weapon and disarm the holder of said weapon is unlikely to have any difficulty with pistolwhipping him to death afterwards.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
SB 293 -- reason #194569769324 California is well and truly fucked.
Poor people don't need guns anyway. Let's make them more expensive so that only the upper class can afford them.
The moderators understand sarcasm.
Modern version: "Installing updates, please wait..."
The best I can find is stats on gun fatalities in homes not linked to self defense, and they are pretty high (over 10 times), but I do not see any stats out there regarding a gun owner being killed with their own gun while it is in the hands of someone else.
Meaning no such statistic exists, or if it does, the number is statistically irrelevant.
However, looks like there is stuff out there regarding accidents or suicide using someone else's gun, and gun locks have a rather mixed track record. So while it would be less dramatic, a better argument for smart guns might be 'stop your kids from shooting themselves'.
Which is a good reason to make 'smart' guns an option, but not a reason to make them mandatory. Not every house with guns has kids, and vice-versa. Trouble is, as mentioned in TFA, some states have decided to go the mandatory route (except for cop guns, which, as we all know, never get used on innocent people, either intentionally or accidentally. Ever. Nope, nothin' to see here...).
Now, a device that would really save lives would be something that could stop people who are drunk from firing....
... Or doing anything else of consequence.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You're right that phones are a very poor comparison but your conclusion is dead wrong.
Stealing a phone is much harder as it needs a network to work at all so getting around
a blacklist is hard. Bypassing the security on a gun or removing it completely before
reselling it would be trivial. The software is not a required part of the gun. Guns are
very simple. In order to make the security an integral part you would need to make the
software an integral part. There would possibly be ways to do this. If the gun was a
laser for instance instead of gunpowder. If the bullets had some complexity in them so
that hacking the gun wouldn't help or if there was an autoaimer or gyroscope in it so that
it couldn't be aimed without functional electronics. That's the only way I see a smart
gun working to prevent sales on the blackmarket. You have to make the gun not worth
retrofitting.
Based on statistics from police shootings, an armed women is more likely to shoot than a man. Generally this is assumed to be the knowledge that she is less likely to dominate the perp physically and though perhaps emotional, social, etc. differences, may be involved -- hard to tell since these are quite subjective, i.e., why did you shoot or not the perp.
The thing with immobilisers is that you have to defeat them before you actually get to steal the car. Such a device on a gun will do zero to prevent the theft of that gun and then the thief has an incentive and all the time in the world to defeat the so-called "smart gun".
Personally, I think they should be barred from even being called smart guns until they actually are smart. Half-arsed security measures don't count.
The question Scowler asked was:
cogeek replied:
I'm not the person you asked for a citation from, and I don't have any for anything specific to women, but, more generally:
1,029,615 incidents per year of a gun used in self defense (162,000 incidents a year where the person using a gun believed somebody "almost certainly would have been killed" if they didn't use their gun)
Source: "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun." By Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995.
989,883 incidents per year where civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime
Source: "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment." By David McDowall and others. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2000.
498,000 incidents per year where a gun is used to defend a home from an intruder
Source: "Estimating intruder-related firearm retrievals in U.S. households, 1994." By Robin M. Ikeda and others. Violence and Victims, Winter 1997.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
The reason why this gets bounced around so much is because everyone knows that any serious "smart gun" push would have to start with the military/police.
But the military/police would revolt if they were forced to use "smart guns" since it would be a mass suicide pact if the 'enemy' got developed a "smart gun disabling spoofer". Or if something simple like extremely hot/cold weather could accidentally force the "smart gun" into a 'Safe Mode' and refuse to fire. Or if there was a civil war/internal fighting with police-vs-police or military-vs-military, what good would "smart guns" be?
And that all swings back to the civilian side of the argument. Why would/should civilians adopt something so horribly flawed that the government can't even mandate the military/police to adopt?
Statistically, the need to prevent "unauthorized" people from using your gun against you is vanishingly small. Yet for the sake of doing that, many people seem willing to compromise the ability to do something that is statistically vastly more likely: defend yourself with a gun.
Wrong issue. Everyone here is worrying about your gun being used against you. Not a big issue statistically speaking. What IS a big issue is suicides. About 2/3 of deaths by firearms are suicides and a big number of these suicides are with firearms not owned by the person committing suicide. Additionally a huge percentage of suicides are impulse actions which if the opportunity is removed they suicide does not occur. In theory, some sort of "smart gun" technology could prevent a lot of these suicides. Key words being "in theory". In practice I simply don't see it ever happening. There are huge numbers of existing firearms and I do not see any likely scenario by which these firearms could/would be retrofitted with this sort of technology even if it did actually work - which it doesn't
67,000, of course, is larger than the 10,886 (in 2008, according to the FBI) or so murders a year using guns.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
If you can beat me from my bed to my nightstand I deserve to die by my own weapon.
"Safety mechanism will fail when it's needed most" is a reason not to do this?
How about "Safeties stick when needed the most", or "Guns jam when needed most" or "Ammunition misfires when needed most", or "You missed your target in the dark at 3 AM without your glasses on after being startled awake and killed your 3 year-old in the bedroom next to yours when you needed to aim the most"?
Guns need to be MORE unsafe so they are safer? Why have safeties AT ALL if that is your argument?
While there may be scenarios where a person-dependent firearm could be a benefit, it is always the case that you don't know what the situation will be when you need a firearm. The firearms in my house need to be readily available to myself, my wife, my kids, anyone that isn't a bad-guy. When the bad-guy comes, you don't know who will be home or whether or not they just got out of the shower.
A major selling point of Glocks (and why most police in America have switched to them) is that they have no external safety to deal with. They have three safeties which prevent the gun from going off when something other than a trigger pull is happening (dropped, etc.); but when you pull the trigger, the guns fire...and that is why they are safe.
Half the problem here is that people define safety differently.
Guns can be a work of art and adding stuff to them can be like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. It is not just about being reliable and quick to deploy it is also about screwing up the designs made by some very dedicated gunsmiths. Even utility weapons such as the AK-47 are valued because they simply can't be drowned or clogged with dirt and simply tend to work every time under really wretched conditions. Imagine how bad an AK-47 would have been all these years with a pile of electronics inside it. Chances are your average Viet Cong would not be carrying replacement batteries when his Ak-47 needed charging.
someone who can and will disarm a person with a gun probably has the skills to then beat the crap out of you with your gun if it for some reason does not fire.
Someone who can and will disarm a person with a gun probably has the skills to then beat the crap out of you without a gun or any other weapon. Might as well have the unsmart gun.
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_Unintentional_Deaths_2010-a.pdf
But don't ever let facts get in your way.
They appeal most to inexperienced and/or untrained people worried about self defense, as well as people with kids, worried what might happen if those kids start messing around with stuff they shouldn't.
A much simpler and less expensive solution is to not let children play with firearms. If a child has access to firearms such that they are able to hurt themselves or others then the parent(s) should go to jail. As for the inexperienced/untrained people, I see no problem with requiring mandatory training classes for anyone who wants to purchase a firearm. We require training for all kinds of other dangerous products. So called "smart gun" technology is a impractical and complicated technical solution to a social problem.
This article ringed a bell ....
How to fireproof your firearms (June 1977 Popular Mechanics)
I want it. Maybe I am not a current gun owner, but have small kids.
So purchase a gun safe and keep the firearm in there. There are plenty of gun safes that can be opened quickly. Your decision to procreate does not make "smart gun" technology a good idea. It is your responsibility to store your firearms safely and if you cannot do this then you should not purchase one. If you are unable to keep your children away from a firearm and thus endangering others then you should be in jail and your children should be put in the custody of a more responsible adult.
So if the dumb fucks who don't/won't secure their weapons, how else do you protect the innocents aside from making sure that the dumb fuck's guns are secured for them?
You put the "dumb fucks" in jail when they screw up and/or remove the children from their custody. "Smart guns" certainly aren't going to solve the problem even if they were technologically feasible. This is a social problem and technological solutions rarely work well on social problems.
so what is the point?
It's about your kid son finding the gun you thought you had hidden so well he'd never find it
If the firearm is stored anywhere except a well secured safe to which the child has no access then the parent is unfit to be responsible for the safety of another human being. Jail and/or removal of custody seem to be the appropriate solutions. If the firearm cannot be safely stored then it should not be purchased in the first place.
Actually the more important thing is to safely secure all ammunition. A firearm without ammunition is of extremely limited utility.
"The moderators understand sarcasm."
But apparently they do not understand the difference between sarcasm that hits the target, and an attempt that comes nowhere near the target.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
1. What are you doing in areas where you think you need a gun? Are you looking for trouble? Pretty much the USA is safe. And the very very rare occasions where you might need one, you more than likely unqualified - which leads to ...
2. Unless you have recurrent combat trainging with a firearm, you will not be able to protect youself. Going to the range and firing at stationary targets does not prepare you. You will get exited, at least - more likely panic - and shooting everything but your assailant. At most civilian shooting ranges they have rules against quick drawing, rapid fire and have very strict safety rules. It's: aim with finger off of trigger, place finger on trigger and then fire. Then wait. You are not practicing in a high pressure situation. whcih leads to ....
3. Any reasonably athletic person can be on you before you can put your finger on your trigger and will take you gun away.
4. You are delusional. I am part of the "gun culture" here in the States but I know my limits, the realities of situations and know when to not look for trouble. And considering the most handgun ammo will carry, you will probably hit an innocent bystander or even the wrong person.
5. Doctor Who has it best: run!
New Jersey since 2002 has been waiting for smart guns to be available so their law can kick in and make them mandatory for all guns sold there. Police, of course, will be exempt from this law. Imagine that.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Most gun lock advocates suggest using it to prevent a gun from being used by a child picking up a gun left around the house, a burglar taking it from your bedside table, or a mugger disarming you. The sarcasm was directed at the notion that somehow the ability to remove a gun lock with a soldering iron would change the dynamic in any of these situations.
It's *possible*, but the attacker would have to be close enough for almost any weapon to be useless from the start. I.e. if you want until the attacker is touching you to draw, it's not going to go well. If she draws at 6 feet, the gun will be empty by the time the attacker gets to her. (and hopefully, some of those bullets will have hit said attacker -- in a panic, your aim will be "off".)
If you don't want a smart gun that "might fail", don't get one. Keep a ordinary gun and be satisfied!
If I want a gun that cannot be operated by someone who broke in while I slept, let me have it. (Well, if it can be made at all.)
Let the gun buyer weigh the risks - gun with another failure mode, or gun that can be fired by thieves, kids or anyone who grab them.
And no, the existence of "smart guns" do not mean that everybody must be forced onto smart guns. It is certainly possible to have a society with both smart and dumb guns. More diversity, that's all.
Trigger locks are probably a better option.
Anything that requires you to put an object into the trigger guard is inherently flawed. I've never seen a trigger guard that would actually preclude the gun from being loaded. What do you suppose happens if you fumble the trigger guard while the firearm is loaded?
Action locks are acceptable, but a solid safe/lockbox is a better choice for a home-defense firearm, because it's the only way to store a firearm in a ready-to-use state.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
William Blackstone might want to have a word with you. Should we really be worried about rounding up a whole bunch of "bad guys" to keep them from doing bad things because of the chance that a few of them might be innocent? Think of the children!
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I understand the debate related to the possible "failures" in critical situations... but aren't there other scenarios where this technology could be useful where it wouldn't really matter if there was a failure. Hunting? Target shooting? In those cases it seems that a system failure would be merely an inconvenience, not a matter of life and death.
If this bill were to pass and the second smart gun approved for sale also had the "not intended for self defense" notation in its manual (as it surely would - I doubt any gun manufacturer would open themselves up to lawsuits because defective smart guns failed to work and, as a result, the gun operator was injured or killed), I doubt the law would survive the scrutiny of even the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Much as most of the judges on the Ninth Circuit court hate it, they have to follow Heller (recognizing a Second Amendment right of individuals to keep and bear arms for self-defense) and Chicago (via application of the Incorporation Doctrine and the Fourteenth Amendment to Heller, subjecting state and local governments to the constraints of Heller). Any law which bans the sale of any handgun which is effective for self defense is unlikely to survive.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
A lot of naysayers of smart triggers are using the supposed inevitability of remote kill switches as part of their arguments. Which I find a little absurd, a little too much conspiracy theorizing. (For example, I don't ever recall any Democratic leader asking for such a thing.) If this is a real concern, then I would like something more to substantiate it. That was the only point of my original post.
A number of years ago a good friend of mine worked for a group that was given the task to study the feasibility of smart gun technology for one of the major gun manufacturers. The problem was that they succeeded.They developed a system that required the gun owner to wear a wrist band that would activate the gun. The technology involved a simple change where a pin would be inserted which prevented the gun from firing unless the wrist band was detected and that the wrist was held straight. It worked surprisingly well. It was demonstrated to the local police who wanted it since if someone is wrestling for a gun it is unlikely to go off or if someone takes the gun they can't fire it. Since they were only supposed to study it and were supposed to fail, when it came out that they succeeded they changed the rules and forbade everyone who worked on it from discussing it. The government and gun manufacturers wanted to prove that it was not possible so they wouldn't have to do it. After they succeeded, they changed the rules such that a smart gun would have to understand the intent of the shooter and not shoot innocent bystanders or non-combatants, in other words, an impossible task. The group was disbanded and forbidden from discussing the project.
Posting as A/C for obvious reasons.
... because the War on Drugs was so effective at preventing the production and sale of drugs in the United States?
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
In the martial arts communities, videos of gun disarm techniques are always taken with a grain of salt and it is usually understood that when trying to grapple a gun away from someone, there's probably still a good 50/50 chance you're going to get shot trying to take someone's gun away from them even for a trained self-defense professional. So I don't think most people have to worry about having their guns grabbed out of their hands and turned against them. This is also a terrible, terrible idea for the 95 lb woman who carries a gun as an equalizer to keep from getting raped by the 200 lb guy who manages to take away the smart gun from her because it wouldn't authenticate in time/improper grip to enable firing/RF interference/etc.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
[bad guy disarms person with smart gun]
Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
Smart guns would also help in the [bad guy finds gun before person can get it] and [kid finds gun in parent's closet] situations.
What we need is stronger booze. One shot and you are not walking for the evening.
The smart gun tech has less to do with being disarmed and having the weapon turned against you (although it might be more useful for police), but making the weapon a brick when your kids are playing with it. It also makes the weapon less attractive to thieves.
A primary concern is securing it against your kids and your kids' friends. It's tough. This adds another hurdle for them to screw up and hurt themselves.
Or...the rightful owner of the firearm, knowing that it is a "smart" gun, moves his/her watch bearing arm away as soon as the other party gets his/her finger near the trigger
From what I can tell, every congressman who backs SB 293 would most likely support kill switches as well. I see no reason for them (or any law enforcement agency) to oppose it.
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
As someone in the military I can say that they are probably right. I can't tell you how many stupid things I have seen done with guns. This probably goes back to the fact that they have no experience with weapons. A lot of people who join have never touched a gun or even seen one until they joined. Quite said really I think that proper fire arm handling is something everyone should know about.
So would good storage discipline.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yea, but the feds tend to get all pissy when you start running 'shine.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
right, because the war on drugs is working out oh so well....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So would good storage discipline.
How about mandating use of trigger locks instead of mandating sale of smart guns? That would go directly to the storage discipline bit.
Yes. The argument often made for women not to carry firearms is that it'll be taken away from them and used against them.
If they're willing to fire it, it's very, very hard to take a gun away from somebody if it's in their hands.
Still, for a statistic on how many people are killed by their own weapons after being disarmed, I came up with a rate of 5% of police officers being murdered by their own weapon, as an average over the last decade(25 out of 535).
It's important to note that I figure that the guns were probably stolen out of the officer's holster, not out of his hands in most cases.
Review of FBI reports on slain officers in 2012 shows that 1 officer is listed as being killed with his own weapon, however I did not find such in the narrative, but the FBI site mentions that not all cases have a publically available narrative, for various reasons. I only found one where such a system would have been helpful, which involved using a slain officer's weapon to injure a tow truck driver and 2 other officers(1 fatally).
I don't read AC A human right
In my opinion, if you're going to carry, you have an obligation to yourself and others to get some training, not only to operate the weapon safely, but also situational awareness and some rudimentary rules of engagement. There are some well known rules of thumb -- like the "21 foot rule", and easy to train and remember tactics to increase the odds of successfully defending yourself.
What you say is true -- if you wait until the attacker is touching you, it may be too late. There are solutions to this, including defensive techniques, weapon retention techniques, and even carrying your weapon in a fashion where you don't have to draw in order to fire.
Carrying a weapon (or having one at home) is not a magical talisman that keeps you from all harm, nor is it an uncontrolled death device that's an unparalleled danger to yourself and others. The truth, as in many such cases, is somewhere in the middle. As I tried to explain to a newspaper reporter years ago, having a firearm is not a sure thing, but it does give you another choice besides huddling over your children and waiting for the attacker to shoot.
Training and experience increases your chances of survival and reduces chances of collateral damage. Responsible people learn and practice.
To those who say "leave it to the police", keep in mind that the police are usually not there at the time -- they're only there to put up the tape and fill out reports afterwards. And if like me you practice at the same firing ranges where police practice, you might be appalled at how bad many of them are. Both at handling weapons safely, and at basic marksmanship. And those are the ones who *practice*.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You want the UK's violent crime rate? Go for it.
(((dB)))
And even if you could prevent a few suicides by firearm, you'd just see suicides by other means.
Actually there is copious academic evidence that the people would NOT just commit suicide by other means. You are making a seemingly reasonable assumed conclusion not supported by actual evidence.
You're going to need to provide citation for that absurd quarter million claim.
Why? Are you incapable of doing the slightest amount of web searching, but somehow still manage to post here?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Implant a RFID in both hands of criminals. Have guns detect the RFID, and go "safe" when in range.
Now criminals can't fire guns...
Unless they buy an older, cheaper gun... or surgically remove the RFID.
MAGAZINE DISCONNECT SAFETY.
We've already had existing technology for years to help deal with the chance that your gun may be grabbed from you and used against you. Addition of "smart" (ironically named) technology is just another bid to add computing technology to guns because it's more NSA friendly and left-wing lobbyist friendly.
Can't speak for everywhere, but my state made it mandatory to include a trigger/action lock with every firearm sold some years ago.
Of course, it's still up to the owner to actually use the damn thing... and I don't see how you could enforce such a thing without grossly violating several other civil liberties in the process.
Well, other than posthumous enforcement, but that kinda defeats the purpose. Maybe a better idea would be to make firearms education mandatory in schools, that way kids grow up knowing real stuff about guns and what they do, rather than getting all their experience and "knowledge" from Call of friggin' Duty.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You're outright wrong.
Really? Then prove that the supreme court has in EVERY single case declined to allow any regulation or restriction of any kind on ownership of "arms" in every circumstance. Even a single standing ruling restricting gun rights in the slightest way proves me right and that the supreme court interprets the constitution to mean that the right to bear arms in the second amendment is not without limit.
However since I've already cited at least one case your argument is shot dead. (Pun intended)
Every right in the Constitution has limits. Free speech is not without limits. Freedom of religion is not without limits. Why would you expect the second amendment to be any different?
Why Helium and not the significantly cheaper nitrogen?
I don't read AC A human right
Go ahead. Make the guns smarter...we'll keep making people dumber.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
"Most gun lock advocates suggest using it to prevent a gun from being used by a child picking up a gun left around the house, a burglar taking it from your bedside table, or a mugger disarming you."
And most people that have any firearms experience will just look at you like a retard if you tell them that.
1.) "to prevent a gun from being used by a child picking up a gun left around the house"
The answer to this is firearms safety education. The adult version of this includes not leaving weapons 'laying around' and the child version includes do not touch without permission. Both versions include muzzle awareness. If they are selling an automatic system on the premise that it allows you to own a weapon safely without going all that boring safety training stuff, then they will be causing, not preventing, injuries to children and should be held accountable for that.
2.) "a burglar taking it from your bedside table"
And this is exactly the situation in which they have all the time in the world to figure out how to disable that safety, or more likely they will simply sell it to someone who does know how to run a soldering iron...
3.) "a mugger disarming you"
As already covered, in that case you just get beat to death instead of shot, that's no gain and arguably a loss.
So, yeah, a swing and a miss. Real sarcasm has to have some truth behind it, that's what makes it funny.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I was making fun of the original poster who seemed to think that anyone with a soldering iron became a threat. You're disassembling the wrong statement.
"The answer to this is firearms safety education." - awesome. Most pro-gun types are vociferously against this sort of regulation. This is really what most gun-safety advocates are looking for. Requiring guns to be in safes or locked cases. Requiring training for everyone in a home with guns. Common sense stuff. Ramifications for accidents that occur due to negligence. I agree, that if we had laws with real teeth we wouldn't need things like electronic trigger locks.
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
I think it's possible that the police don't want "smart" guns for the same reason citizens don't -- the perception that the circuitry or sensor may fail at a crucial moment and the gun will fail to fire when it should.
I think the people who believe that smart guns should be required for citizens, justify it in their own minds by the stipulation that citizens shouldn't really be allowed to defend themselves, and "smart gun" laws is a baby step in that direction. And if a citizen needs to fire to defend self or family, and the gun doesn't go off, well, so what?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Simple, make a law that all firearms involved in domestic policing (FBI, local police, various SWAT teams) must have the smart gun technology.
What's good for the goose...
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
California - and it's really the microstamping law (not sure if owner-identifying features are also covered).
Every time you post Tom http://start64.com/index.php?o... since it's part of what I do all over the world with thousands and millions of threats - giving you the working principle of the forcefield essentially, ala "what can't touch or reach you, can't hurt you"... & it works
APK
P.S.=> So don't go telling more lies - & besides securing you? It makes you faster 2 ways, + more reliably connected to your favorite sites too - Bonus (3 for the price of 1 (zero actually - it's free))... apk
"Most pro-gun types are vociferously against this sort of regulation."
Regulation? Why on earth you inserted that word I dont know, but we are most definitely not against this kind of education.
"This is really what most gun-safety advocates are looking for."
Well yeah, except that we teach our kids instead of going around calling ourselves 'gun-safety advocates.'
"Requiring guns to be in safes or locked cases."
Absolutely not. A gun you cant get to when you need it is *worse* than no gun at all.
"I agree, that if we had laws with real teeth we wouldn't need things like electronic trigger locks."
I dont know who you think you are agreeing with but it's not me. We have more laws than we need already, and by the way no one needs a trigger lock. If the weapon really needs to be decommissioned you pull the firing pin and pack it separately.
You know just a few decades ago we had firearm safety classes in schools? It's your so-called 'gun safety advocates' who shut that down. Oh, the horrors, exposing innocent children to firearms!
Many, many accidental deaths have resulted as generations have been raised since without formal firearm safety education available to them.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
18:39
Psychology 101: Bite your lip after a strong statement such as that and you've been caught lying.
"Gun control - the theory that 100lb women have the "right" to fight off 200lb rapists with only their bare hands."
My SIG is a P226
Not that you really care but a simple search for John Lott, jr. will bhelp you out.
I think it's possible that the police don't want "smart" guns for the same reason citizens don't -- the perception that the circuitry or sensor may fail at a crucial moment and the gun will fail to fire when it should.
Given that the most popular firearm for police in the USA doesn't even include a manual safety? I agree. I just give the police as an example because statistics actually exist for them, and given their unique profession are at additional risk. If you're murdered in the line of duty as a police officer, there's a 5% chance it will be with your own weapon. Heck, the manga-trigger system is ancient and doesn't actually authenticate beyond you needing the ring(and any magna-trigger ring will work) and it worked as well as any more complicated system would have. Of course, if every gun had a magna-trigger then anybody with a functioning gun would have one and be able to fire any other firearm, theirs or not. So it doesn't scale.
I think the people who believe that smart guns should be required for citizens, justify it in their own minds by the stipulation that citizens shouldn't really be allowed to defend themselves, and "smart gun" laws is a baby step in that direction.
That's the perception of gunnies, yes. The other stated policies by said politicians only reinforces that. Unstated is also raising the price of firearms so only the rich can afford them. Classism at it's finest.
I don't read AC A human right
And I, for one, am positive that all the gangbangers and other criminals in Cali will be turning in their dumb guns and use only the legal smart ones. After all, criminals always follow the laws, right?
So, you're wearing this watch that is constantly broadcasting "I have a 'smart' gun". A criminal can then scan for the signal to locate you, and use a jammer to disable your weapon (because if it can't hear the watch it defaults to locked). They can then collect your $2000 gun and watch, probably for de-smarting and sale as an unregistered weapon.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Yeah I was trolling you. I know there's no such thing as a reasonable pro gun advocate.
Is apparently to take guns out of the hands of poor law abiding citizens.
Who is going to be effected by this tech? Not the police or military. Despite police guns often being used by criminals their guns will probably remain "dumb" because dumb is reliable.
It probably won't effect the rich either because the older weapons will remain grand fathered and they can afford to buy them even as the price goes up. You can for example still buy a licensed AK47 or fully automatic M16 in the US. Its just very expensive because the gun in question had to have been made and licensed prior to those getting banned. There is a market in the US for those grandfathered weapons. And if you've got 10 grand sitting around you too can have a completely legal automatic weapon.
So this doesn't effect the rich at all.
And then you have criminals... by definition they don't obey the law. So it doesn't effect them either beyond marginally reducing the market they can tap into.
What's left? Poor and middle class people that might not be able to afford a gun if its cost goes up a few hundred dollars.
Here is my solution to the smart gun debate:
Make it clear that the police will have to use the smart guns if the general public is forced to use them as well.
Its not unreasonable because again may gun crimes are committed with police weapons.
But the political genius of this ploy is that the police won't like it and will use their lobbying power through their unions to shut it down. Which renders the whole push dead.
Best way to kill it. Say all new gun legislation would have to apply to the police and police weapons and very quickly the political coalitions that bring these issues to the fore would choke it off out of shear self preservation.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apkquote
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
I'll accept it when the majority of police departments require their officers to use it, and have field tested it thoroughly.
The purpose of smart gun tech is to allow you to carry and store the gun in plain sight where you can reach it quickly when the time comes to defend yourself, your family, and the Constitution. If you have to keep the thing locked away somewhere to keep kids and women from hurting themselves with it how long is it going to take you to get to it when you really need to defend those women and children?
Guns fans should be in favor of anything that lets them pull the trigger quicker. By enabling safe and open storage on the coffee table, the dresser, nightstand, under the pillow, the kitchen counter, the bathroom counter, your desk at work, and the dashboard of the truck, you'll never be caught without your gun within quick reach and everyone will know exactly who they should not mess with.
I think OP's contention is that the criminal is going to steal the gun and, at some later point, disable the disabling mechanism, at his leisure.
surely a smart gun would still be secured like a feature gun. a feature gun could just as easily be taken and reused. I thought the purpose of smart gun technology was to prevent a turn-the-tables play.,
mayhaps someday there will be groups of criminals that specialize in de-smarting firearms, presuming there's ever an actual market for the damn things to begin with.
"jailbreaking" them?
A quite conservative claim cited here is between 50,000 and 100,000 use of firearms each year for defense. Much less conservative estimates go all the way to nearly 4 million. However, the earlier studies go on to claim that in over 90% (as high as 98%) of cases, merely brandishing a weapon is enough to deter any attack, which then goes on unreported, hence the discrepancy.
Also, prevalence of crime involving guns has been estimated to about 500,000 a year. So depending on who you believe, it is either much more or significantly less. This is in the USA. In other countries with much tougher gun control laws, all figures are much lower. Now you can argue which is better.
There is an upper end on the difficulty for retrofitting a gun.
Roughly speaking, you can make a full auto sub-machine gun for about $50 worth of parts and labor if you're making lots of them.
Now, more labor makes some sense for higher quality, but there's a limit for guns for a criminal. Quality isn't actually that big of an issue for lots of them.
Still, what do you have to bypass in a smart gun to make it operate? One version I remember interfaced with the 'magazine safety', which is designed to not allow the gun to fire if the magazine was removed. 'fixing' that would involve ripping out the electronics and spot-welding the safety into the proper spot to disable it completely.
I don't read AC A human right
Could be the difference between YOUR Life and Death.. or the Life and Death of the person you want to shoot.
He was referring to a common 'failure to stop' drill called the Mozambique (Drill). Translation: 2 to the chest 1 to the head.
It works out very quickly because of muzzle climb. First round to around nipple level, a bit below the armpits. Second round to just below the collarbone area. Third round to the face, forehead specifically.
The idea is that even if somebody is wearing body armor it doesn't protect against head shots. So you shoot twice to the chest, the largest easiest disabling target. If that doesn't work, you put a round into the brain.
I'm a bit hesitant to believing that a fold up shield can withstand small arms fire, but I agree with deescalating to the maximum extent possible. But if you have to shoot, you should be effective at it. Tueller drills help reduce your reaction time if somebody is coming at you with a knife, as well as help inform you how close you can get and not be threatened by a knife. Mozambiques help in case you encounter somebody wearing armor. Or hopped up on crack/meth/bath salts for that matter.
I don't read AC A human right
Because the only weapons someone can use for self-defense are handguns?? Pepper spray works wonders, you know. Or a stun gun. You do know other weapons exist, right? You can't be that dense, surely.
Or you could work on improving your country so it doesn't sound like the wild west or something from Mad Max. Honestly - where do you live?? Just for a comparison, the police in the country I live in fired just 85 shots in total for the whole of 2011. Most of those were warning shots. Lots of people here have guns, but purely for sport. Surely something must be broken in your country if even owning a gun is some sort of necessity. Is crime really that bad where you live? Mod me down if you wish, but that won't fix anything.
Nothing that a ball point pen, or a sharp pencil can't solve! Just press down here for 1, 2, 3 seconds. There! Wait, or is that 5 seconds to reset?
The 9th made an interesting decision in Peruta v San Diego :)
the "smart gun" appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
Agreed with other statements, but a perfect "smart gun" would be cool, and more useful than non-smart guns.
Currently one can train for using guns. One of the training subjects is "gun retention" - exactly the topic being discussed. It might be rare for one's gun to be used against oneself, but that is because gun holders take extreme care so that it doesn't happen. Not having to take so extreme a care when already stressed can only help the gun holder.
Another point - gun is a distance weapon. Could be useless when distance between combatants is less than 2 feet. But at times the aggression starts when the attacker is at 2 feet distance, maybe even less. So either the self-defender starts shooting everyone within 30 feet of his/her own body, whether or or not they are aggressive. OR they need to be extremely well trained in close range combat, without using the gun because gun could be useless at low distances. Importantly - at that point, the self-defender would have to weigh the option of trying to use guns - if successful the attacker can be killed / wounded / scared / fended off. But at such close ranges, attacker being a professional, can take the gun. So the self-defendant might not even try to use the gun, which means a wasted gun.
Smart guns are more useful. If combat unfortunately becomes a close range one, the gun holder can still try to use the gun. With non-smart gun, there is a big risk even in trying.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
And is a conjunction moron. Learn to write so we don't endure your typical 1 line fart replies.
Exactly. Unless you change the technology involved then smart gun technology will
not help in the black market. If nothing else, the criminal could just detach the
high quality barrel, etc... from the smart gun and buy or recreate the missing pieces.
I've often wondered if that wouldn't be exactly what's needed. It would certainly make things more democratic, instead of having the forces of capitalism determine who gets to have their message heard. Or simply influence the most people, per the recent claims that Google has an influence on elections.
Of course, this would mean that the government couldn't use technology to communicate messages either, or everything would be influenced by messages from the state, which is a rather perilous track to tread. I don't trust people who control political power any more than I trust people who control capitalist power.
The question should be whether the safety mechanism will work much more often than it fails, not whether it will ever fail. If, on overwhelming balance, it's more likely to save your life than risk it, it's a win. It is exactly akin to people who refuse to wear seatbelts because of the tiny number of cases where people were trapped by them.
Of course, there are plenty of people who refuse to accept that ownership of a gun puts you at greater, not lesser risk ("the well-known I'm-special" argument), and plenty of people who, for some reason, think that safety and liberty -- and the constitution -- are inevitably at odds (they are not). There are a few gun-owners who actually believe in responsible design, ownership, and operation, and promote that -- but the NRA, though founded on those principles, is not.
Oh, there is no such thing as a rational, pragmatic, gun argument, in the USA, in case you were wondering. Again, you might expect the NRA to promote a reasoned discourse, and safe sale, use, storage, and ownership. Not a bit of it.
Of course, it's still up to the owner to actually use the damn thing... and I don't see how you could enforce such a thing without grossly violating several other civil liberties in the process.
Oh, that's easy - and not "daily visits from law enforcement to check your locks". Instead, you just say "if there is a firearms accident that would have been stopped by the trigger lock if it was in place, there is a rebuttable presumption that the owner was willfully responsible."
Well, other than posthumous enforcement, but that kinda defeats the purpose.
It would work well as a deterrent. A news story about some father going to jail for homicide when one playing kid finds the gun and shoots another might make others double-check their trigger locks.
> Pepper spray works wonders, you know.
No, it really doesn't. You can build up a tolerance to it in practice. Keep in mind that consumer "pepper spray" is not the same thing as military grade Mace, and isn't significantly more effective than throwing hot sauce at your attacker. It may be effective if the attacker isn't expecting it, you manage in the heat of the moment to deploy it and have the nozzle pointed in the right direction, and you are in a tactical position to inconvenience your attacker and make a run for it. But magical it ain't, and you need to have realistic expectations if you're going to carry it. It's somewhat more effective than a St Christopher medal, true. (Side note, the best pepper spray dispenser I ever saw was shaped somewhat like a handgun, with a handle and a trigger. Much easier to get it pointed the right direction under stress. But those designs are rare.)
> Or a stun gun.
I have researched this, because my 19 year old daughter travels, and the areas of the US with the most draconian gun laws tend to restrict stun guns also. (In some cases, even pepper spray is restricted.) Fortunately she spends most of her time on the west coast, where they can be carried, with some restrictions, and that will have to do until she's old enough to get her CCW. (And even then, she won't be able to carry in California.)
But ... you've seen the youtube videos and read news reports about people being tased, right? So you know that effectiveness varies SIGNIFICANTLY from individual to individual, with some people dropping at one jolt, and others continuing the fight after being tased multiple times. So a sure thing, this ain't either. Perhaps better than nothing, but be aware of the limitations.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Per the CDC, in 2010:
Deaths:
369 children(1-14) by firearm
208 were homicide(IE intentional by other)
81 were suicides(tragic, but would they have used something else if a firearm wasn't available?)
62 were unintentional
Another source on injuries
1,535 injuries over a 5 year period, or 307/year.
A 'few hundred' is correct, but in a country of over 300M people, you'd be hard pressed to find many common activities that are less dangerous on the whole. While I always recommend keeping guns locked up, saying it's a pressing issue compared to things like the proper use of car seats, pool safety, etc... For example, on average 707 children(0-14) die each year from drowning. 3,533 experience nonfatal submersion injuries.
I don't read AC A human right
Until your precise hand print is necessary for the gun to operate, there is no way to stop an assailant from using your own gun on you even with the proposed bracelet and RFID technology. All they have to do is get close enough to your wrist for the RFID to communicate, and voila' you are shot. If you are going to bring a gun into your home defense strategy you better be ready to use it with no hesitation. And if you truly feel you are being physically threatened, trying to make a disabling shot is asking to die yourself. If you think they are going to kill you, you better kill them first. Every statement, inference, and consideration regarding gun owner ship made by our Founding Fathers reflected their understanding that the only way to keep a Democratic Republic from becoming a dictatorship under the rule of the right individuals, is an armed populace. True, our current Administration wants to convert the United States into a Communist country solely under the control of the "Elitist" among that ruling body. Regardless of the rhetoric, if they are telling you they have any other agenda than dis-arming said Citizens Militia, they are lying to you, which is pretty much standard procedure for our current government. We already have Government agencies declaring the 1st Amendment no longer exists in this country. It only exists in the zones they establish as "Freedom of Speech Zones". Was anyone watching what the BLM was doing in Nevada? Nope, didn't think so.........
It is more applicable to law enforcement officers where the statistic is well measured. Of course this is the group that is exempted from smart gun legislation.
In the case of a smart gun though, the item is stolen and *then* unlocked later at leisure. Given how simple firearms are, that will not be a difficult operation.
Gun safes work great for protecting firearms as well but not if the thief either has time to work on it or can carry it off whole to a more private location.
This is exactly the point. The things that drive violent crime are not caused by increased firearm ownership rates. To that extent, you an expect any efforts to reduce firearm ownership rates to have no effect on violent crime.
is another flame bait article like this one
Interesting, but it was only a three judge panel so I view it as a statistical fluke.
Unfortunately, the soap opera continues and, I expect, the petition to rehear the case en banc will be granted. The full court will then have to decide between following their "feelings", and likely being bench slapped by the SCOTUS, or following the Constitution. Sadly, I'm not hopeful they will do the right thing.
No matter which way the 9th ends up on this case, certainly the SCOTUS will be asked to weigh in and, if the full court ultimately rules against the plaintiff, I imagine cert will be granted as it's a fairly important and crisp legal question that the SCOTUS has not addressed and that seems to fly in the face of the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms. I am hopeful that SCOTUS will do the right thing.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I don't need one more technology added that can fail. Besides, there's over 300 million out there without it.
When I am at the range, the minute I see a group of police coming to train is the minute I start packing up my gear to leave...they are the most unsafe group of people I tend to run into at the range...even more-so than the newcomers!
When I am at the range, the minute I see a group of police coming to train is the minute I start packing up my gear to leave...they are the most unsafe group of people I tend to run into at the range...even more-so than the newcomers!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I think the GP is thinking about microstamping, if so that would be CA, NY, NJ at least
Once weapons are dependent on a radio electronic connection in order to be functional, what comes next? Ever notice that your cell phone doesn't work in most movie theaters? That's because they have cell phone dampening systems that block your signal. Not a bad idea in a movie theater... Who wants to hear someone's cell phone go off during an important scene?
If you can block cell phones, why not Smart Guns? Perhaps you own a Bar or a restaurant or hell, you pick which business you want to own... If you didn't want firearms in your establishment, wouldn't you buy a "Smart Gun Jammer?" Who wants guns around schools? Perhaps an area jammer to create a gun free zone? What happens if your home happens to be next to a school and that jammer also covers your home?
Apply ROT13 to my e-mail address to reply to me. The Price of Freedom is Self-Reliance. The Cost? Education!
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
The language at the time of the founders does not support your contention that "well regulated" means "well armed." "Well regulated" means well trained and run according to rules - as opposed to an unruly (see what I did there?) mob.
"Well equipped" or, of course, "well armed" would mean, well, "well armed."
I do not think "well regulated" means what you think it means. "Access to working guns" might be expressed as "well furnished" or "well equipped" or "well armed." "Well regulated" means functioning with rules, as opposed to an "unruly" mob. Usage at the time also indicated an element of "well trained."
But no. It does not mean "access to working guns" any more than it mean "well furnished with delicious cake."
As desirable as that would be.
You're right, that people sometimes do "have to defend their freedoms against their own government". But something being good doesn't mean it's in the Constitution. Furthermore, something being in the Constitution doesn't mean it's good. I think that's Scalia, who said it wasn't their job to make sure laws were smart or good, just that they are constitutional.
As an example, I'd say that that the Prohibition, very much part of the Constitution, was terrible law and terrible policy.
I'm with Wyatt Earp - hand over your weapons when you come into town. We'll return them when you leave.
We have seen the case of a well-regulated armed militia. It is/was called the Posse Comitatus, and few greater forces for evil exist. I worry about highly motivated, heavily armed groups of religious people who follow a leader who has heard the voice of god tell him that all X need to be killed, that all Y need to be subjugated, etc.
One could argue that every lynch mob was a "well regulated militia", in that they were armed groups of citizens pursuing a common goal in a sufficiently organized fashion.