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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.'"
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Disabling shots are irresponsible, unsafe, and ineffective.
If you can deal with a situation without lethal force (accounting for disparity of force, ability to do act, and reasonable-person standard of self defense), then you are obligated to do so. You are more likely to miss (especially under stress), will achieve far less knock-down, tells a jury that you are so goddamn awesome that you probably didn't need to shoot, and you are trying to hit something still filled with things like femoral and brachial arteries so it may result in you BOTH being dead.
Center mass if you can, Mozambique if you have to.
THL phish sticks
Note to self - start proofreading your own proofreading, dork.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
how about we just learn to respect the constitution in all regards again
the second amendment is literally 3 or 4 sentences long. I dont know why its so hard to understand the law that says the government "shall not infringe" Mandating ANYTHING is infringing
And dont give me that BS about how well regulated means regulations, it does not. It means well armed. I am all for smart guns, as long as I have my choice to buy a non smart gun signed, this non gun owner in a home with many
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
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.
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
The only place that I know "disabling" shots are taught as a practice is in the prison system.
The system just isn't that concerned if the convict being "disabled" ends up dying. If the correctional officer "misses" and the disabling shot goes center mass, the only thing that is going to happen to him is some more range time
Its a really bad idea on the street though
Once it is proven to work once, it will work the same way FOREVER.
I have a DTV converter for an old analog TV set. No Internet connection, no way to upload new s/w. About once a month, I turn the TV set on and there's a kernel panic dump on the screen. Unplug, count to ten and plug back in.
Fortunately, this is not a life or death situation unless the Superbowl is on.
Have gnu, will travel.
> 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.
[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.
im all for individual freedom, not being told what I can and cant do. If you dont like it, get a constitutional convention together, and get the congress to amend the constitution, as was intended when the constitution was written, and has been done a handfull of times over the years.
Without doing that, all gun regulations are unconstitutional.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
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."
am I part of the state militia? yes, as are you and all other men and women in our country.
Well regulated means has access to working guns, not regulated by the government.
the 2nd amendment and ALL amendments apply to ALL americans.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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...
"Handguns" didn't exist in 1789, so if you're holding up a 1789 piece of paper, you should only get to use a 1789 gun! If you accept a gun made in 2014, then you have to accept ALL the technological features required. It's not that complicated.
Handguns existed at the time the Second Amendment was passed. They weren't nearly as good, no question, but they did exist. More importantly, though, I doubt you'd accept that kind of limitation with respect to the First Amendment, which would allow only handwriting, unamplified speech, acoustic megaphones, woodcuts, manual printing presses, and a few other, mostly one-off or impermanent, means of expression. No internet. No microphones. No audio recording and playback. No video or photographs.
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.
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
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
Let me sum the whole argument up. The 2nd amendment is often misinterpreted to mean that a militia is required for gun ownership. In fact, it is the opposite. Guns are required in order to have a militia. Put into simplified modern language, the amendment reads "Because we need a well regulated militia, we must ensure that the people have a right to carry weapons".
In other words, the militia is not a condition for gun ownership. Gun ownership is a condition for having a militia.
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.
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
"Disabling shots" are not used intentionally, and for a reason. Stating that they are "used frequently" is an outright fabrication.
You watch too many movies and/or play too many video games.