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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?
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
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
. . . 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.
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
The odds of your gun being grabbed and used against you are high.
Weird that we carried guns at all when I was in the Marine Corps then, huh? The enemy might have taken it away from me!
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.
Wow, really? A couple hundred deaths a year from toddlers alone? Please cite a source for that, other than your ass.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
> Please cite a source for that
Hard to find a non-biased source for this, most of my searches pulled up anti-gun advocacy pages whose figures wouldn't stand up to scrutiny, but I did find this article from 2009 that cites a CDC report stating that around 100 children annually, on average, died from accidental shootings between 2000 and 2005.
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
According to CDC data, there were 62 firearm deaths among children 1-14 in 2012. Considering that range goes far beyond toddler, and includes deaths resulting from negligence by older household members, your assessment of the odds seems unlikely. I would suspect that older children are far more likely to misuse firearms.
But the idea that accidental deaths are "high" in general bears scrutiny as well. For perspective, each year about 390 children drown in swimming pools. There are somewhere in the range of 32-37 million households that own guns, while only 8-10 million households own pools. Even if you don't have a pool, drowning is still a more present danger than a gun, with at least a hundred children a year drowning in bathtubs.
Other dangers lurk around every corner. Poisoning sends hundreds of children a day to the emergency room, and kills several every week. Over a hundred a day die in car accidents. Then you have fires and accidental suffocations.
TL;DR: the absolute level of risk is not particularly high.
So the main question is what the countervailing benefit is. Citing only statistics about gun deaths is disingenuous. People do not only kill in self defense; they may not even discharge their weapon. The broader measures of defensive gun use vary pretty wildly, from as low as 67,740 from pro-gun control sources to as high as 2.5 million from other surveys. The true number is likely somewhere in between, but difficult to discern because the survey data does not include all categories of crime, unreported incidents, unrealized incidents (surveys of prisoners have stated they avoided households where they suspected there were firearms), and do not reliably ask whether firearms were employer.
But even if you look at the low water number conceded by control advocates, the number of defensive uses is far higher than the total number of firearm deaths (~ 31k in 2012) including not just homicides and accidental deaths, but also suicides.
That isn't to say efforts to mitigate risks are not valuable, but the efficacy of fire arms as a defensive tool should be kept in mind. The consequence of forgetting to put on your watch should be having to ask what time it is, not being raped or murdered. Even if these sorts of things became mandatory, the kind of gun owner irresponsible enough to leave guns where small children can get at them are probably the type who will just velcro the damn watch to the gun.
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."
"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.
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.