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High School Student Builds Gun That Unlocks With Your Fingerprint
An anonymous reader writes: Kai Kloepfer is a 17-year-old high school student from Colorado who just won the Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge. Kloepfer designed and built a smart gun that will only unlock and fire for users who supply the proper fingerprints. "The gun works by creating a user ID and locking in the fingerprint of each user allowed to use the gun. The gun will only unlock with the unique fingerprint of those who have already permission to access the gun. ... According to him, all user data is kept right on the gun and nothing is uploaded anywhere else so it would be pretty hard to hack." The gun can have up to 999 authorized users, and its accuracy at detecting fingerprints is 99.99%. For winning the challenge, he won $50,000 in funding to continue developing the smart gun. Some of the fund have already gone toward 3-D printing portions of the prototype.
Just what I need in a firearm. One more area that can fail epically. Also yet another battery to carry and eventually run out of.
Call me crazy but none of my firearms accidentally go off.
<happiness>beer</happiness>
This one will insist on checking your fingerprints first.
As soon as the Police and Military adopt these guns,I'll start considering doing so.
Until then, my old-fashioned guns will have to suffice.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I shot the first shot!
...the deaths caused by an innocent person not being able to defend him- or herself with such a gun due to no battery of malfunctioning electronics or software? Why is this risk not taken into consideration?
If it's extremely reliable, I think even gun advocates would adopt this. Here's hoping.
Did this fellow just watch the movie "Licence to Kill"? In that movie, which came out back in 1989, there's a gun gadget with this capability.
This site has a photo of it, and describes it as:
Signature camera gun - A camera that when put together became a sniper rifle that only worked for Bond, due to a scanner built into the grip.
> The gun can have up to 999 authorized users
This really bothers me. What current memory hardware stores stuff in base 10? Just either use a byte or the wordsize of the device and be done with it!
Let us know when the police and armed forces widely adopt a tech that prevents a gun from firing in certain circumstances, till then it's not reliable enough for consumer self defense.
Just swipe your gun over the counter and take home your merchandise.
2nd only to AGW in screed fest size.
Children build guns
If the finger printer reader is anything like the iPhone 5s+ then I am in trouble. I cannot unlock my iPhone with my right thumb print and have to use my left thumb and that stinks to be me because I am right handed. Guns are pretty safe and have been for a while. Kids who get accidentally killed by the parents' guns have irresponsible parents. If I mishandled a gun while I was growing up I got quite the whipping to be taught a lesson. I guess you cannot whip children without being dragged to jail. Funny how children are out of control today.
So I guess the possibility of hotwiring or somehow physically forcing the bullet to detonate have been ironed out?
If you are too incompetent to control the use of your own gun, then you should not have one. Period. Take the money you were going to spend on this smart gun and take a basic gun safety class.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If it's anything like the 5s reader then apparently all you need is a high res photo and some other stuff (so say the people bagging it out). The only difference is gaining access to a weapon is slightly more risky that finding your enemies nude selfies.
This is certainly not the first time someone came up with this idea, nor the first time an actual implementation was made. This article and the award sounds like a publicity stunt, and it has all the usual elements: young wunderkind, technical gadgetry to solve some social or politically charged issue.
And other posters here are right: the last thing you need is a weapon that fails when you need it most. If you want a weapon that's safe at rest, get a gun safe with a fingerprint scanner so you can get at it quickly when needed. And if you really want a gun that is disabled when it's taken away from you, I'd go with a simple mechanical solution like a pin on a lanyard that will lock the gun when removed. But in reality, if you've pulled out your weapon with intent to use it, you want nothing to stand in the way of a shot being fired when you pull that trigger.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
When you're in a hand-to-hand struggle with an assailant and can't get your finger on the trigger but you've managed to manipulate his hands/arms so the gun is pointing at his face (I know this happens a lot, I've seen it in movies countless times), you should be able to say the password and have the gun fire.
I know, I know, if you end up in a hand-to-hand struggle with an assailant you weren't using your gun properly and maybe deserve whatever happens, however, I for one would like a second chance.
Just think, you could set the gun on a tripod and from a remote location, yell the password or use a radio to convey the password to the gun and have it fire. THAT could be extremely useful in a home-defense situation!
It could also check your BAC and blood oxygen levels. Even if you are the owner you shouldn't be firing while drunk or high - or unconscious or dead.
This is more useful to cops, military and armed security who have guns issued to them rather than owning them - making sure their weapons don't get to the black market or used by enemies without some technical rework.
.
all user data is kept right on the gun and nothing is uploaded anywhere else so it would be pretty hard to hack.
Is this serious? A person would need access to the gun to shoot it, therefore they would already have access to the gun to hack it. The hardest part of a hack is getting physical access.
> High School Student Builds Gun That Unlocks With Your Fingerprint
How did he know my fingerprint?
Also, how long does the fingerprint analysis take? Sometimes you need to fire in a hurry. One second might make the difference between you walking away and the other possibilites mentioned above.
anybody who has had to deal with fingerprint scanners knows how this will turn out.
Was that 99.99% test done on a fire arm that has been used much? I kind of remember one of the big problems with these kinds of devices is that if you practiced regularly with the gun the shock from all those firings tended to break this kind of hardware. (And yes, you're supposed to practice with the actual gun you're going to use to protect yourself with. Picking up a random gun and getting off a perfect only happens in the movies.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The fingerprint reader in Apple devices is not a photo scanner, stop spreading FUD and go read the complete article about the guys who were able to copy a fingerprint to fool the reader. It took much more than a simple photo, it took something that you might see on mission impossible.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Forget guns, sell the technology to Samsung.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Is that none of the politicians demanding them, most of whom are big city liberal politicians, are saying "well if we had smart guns, of course we'd let all law-abiding citizens carry in public." It's just a measure intended to further lock down legal gun ownership disguised as a way to keep criminals from using stolen weapons. Even though theoretically smart guns should make it easier for police to account for gun crime, the people pushing this aren't going to let up because their goal isn't even really to balance freedom and security.
Yeah, I just bet it is.
This kid managed to make a rugged, reliable piece of hardware that recognizes many fingerprints, will withstand regular impacts from firing, and managed to make the failure rate only one in ten thousand.
Oh, wait - he made a plastic prototype, and hasn't actually tested it in a firing weapon?
Do tell.
It is unreliable, only a fool would carry a weapon that has these sorts of "safety" features attached.
When it comes to defending yourself the simpler the better, if you can't control the situation or your weapon don't carry one to start with.
This article is filler.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
... but completely irrelevant when you can just hack the gun itself.
Hire this guy. This tech would be a great improvement over the 0.99% reliability of the S5 fingerprint reader.....
To make a real safe gun, it should require 2 fingerprints - one of the shooter one of the victim.
Without consent from the target it cannot be used. Now that would make the world a bit safer.
Does little Bobby Tables Jr. keep wasting your ammunition? Did your dog shoot itself while rummaging in the closet?
Then Inteligun is the gun for you!
- "Intelligun. Smart guns for stupid people."
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Just as you never need your brain. Also, statistically, anyone else is going to be smarter than you. Just stop existing.
to a well regulated militia.
Ahh yes the ol "regulated" argument
you are aware that "well regulated" at the time written simply meant "working weapons" right? I mean all you have to do is think about it logically and you would understand it does not mean regulated as we use the word today.
the second amendment was written as a way to protect us FROM the federal government. As such, why would we need to be regulated by the same people the amendment is supposed to give us the option of protecting ourselves from said federal government?? Its simply not logical on top of the fact that it doesnt mean what you think it means.
most of this problem is the NRA. the NRA targeted the first safe-gun and wiped it from stores everywhere. they spun uncited rhetoric about the unreliabiltiy or the technology and pounded the communism/fascism fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the public that a biometric or safer firearm was simply another cobblestone in the road to hitler/stalin/mao.
No we can blame places likeNJ who have laws on the books that bans all existing weapons as soon as one of these smart guns becomes mainstream. If it were not for laws like that, the NRA would not have to go out of their way to point out the flaws. Im no fan of the NRA as a whole, pulled my membership years ago, but the problem is with the government, not the NRA
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Did it take a laser printer?
'cause that's all the Mythbusters guys needed for pretty much every fingerprint reader they tested (admittedly, before the iPhone 5s came out, so I suppose there could have been some advances since then)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
WARNING: Do not look directly into the barrel with remaining eye.
I love our Second Amendment.
You confuse me. You sound like you support gun ownership and yet at the same time you seem to want the kind of regulations and bans that the gun grabbers want. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Let me make one, though, about the Constitution and firearms. First, about the Constitution:
1) The Constitution is not an all inclusive list of rights. It actually says that in the document, and yet I hear this kind of nonsense all the time.
2) If in conversation you said you wanted "privacy" back in the days the document was written, it meant you needed to use the bathroom. I rather doubt they felt it necessary to include that in the founding document of our country, though the way things are going these days it might have been useful if they had.
With that groundwork laid, just work with me here for a minute.
See, the term "well regulated" these days, just like "privacy", meant something different when the Constitution was written. It meant trained or skilled in something. It didn't mean bogged down with paperwork and people trying to tell you what's good for you, which too many Americans seem to want these days.
Then there's the "militia" business, which again, at the time meant pretty much everybody who was capable of using a weapon. In those days it referred almost exclusively to men, but cultures do change and fortunately we have plenty of women who know more than a few things about firearms these days. The founders even wrote about that. Consider this:
I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.
Or perhaps this draft proposal:
That the people have a Right to mass and to bear arms; that a well regulated militia composed of the Body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper natural and safe defense of a free state, that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided.
That one kind of shows the lie of those nitwits who say that the Second Amendment isn't about protecting ourselves from an overbearing government as well.
Oh, those quotes? They're George Mason's, one of the people who wrote the Constitution in the first place. I rather think he knew more about what was on their minds than most people who blather on about their personal emotional opinions about what each and every word in the Second Amendment means and who grab at any straw to support their lunatic emotional positions.
History and the truth are not on the side of the gun grabbers on this one, no matter what lies they want to tell about it.
Get the whole thing in there son, don't be a pussy:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
A militia consists of ordinary citizens, NOT a professional military or national guard.
SCOTUS called, and they said to STFU. You've already lost.
And as a centrist Democrat, I have absolutely no problem ripping people like you to pieces come election time. I've voted for moderate Republicans to keep the loonie lefties out of office. In the event you need to be shown the difference:
Good left: funds social safety net, education, and has a libertarian bent with respect to personal freedoms, and indeed realizes that freedoms come with a societal cost. Allows individuals and free-thinkers to flourish while providing a baseline of security to the populace. See: Howard Dean.
Bad left: embraces social engineering, authoritarianism, likes to tell you WHAT to think not HOW to think, loves to take away rights (2nd amendment), loves to give 'special' rights (affirmative action). See: any Democrat from Illinois, most notably Obama.
The best publicity for this gun would be for the designer to program it for someone else, then load it, point it at his own head and pull the trigger. Several times. Live. On television. Then give it to the guy it's programmed for and get him to shoot (at a target).
if only that was how they were used.
far more people are accidently killed by a gun then bad guys are shooed away by gun owners.
except when they are used by accident to kill , frequently by children who find them.
I'd rather a gun not fire when a child picks it up regardless of the technology UNLESS he were the assigned/keyed individual.
I have an idea. How about we let the NRA keep track of serial numbers and ownership .. that way the `gummint isn't doing it .. but the data is available if needed for crime fighting.
A few days ago, a new ant-sized radio was announced. Couple this fingerprint tech with tiny radios and the "internet of things" and eventually, some government server will have to authorize the firing of the weapon. Right now, the NICS computers, you know, the ones that are supposed to do those oh-so-important instant background checks, go down at unscheduled times and for indeterminate periods of time for no published reason. Do you really think a permission-based firearm will work when you need it? Add this one to your net neutrality arguments.
the army and cops will not use this or any think like it.
In the army you want to have it so any one can use any gun at any time. Also they do not want something that needs batterers and / or can be jammed with EMP's.
Only uninformed liberals still use this argument.
Heller v DC case heard by the Supreme Court ruled on that phrase specifically and ruled specifically that the right applied to the individual not just militias.
Please inform yourself before attempting to debate issues you don't understand.
I don't think this individual has much of any real experience with firearms. I've seen flashlights and lasers, basically a light source with a battery and a switch, literally shake themselves apart after a few dozen rounds. While I am sure that you could harden the electronics to survive the beating, oil, water, etc that your average firearm has to deal with getting all manufacturers to follow the stringent manufacturing levels that would be required is unlikely. That and it would add at least $50, possibly a couple hundred dollars to the price of each gun (tens of millions of dollars per year). All to stop incidents barely show as a rounding error in the overall child mortality statistics (less than 100 accidental child deaths or about 0.3%). When we've fixed all of the other preventable causes of child death that are orders of magnitude more hazardous to their health (falls, pools, buckets, infections, allergic reactions, etc) maybe we can focus on accidental firearms discharge.
it gets better when you realize the fingerprint sensor is in millions of phones and doesn't come close to that reliability. That same sensor can be hacked in minutes too.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Bullshit. All gun control is about one objective ... control. This will become mandatory. Every dictator and tyrant in the history of guns has enforced gun control for a reason. Just because they're democratically elected doesn't make them any less of a tyrant. Note that Hamas was voted into power, as was Mugabe.
technically, the people ARE the militia, therefore no need to distinguish between the 2
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
A gun is a radically different animal. Very few tools are designed to kill people and strike at a distance. A gun is not a tool. A gun is a weapon of war that has been (barely) domesticated.
They're 3D printing bits of the prototype? Given the furore that went down after people claimed that guns could be 3D printed, that's hilarious.
> High School Student Builds Gun That Unlocks With Your Fingerprint
I thought the USA had strict laws and regulations (zero tolerance policy) about guns and high schools and high school students. The kid should be in jail awaiting trial on terrorism and "terroristic acts." Won't anyone think of the children whom he has traumatised?
Seem pretty inconvenient. Now I'll have people all over asking me to unlock their guns. The worst will be the emergency runs. "Help! There's a man here whose gun you unlocked. I need you to unlock my gun or he'll kill my family!" *sigh*
Is this kid going to accept liability when his guns failure results in somebody being murdered or raped?
How does the added cost help poor people in high crime areas?
What is effectiveness when it is covered in dirt or blood? How efective is it when a hand is broken, smashed, or cut? How effective does it work when person is under high stress? Having to put in all ten digitals, cuts down on the 999 claim.
Smart guns are one of the dumbest ideas ever.
Respect the Constitution
Unlocks after an average of about 2.5 swipes. That's fine, for my phone, most of the time, and it would be fine for a weapon, most of the time, which makes it a viable mechanism... none of the time.
1) You pull the gun and pull the trigger, and nothing happens. Dead battery. Your attacker kills you.
2) You get wounded. Your own blood runs onto the sensor. It stops working. So does the gun. Your attacker kills you.
3) You have gloves on. The gun can't see your fingerprint. Your attacker kills you.
4) You take the gloves off, and its so cold you get frostbite and can't pull the trigger. Your attacker kills you.
5) A strong radio field interferes with the electronics in the gun. It won't fire. Your attacker kills you.
6) The gun gets wet, the waterproofing fails on your now 80 year old gun, it doesn't fire. Your attacker kills you.
7) You leave your gun in the car, its temperature reaches 190 degrees. The electronics won't work at 190 degrees. Your attacker kills you.
8) The electronics simply fails for any number of reasons. Your attacker kills you.
9) You're wounded. You throw the gun to your wife / friend / lover to continue the defense. It doesn't recognize their fingerprints. Your attacker kills you, rapes her.
10) The electronics fails. You get it repaired. Now it works sometimes, doesn't sometimes. The tech can't find the problem. Your attacker kills you.
I wonder how much hate mail and threats this kid has received so far. The gun shop owners who put a locking gun like this for sale were threatened into not selling it.
You can to think about that. So it doesn't prevent gun suicides. The fact aside that someone can commit suicide with something else, the person doing it would be an authorized user of the gun. So no help there.
It doesn't prevent gun homicides. Again, these are done by authorized users of the gun, or people who have time to modify the gun. Remember for all the clever electronics, in the end guns are mechanical devices. So ultimately the electronics have to be something that mechanically disables the gun like a standard mechanical safety. A trigger disconnect, a firing pin block, that kind of thing. Ya well those are dead simple to bypass. So no help for stolen guns, the criminals would just remove the safety.
It doesn't prevent accidental shooting by any authorized user of the gun. Since they are authorized, it will fire. So any drunken games, etc, are still just as dangerous as they were before.
Already here we have, by far, most of the shootings that happen.
It may not prevent shooting where a gun is taken away from someone. Depends on how it works. If it has some way of reading the fingerprint when the trigger is depressed, then ok it could work. However if it works like a safety where you disengage it when you grab the gun, it'll still be disengaged if someone takes it away.
It would prevent accidental shootings where an unauthorized user gets their hands on the gun, like a kid coming across it.
Ok well, that doesn't seem very useful to me. The correct answer to the problem of kids is to lock up your guns. That is much more secure, particularly since something like this would only be effective if you didn't authorize you kids to use it, or remembered to remove their authorization when they were done at the range. Having them secured in a safe fixes the problem nicely. Likewise, that provides pretty good protection against theft.
So I really don't see what this will solve, and it will make things more expensive and complicated. It just doesn't strike me as very useful.
The statement ... The gun will only unlock with the unique fingerprint of those who have already permission to access the gun. ... According to him, all user data is kept right on the gun and nothing is uploaded anywhere else so it would be pretty hard to hack." seems a bit of a pipe dream to me.
The fingerprint reader that is shown would allow the typical scotch tape to life a fingerprint and replay it on the device type attack. Technically speaking if the device stores the finger print data on the persistant memory chip it can be accessed. If it is encrypted then the controller logic used to authenticate can be reverse engineered to find the symmetric encryption key(s).
I think this is a political stunt imho as stated in comment http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5698545&cid=47901501
Was that 99.99% test done on a fire arm that has been used much?
If you check out the pics in TFA, you'll see that not only didn't they test fire this the hundreds of thousands of times it would take to come up with that claim of accuracy - This "proof of concept" wouldn't ever work in a real gun.
Apparently, this genius 17YO knows so little about the functioning of an actual gun that he simply filled the receiver with electronics (because nothing important goes in all that empty space) and produced what amounts a gun-shaped fingerprint reader. Because, y'know, who needs all those silly little things like springs or hammers or firing pins or magazines to also fit inside a working gun?
Have gnu, will travel.
you are aware that "well regulated" at the time written simply meant "working weapons" right?
No, we aren't, because it turns out, they didn't bother to define their terms well when writing the Constitution.
Then again, they didn't even bother to consider an effective line of succession, so why the fuck are we still so slavishly devoted to what a bunch of dead guys came up with?
We should have the morality to stand on our own, not rely on the authority of others.
I am not nor will I ever advocate smart guns.
In answer to your skunk anecdote, how many rounds was your weapon capable of raining down on said skunk. If you had a gun with 12+ rounds ready fly in less than 5 seconds, then I would say you had a weapon of war.
... from the pro-gun lobby. Because nothing says reasonable discourse like threatening to kill people.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
I think it's just "riding" the hype, I mean pretty impressive from a 17yo but does it worth 50k$?
This is either a strong positive or negative depending on which side of the "gun issue" you are on, but I haven't seen much discussion on what the tech could lead to (and its ramifications to each side of the debate). There are many interesting potential ramifications:
Is this kid licensed to own a firearm?
Is this kid licensed to manufacture a firearm?
The kid took his firearm to multiple science fairs (probably on school grounds). Sounds like a felony to me.
We should have the morality to stand on our own, not rely on the authority of others.
I dont think you are aware of the irony of your statement
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
http://www.marshallbrain.com/c...
"Buckets seem so innocent -- how can a bucket kill a child? Unfortunately, about 20 children die in the U.S. every year because they drown in buckets."
If you're worried about one penis shot per year, and are willing to put fingerprint sensors on firearms to stop it, what kind of fingerprint sensor are you going to put on buckets, that *kill* 20 times more people?
Ready to regulate buckets, bitch?
Have you ever noticed that on Slashdot there are no good ideas?
The world would save so much time and money if they would just talk to Slashdot before trying to invent things!
We have memorials for the people who have died for our rights, why not one for those who died for your second amendment rights?
If there is no connection to outer databases then who adds fingerprints on it who will be authorized to use it? I see some problems with this...
You should probably look up the definition of words you don't know before mocking people. He used the word quite correctly.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said but I am really curious to see how many times an officer's gun gets taken from them (regardless of if it's fired.)
What's the point of these statistics? There are thirty to forty-thousand deaths each year caused by cars, and nobody is calling for the abolition of cars. Yet, any time the gun subject comes up, everyone trots out their fave statistics. We have an unfortunate tendency to think we have the right to curtail the rights of others, simply because they may, or may not, harm themselves, whether physically or morally. Even worse, is this idea we can pre-empt crimes by curtailing rights. This is where the debate should be.
We already have laws, in most cases, against harming others, (apparently, it's perfectly legal to destroy the economy for your own gain). What gives us the right to dictate how others should live? The idea of liberalism used to be that we don't have that right. But now, those that call themselves Liberals have adopted from the Right, the idea that we do have the right to coerce others "for their own good," or gods help me, "for the children." Hence anti-gun, anti-soda pop, anti-smoker, anti-fast (and inexpensive) food legislation, etc., etc... How is this different from, say, the Right's blue laws? This is how we end up with travesties like prohibition. I would submit that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights deny us the right to pursue happiness only when we trespass upon the right of our fellows to do the same. Statistics have no bearing on this topic.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
In looking at the prototype, I see a usb port. Now call me crazy but if there's any physical access to the device, having that port is just inviting someone to hack it. Once that happens then there's no "security" in using the device.
This was discussed in Slashdot (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/05/12/1522253/a-look-at-smart-gun-technology) months back. Yet another kid learned to plagiarize someone else' design.
No one seems to be pushing for "smart" guns other than the anti-gun people, that should tell you a lot right there.
The main problem with so called smart weapons is they are inherently unreliable. Guns are based on a robust physical mechanism that seldom breaks (although springs and firing pins DO break occasionally). However, once you attach an electronics package the unreliability factor increases hundreds, if not thousands of percent.
The main two points of failure of this design would be a dirty finger followed by a dirty sensor. Next would be the dead battery problem. Does the system fail armed? In which case no one who bought one would ever put batteries in it. OR does the the system fail safe? In which case no one would ever buy one, period. In an emergency situation I don't want to become dead because of a dead battery. Electronics are affected by EMPs and other external electromagnetic effects, such as the solar flare that hit Friday. Individual components can fail over time, just by sitting.
Electronics are also delicate. Circuit boards crack fairly easily as anyone who has dropped their cell phone more than a couple of times can tell you. A 1911 .45acp firing 230grain ball ammunition has a recoil of about 7.5 foot pounds of energy. A Galaxy 5S weighs about 6 ounces. That means that every time you fire the gun, you are "dropping your cell phone" from a height of about twenty feet.
So what's this kid's punishment for doing a gun related school project?
Lets have all the politicians and people who push this very likely impractical and disabling system test it first -- to be employed with ALL the security of those people (and their families and businesses) who will want to foist it onto the general population.
Five to ten years of actual proved use under all field conditions - real use - including firing practice -- to be mandated.
See how fast the whole idea is dropped if THAT was a requirement.
So this. Electronics and extreme percussion DO NOT MIX. Even if the electronics have no moving parts. PCB is not made for this kind of stress. Solder is not made for this kind of stress. Even fully encapsulated electronics cannot handle the kind of stress even a paltry .22 pistol will dish out when used on a regular basis.
This is the reason cops do not want this stuff. This is the reason the militaries of the world do not want this stuff. Simply put, electronics are going to fail, period.
The best solution here is either some fantastic mechanical trigger lock such as on a lanyard or a special glove of some kind possibly, or...better training and always treating the weapon as if it were loaded.
Most accidents in the US are form mishandling firearms that starts with the basic premise "Oh its not loaded, I just checked." A knife is never unloaded. Treat your gun like a knife. It is always ready to inflict harm on you if you mishandle it.
I don't own any handguns presently, but the way the world seems to be backsliding into 'every man for himself' lately, I've thought about it.
However, I'm going to have kids in a few years, and there is no way I will keep firearms in my house with small children. It's far to easy to have an accident with a child who is old enough to cause said accident, but not old enough to fully communicate the proper respect of such a device to.
These would be perfect. I doubt they'd be popular at all, but I'd say they have a marketplace at least. I also don't want any more potential failure points on such a device, but if I own a gun, I want it to be 100% secure while around the people it will be in close proximity to 99% of the time, rather than 100% operable for a 1% possibility of self-defense.
Though we can't escape the fact that this is just another way for busy citizens to push off true responsibility onto technology or other people, so who knows. In reality I'll probably just opt to not have any firearms in the house, and chew through the faces of any intruders that threaten me or my family.
I was not disagreeing with gun ownership. I just think a gun is a weapon, not a tool. If you call a gun a tool, then what is a sword? An ad-hoc non-elective surgical instrument? Overgrown Cutlery? Guns are not tools. They are weapons. I have no objection to the ownership of weapons...within reason. I just think calling them a tool seems like an attempt to shroud their importance by mingling them with other more benign implements like screwdrivers.
The next step will be safe grenades that won't go off unless the correct fingerprint is being held in place.
This is exactly like when management tries to get you to use some technology that they know nothing about. It isn't a good idea. Anyone that actually uses a gun knows this.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
http://www.citizensreportuk.org/reports/murders-fatal-violence-uk.html
No thanks.
Depending on the ratio of illegal/inappropriate discharges of firearms vs valid defensive discharges of firearms, it may be that the one-in-ten-thousand failure to fire actually *reduces* murder and assault rates.
who refuse to see the common denominator of damn near all violence against the human race.
People.
They can't / won't admit that the people are the fucked up variable of the equation, not the tools they utilize.
I can put the biggest and scariest firearm on a table inside a ( school, church, mosque, whatever ) and AS LONG AS PEOPLE LEAVE IT ALONE, nothing will ever happen. If enough time goes by it will simply rust into dust.
People are the problem. Always have been, and always will be.
This isn't a government imposed regulation. Some high school kid came up with his own way to make a smart gun. If you don't like his design that doesn't mean there isn't a way to make a good smart gun. The idea itself is not bad, for people who want a gun but are still worried about their kids/home invader getting a hold of it, this is the gun for them.
If you want it, don't buy it, but there is a market for this.
The fingerprint reader on my laptop doesn't work if my fingers are damp.
Sometimes it doesn't work at all, for no apparent reason.
It's not hard to connect a fingerprint reader to a firearm. What's hard is making a finger print reader that is as reliable as a single piece of metal that works as a mechanical toggle switch.
You cannot have a Smart Gun in the US. It would be smarter than 1/2 the population.
It's undoubtedly a COTS fingerprint reader. I work in access control, and user "slots" in access control devices are pretty much always in increments of ten. The reason fingerprint records don't come in base-2 increments is that a fingerprint record not only isn't likely to be a size that by chance happens to be an even base-2 length--- it's certainly not going to be a single byte or word long, right? Then, once you know how long you want your records to be, you ask engineering what size flash RAM you can afford, divide that by your print record size, and when you get a number like 109, marketing says "make it 100".
My favorite part was where the idea "came to hm in a dream". Wow, you're some sort of genius, kid. It's not like I saw a cartoon in freakin' MAD Magazine in the bloody early 80's detailing this very invention.
That's what happens whenever anyone tries to make progress on smartgun technology.
> faced with a shrinking customer base
According to whom? All the numbers I see indicate that guns and ammo are selling like hotcakes in America, and continuing on an upward trend.
totally stole this from Shoot 'Em Up ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465602/ )
People who work in trades that wear down finger prints or damage fingerprints might have a problem with such things. Even fingerprint readers don't work very well if you scrape up your fingertips regularly.
accuracy at detecting fingerprints is 99.9%
Which means what exactly?
Does that mean it correctly recognizes 99.9% of valid fingerprints (with lots of false positives)?
Does it mean it correctly does not recognize 99.9% of invalid fingerprints (with lots of false negatives)?
99.9% accuracy with fingerprint recognition technology is an extraordinary claim.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Judge Dredd had one of these! Sooner or later all Mega City tech will be real.
I wonder if it'll run Windows...
This and similar not so "safety" measures have already been done several times before with key rings, palm scanners, and other garbage. What about with gloves on? Or when hands are dirty? This idea may be fine for non-emergency target shooting at the range, but turns the pistol next to useless as a self-defense weapon. Please Kai, turn your intelligence to something intelligent.
Is this kid in JAIL yet? HELLOOOOO????
No kidding. The army doesn't even have keys for the humvees. It's a popular way prank the new guys, send them looking for humvee or tank keys.
Yes, monotonically. It's a word. You might want to look it up, specifically the mathematics-related definition. Your own lack of education does not reflect poorly on the person you just mocked.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/monotonically
Not sure I'd want this on my own weapon but I could see it being useful for giving / selling firearms to possibly temporary allies that we arm to deal with today's enemy that might become tomorrow's enemy (or just leave the stuff laying around for today's enemy to use).
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
A kid invented something unusual and won a prize for it. Smart kid. I hope he continues and invents something truly useful one day. I'm sure Mark Twain started by scribbling his letters, and none of that was useful or brilliant, but he grew up and did some worthy stuff. See the point? Let's encourage the kids for a change. If we don't like the project, lets suggest some that are better.
Only in the USofA is gun ownership specifically guaranteed because it is in our charter that the people need to be able to overthrow their government. All the rest of this discussion is just chaff.
The statistics presented are part of the PRICE of that guarantee, and it is a fair use to use those statistics to ask if that protection (against the government) is worth the price, and given the way governments tend to evolve, one can ask if the USofA is really immune to the sort of evolution the Constitution was trying to protect against. And it is fair to ask whether the guns we are allowed to own are capable of protecting us against drones, black helicopters and the NSA.
But I must say that if I were confronted with a government that suddenly decided that atheists were amoral gits who deserved beheading (to mix metaphors), then at least I would be able to take one or two with me.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Cue the guy who thinks a ban on all guns in workable, and in the next comment rages against the war on drugs and how it's been an abject failure.
stick magnetic capture system in action if it is conventional cased ammo. magnetic action racking the gun recharges capacitors enough to run authent system. keeps enemy from using your guns against you, and you have whole company authented as valid users. your gun's insides are a faraday cage so it won't do anything to them.
fingerprint scanners would be better for caseless electronic action guns. unfortunately, the military is really conservative with their weapons, and civilians can't experiment with electronic action as the ATF has repressed all research into civilian weapons technology for the last 50 years. The freaking AR is a 50 year old platform and there are many people who say it is "Too Modern"
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