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Obama Orders Feds To Study Smart Gun Technology (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Today U.S. President Barack Obama rolled out a set of executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence. The most controversial of the provisions requires licenses for those who sell guns at gun shows and on the internet, and forces background checks on buyers. There are also a number of measures dedicated to making background checks more foolproof and universal. Less controversial but more on-topic for Slashdot is that Obama is requiring the departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to investigate smart gun technology. This can include RFID chips, fingerprint scanners, and other bits of technology. Their goal will be to "explore potential ways to further its use and development to more broadly improve gun safety." The new gun measures include a proposal for a $500 million investment into providing care for people with serious mental illnesses.

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  1. America Doesn't Have a Gun Problem... by Orgasmatron · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    America Doesn't Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Democrat Problem

    America's mass shooting capital isn't somewhere out west where you can get a gun at the corner store. It's in Obama's own hometown.

    Chicago is America's mass shooting capital. There were over 400 shootings with more than one victim. In 95 of those shootings, 3 or more people were shot.

    2,995 people were shot in Chicago last year. Shootings were up, way up, in Baltimore. With an assist from Al Sharpton and #BlackLivesMatter, Baltimore beat out Detroit. But Detroit is still in the running. Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit all have something in common, they're all run by the party of gun control which somehow can't seem to manage to control the criminals who have the guns.

    The murder rate in Washington, D.C., home of the progressive boys and girls who can solve it all, is up 54%. The capital of the national bureaucracy has also been the country's murder capital.

    These cities are the heartland of America's real gun culture. It isn't the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it's Obama's own voting base.

    Gun violence is at its worst in the cities that Obama won in 2012. Places like New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, St. Louis, Kansas City and Philly. The Democrats are blaming Republicans for the crimes of their own voters.

    Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.

    Chicago's murder rate of 15.09 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago's murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody genocidal civil war.

    But Chicago isn't even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be St. Louis with 50 murders for 100,000 people. If St Louis were a country, it would have the 4th highest murder rate in the world, beating out Jamaica, El Salvador and Rwanda.

    Obama won St. Louis 82 to 16 percent. ...

    (Go read the whole article, it is worth it)

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