New Smart Guns Will Have Fingerprint Readers (computerworld.com)

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described the International San Francisco Smart Gun Symposium, and the "Mark Zuckerberg of guns," a Colorado 18-year-old who's developing a gun which only fires when its owner's fingerprint makes contact with the pistol grip. But it looks like he'll have competition. Lucas123 writes: Armatix LLC's new iP9 smart gun will go on sale in the U.S. in mid-2017 and...will have a fingerprint reader that can store multiple scans like a smartphone. The iP9 is expected to retail for about $1,365, which is more than twice the price of many conventional 9mm semi-automatic pistols...
The company's previous product was a smart gun which only fired when it was within 10 inches of radio waves emanating from its owner's watch, but they had trouble attracting buyers. Armatix now also hopes to interest shooting ranges in a gun which only fires when its built-in RFID system recognizes that it's pointing at a shooting target.

Comments

Re:gloves?

[hsmith]

I have eczema on my hands. I have no discernible fingerprints year round due to it. What am I to do? I guess the ADA won't cover me and my 2nd amendment rights.

It is just a matter of time.

[Anonymous Coward]

A liberal acquaintance of mine told me "the second amendment is stupid, and harmful, because it prevents meaningful conversation. It allows people to take an absolute extremist position and prevents any reasonable discussion about practical compromise."

Fancy words. If the second amendment didn't exist, the immediate "meaningful conversation" would be something like "lets make all handguns illegal across the board and then think up regulations around permitting for people who have some justification for gun ownership beyond "I want one.". This would seem perfectly reasonable to a group of liberal extremists, while being bloody-revolution material for the opposing group.

My point there is that nobody will ever agree on what "reasonable" means. It is impossible to find agreement, in this context. Which brings me to my main point:

Eventually, private gun ownership will be abolished in America.

This is a simple matter of sociology. The greater the population density, the greater the fear of one's neighbors, and hence the greater the public interest in weakening one's neighbors. This is the reason that most crowded countries have disallowed civilian gun ownership: it has nothing to do with the state of civility of their culture but everything to do with how crowded their cities are (which is where most of the voters are).

There are exactly two reasons why this hasn't already happened to America: 1) we still have an extremely high rural population (especially compared to countries that have disallowed gun ownership), 2) we have the second amendment.

The migration of our citizenry from rural to urban areas continues, however, and so the political winds on that front continue to shift. Eventually, the city-dwellers will have the raw numbers, and their natural fear of strangers will drive them to take everyone's guns away. Of course, this will just produce more attractive targets and invite more violent crime, but those facts will not overpower the emotional response one has to being surrounded by strangers, and needing to walk by them every single day.

The process will be slow. Slow enough to prevent revolution. But it will happen.

Re:You're being silly

[ShanghaiBill]

The evil libtardos aren't coming for your guns.

You need to talk to some liberals. I live in the SF Bay Area, so I talk to plenty of them. Some lean libertarian, and support (or at least tolerate) gun rights. But most lean authoritarian, and think guns should be completely illegal for private citizens. No one, absolutely NO ONE that I have ever met, thinks all we need is to close the "gun show loophole" and then everything will be hunky-dory. Politically, it is always about "just one thin little slice", but the real goal is the whole salami.