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

Supply and Demand - where is the demand?

[slasher999]

Here in NJ they tried to pass a law to force gun shop owners to stock these "smart guns" and it failed. If people wanted these, they would stock them. For something as important as a firearm the added complexity of fingerprint readers simply increases the likelihood of failure when it is needed. These features aren't safe, they are dangerous and potentially deadly.

Re:Supply and Demand - where is the demand?

[OzPeter]

It's a gun. These features would make it potentially not deadly.

And that's the point. It will make them not deadly on its own accord without consulting the owner. A gun that doesn't go bang when the owner needs it to go bang is not a gun to be trusted.

And I say this as some one who believes there needs to be stricter gun controls in the USA.

Re:Supply and Demand - where is the demand?

[CrimsonAvenger]

And yes I realize that finger print technology will reduce deaths.

It may reduce deaths by the gun's owner, while causing more deaths OF the gun's owner.

So, no, we have no real idea whether it will cause a net reduction in deaths. We can be pretty sure it'll produce some change in the identities of the people killed though.

Re: Supply and Demand - where is the demand?

[E-Rock]

Is it greater or less than the trauma of what would have happened otherwise? An extreme example, but I'm pretty sure every rape victim would rather live with the effects of killing their assailant rather than of the rape they would have committed.

and when it misreads?

[kuzb]

As so often happens with these things you have to do it more than once. If you really need a gun to work at a moment's notice, owning a weapon that may or may not work when you pick it up seems utterly stupid.

Re: Halfway There

[slasher999]

I don't know any gun owners who aren't also college educated professionals. Now that is just my personal experience, it by no means speaks for all legal gun owners. However your (anonymous) comment that gun owners aren't smart is likely just troll bait, but if it isn't then it is ignorant and part of the problem.

No they won't.

[Marful]

These things are usually dreamed up by anti-gun proponents who wish to push this technology into law so they can bury gun owners with regulations and thus restrict access to firearms.

That's what the safe handgun list in California was for, as well as the "microstamping" law.

If you can make it so difficult to acquire, legally, that the average person doesn't want to be involved due to the regulatory burden, congratulations, you have just restricted and/or removed the right to access that item.

Re:No they won't.

[BlueStrat]

If you can make it so difficult to acquire, legally, that the average person doesn't want to be involved due to the regulatory burden, congratulations, you have just restricted and/or removed the right to access that item.

Even more troubling is that you can get judges all day long that will happily violate their sworn oaths and ignore that "shall not be infringed" "recommendation" in the US Constitution and rule these "backdoor ban" tactics do not infringe by some unfathomable "logic" they pull straight out of their collective ass.

Anti-gun extremists may celebrate, but they'd better bend over because the same tactics used to go around and/or reinterpret the 2nd Amendment can and surely will be used against the others, some of which you might actually value.

First they came for the gun owners, but I owned no guns...

You know how it ends.

Strat

I have one of those watches

[DNS-and-BIND]

Actually, it's a fitness band that shows the time. It's supposed to unlock my phone automatically if I'm in range. Since I hold my phone with the hand with the watch on it, and swipe with the other, the band is always in range. I'd say 6 times out of 10 it works OK, 2 times out of 10 there is an irritating delay while it displays the password prompt and figures out it should unlock, and 2 times out of 10 it doesn't work at all and I have to input the password. Not something you want your life depending on.

Firearms are already complex mechanical devices, there is a lot that can go wrong already. 10 minutes after the smart band becomes legislated into existence, evil men will start carrying jammers to interrupt the signal so that other people's (legitimately purchased) firearms can never be fired. Including the police. The criminals, will, of course, not be subject to these restrictions. Not following the law is kind of the definition of what a criminal is.

Re:I have one of those watches

[He Who Has No Name]

And they are that way because we have used hard-won experience earned in blood to spend hundreds of years designing unnecessary complexity and failure points out of them.

Cartridge ammunition small arms are one of the most refined and matured technologies on Earth.

The only - ONLY - consistent reason that people have attempted to add significant complexity back into them is in convoluted, ideologically-motivated attempts to make them less accessible and reliable, and that impetus has always been based on the belief that by doing so, their use will be discouraged.

Notice that nobody hawking these devices ever suggests the military or law enforcement should be mandated to use them. Just the filthy plebs.

Re:gloves?

[ShanghaiBill]

Gloves are only one of many problems with this re-tread idea. If fingerprint enabled guns are such a great idea, then they obviously should be adopted first by the police and military. That has zero chance of happening, because the real goal is not "safety" but to make guns more expensive and less reliable thereby disincentivizing ownership, while giving liberals talking points about how the NRA is unwilling to accept "common sense" gun restrictions.

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.

One trusted model per hundred years. Model 1911

[raymorris]

> You have NO IDEA how effective

That's a problem when your life, and the lives of your family and buddies depends on 100% reliability.

By far the most popular handgun ten years ago was the model 1911. So named because it was first made in that year, 1911. 20 years later, it had been proven extremely reliable so that's what professionals and careful civilians caried for almost a hundred years. Besides handguns, almost all trusted guns, from shotguns to ship cannons, were designs from John Browning or Samuel Colt. If you aren't Browning or Colt, we're not trusting our lives to your "clever", more complicated design.

  After about 75 years of different people trying, Gaston Glock came up with a design which might rival the 1911, so after it was proven in military and police testing and proven in the field for 25 years, a lot of people switched from the 1911 to Glock. That's the switch, from a model that stood the test of time since 1911 to somethinf better only 90 years later.

Take your "you have no idea if it'll work" and do the USMC testing to it - bury it in wet sand, pull it out, and see if it fires reliably, every time. Keep that up for 25 years and maybe we'll trust our kids' lives to it. Until then, save your "maybe it'll work, maybe it won't" for video games.

Re:One trusted model per hundred years. Model 1911

[MBGMorden]

For a user of moderate skill? Yes, the Glock is better. I say that as someone who owns a semi-custom 1911 that cost me just shy of $3000. A 1911 just tends to be more temperamental. You can get them to be mostly reliable, but even the best tuned 1911 is still merely on part with an out of the box $500 Glock when it comes to reliability. The thumb safety also takes more training to get used to vs the Glock's point-and-shoot. The magazine well on the Glock, being a double-stack, also makes mag changes faster, and the magazines hold more making mag changes less frequent.

Granted, the 1911 does feel better in the hand, points more naturally, and is generally a heck of a lot more accurate, but there's a reason 95% of all police departments carry Glocks.

I'd consider the 1911 akin to a sports car. In the right hands you can get a lot more performance, but for your average driver they'd be better served by a Camry with an auto-transmission.

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.