This is a good thing and a logical progression with regulating new technologies. Just as when cars were invented, there were very few laws, and lots of injuries and accidents, so too with any new technology society must develop new norms. Having almost run down an iPod zombie years ago, this law can't be adopted fast enough across all 50 states. At the very least, it will make the entire population aware that before crossing the street, they must disengage from their technology and then "look both ways" like we teach every child.
This will be my last post on this thread because you are clearly ignorant and I suspect trolling. On the off chance that you are just really ignorant and obnoxious:
Google maps and shopping for example on the web will use your IP address and zip code to guess your location (usually off substantially based on your zip code). However, if you allow it to on the permission request, it will use your GPS determined location, in which case it will be accurate to within 30 feet or so. Stop arguing your ignorance with me and go try it. You will have to turn on location services on your iPhone 4 and allow safari/google access to location services. I assume it will work on an iPhone 4, but it might be too old at this point. Owning antiquated tech doesn't invalidate the reality for the rest of us.
My iPhone 6s has an Arm9 dual core CPU as well as a GPU and 4 ALUs (what used to be called math co-processors). It also has a GPS processor, a GSM processor, etc. The main CPU is core zero of the Arm 9, all other processors are slaves (technically there are parallel logic pathways these days, but this is still essentially true for most operations or at least the start of operations).
Regarding Democrats blocking the collection of accurate statistics on defensive use of firearms, I am my own source. I watched and listened to it happen in the 90s during the first two years of the Clinton presidency when the AWB was passed.
Regarding police using firearms in the US, it is standard procedure to perform all felony arrests at gunpoint. You can use Google yourself if you are that interested.
OK, sorry, I didn't realize I was talking to a fellow engineer. To clarify your confusion, your position is determined by GPS. Your cell phone utilizes the on chip GPS circuitry to calculate your position by interpolating time stamps from at least 4 satellites, which is then sent to main CPU, which utilizes firmware drivers to read the positional information. The main CPU is then capable of sending out those position values via Wifi radio or 3G/4G cellular band radio to anyone who requests it, within the permissions built into the phone and those permissions that you allow, including but not limited to app providers, web sites, your cell provider, e911 and probably others as well that I cant think of off the top of my head.
If you want to be taken seriously, don't be disingenuously ignorant of reality.
And I too am happy to look at solving the problems of accidental gun use (felonious gun use is a consequence of a free society, as is felonious car use, felonious knife use etc. the only solution there is to make the penalty so high that no one does it, and/or execute everyone who does so that there are no repeat offenders.)
As far as solving accidental gun use, any reasonable person should be able to agree that the solution to that relatively small problem (760 deaths per year out of 330,000,000 people is very small) must not result in higher overall deaths. You can check my other posts on this thread for the sources of the stats, but every year guns are fired in around 100,000 instances by police (40,000) or private citizens (60,000) to save lives (sometimes only one life, sometimes 50 or more lives are on the line) at either criminals or animals. Smart guns might reduce the accidental shootings by 50% generously (since there are a few intended users who are unsafe and result in some of those shootings.) So smart guns may save around 350 lives per year. In order for that to be a net positive for society, the failure to fire rate for the smart features of smart guns must be small enough to merit their adoption. If since guns are used 100,000 times per year and lets assume they save an average of 5 lives (sometimes only one, sometimes more than 50), guns save around 500,000 lives per year when used defensively by police and private citizens.
If the failure to fire rate for smart guns is 5% (right now it is actually around 20% or more, depending on the model; it is 100% if someone uses an RF jammer on the gun mentioned in the article), then smart guns will cause the unnecessary deaths of around 25,000 people each year. And that is at a 5% failure rate. You can see how people who rely on guns for their jobs and personal protection despise smart guns as a stupid idea poorly thought through and never implemented well. You are looking at trading around 350 lives for 25,000 lives. By the way, those 350 lives could more easily be saved by teaching gun safety in schools (why not, we teach safe sex in school) gun safes, cable and trigger locks along with stiff penalties for not properly storing your firearm. Smart guns, at the end of the day, are a solution to a problem better solved with other methods.
Obama had the friendliest media coverage in the last 30 plus years. George W. Bush was treated so unfairly by the establishment media that it literally launched Fox news as one of the largest cable news outlets because people (especially conservatives) were so sick of the rampant left wing bias. By any meaningful statistic George W Bush and Trump have both been treated horribly by the press, and Obama had a continuous love fest with the exception of Fox News (who he tried to kick out of the WH news pool and lied to a fedeal judge so he could spy on their reporters like James Rosen). With the exception of Rush Limbaugh and a few other COMMENTATORS with relatively small audiences (not the national news outlets) Bill Clinton got very favorable coverage until he was caught sexually harassing an intern in the white house (and there he earned what he got). Hillary Clinton was caught during the campaign getting questions passed to her ahead of the debate from Donna Brazile of CNN, a clear violation of debate standards, and an unfair advantage for which Brazile was fired. http://www.washingtonexaminer....
"President Trump handles criticism very differently than earlier presidents. For one, reporters who interview him say that he speaks a little too casually, and often is the leak, which does him no favors. The other is that he "hits back" when criticized, even over trivial things."
I agree that Trump hits back every time, no mater how trivial, but I think that is due in large part to what happened with George W. Bush. Bush chose to be classy and didn't "stoop to their level" with the openly hostile media and that ended up with him essentially being constantly pounded by the press who saw it as weakness. Bush was certainly not the best public speaker, but he was also not a blithering idiot, anyone who thinks he was is an idiot and ignorant of historical facts.
"Most kids who survived an American high school know that fighting back against a crowd that's teasing you will only make matters worse."
Apparently Trump learned the same lesson that I did in high school. If you have a crowd that is teasing you, single out the most obnoxious one and beat the piss out of him. I only had to do that one time and I never go teased again. I tried ignoring them for a year beforehand (like George Bush taking the high ground) and that was definitely not the solution.
"The President of the United States has been the nation's punching bag for a very long time; there's just nothing new about scathing presidential criticism."
By commentators and comedians maybe, but hard news people are supposed to be sticking to facts, and so far with Trump that is clearly not the case. They are actively participating in an attempt to steal the election from Trump because they personally hate the man, and if/when Trump is cleared of any wrong doing (which he almost certainly will, after 8 months of investigation, all the facts so far do not indicate any criminal activity), I hope Trump sues each and every news outlet who reported falsely on the Russia "scandal". If CNN and a few other major outlets go the way of Gawker, the shit heads running the other outlets will get their minions under control for fear of losing t
Medical mistakes per year: 250,000 / accidental shootings per year 760. You tell me which is the bigger problem.
There are around 2,500,000 lawful uses of firearms by citizens in the US every year to prevent crime and save lives, so accidental death risk to lifesaving use ratio is 0.03%. We can use that number if you like, or that there are about 68,000,000 gun owners in the US so the irresponsible gun owner ratio is 0.001%. How about that number?
OTOH, there are 916,000 actively practicing physicians, so in a single year, the risk of a physician killing someone by medical mistake is right at 27%. Don't like those odds? How about this, there are 5,564 hospitals in the US, so the odds of a hospital killing a patient in a year is 4,493%.
Doctors and hospitals save lives as well, but so do guns, a fact that the liberal mind can't seem to fathom (likely a side effect of inexperience coupled with coddling by society). However, they firmly understand the concept of calling 911 to get armed strangers (police) to come and save them from criminals (if the criminals haven't already murdered them and fled 20 minutes before officers arrive). The question is, do you want unarmed police officers or armed police officers to come deal with your intruder. You really want that gun to come and save you at 3am with an intruder in your house. The cop is just the vehicle for that gun to arrive and be used. Myself and all other gun owners just don't like the delay so we cut out the middle man and own our own gun and get training ourselves.
For reference, I am talking about the US college/university system here. Maybe you missed the 1940s through the 1980s? Research and job training was the purpose of ALL the colleges founded in that time frame.
Education will never be a free market thing UNTIL THE PEOPLE FOOTING THE BILL DEMAND IT... FTFY
Fear #1: if someone starts selling these jammers for $25 (google RF jammers on Ebay the existing models probably just need a little tweaking on the frequency range), then every thief will have one, along with the universal pantyhose/ski mask. Maybe not every crack head, but 8/10 is still a massive problem for a smart gun. Any idiot can order that kind of stuff online and press a button to turn it on.
Fear #2: I'm not worried about organized crime, but see fear #1. If every 2 bit criminal is ordering these jammers from Ebay or the dark web, then every time an officer pulls someone over late at night on a lonely road and the suspect turns out to be a drug runner, the cop has to wonder if his gun will even fire, on top of all his other concerns. No officer in his right mind would put up with that shit, and I predict here and now that any department forcing "smart" guns on their officers will see massive numbers of officers quitting.
I am probably one of the most safety conscious people you will ever meet. I design systems that have zero margin for failure and that can kill instantly in multiple different failure modes if the designs are not right. I carry that sense of caution with me in my personal life as well. If smart guns were truly smart (pick it up and it recognized you 99.99% of the time in under 0.1 seconds) and had a battery good for 20 years, I would be fine with that. But they don't so I'm not.
I did the analysis in another post on this thread, but to boil it down for you, we are talking about saving maybe 50% of 700 lives per year from accidental shootings (some accidental shootings are the intended user/owner being unsafe; with almost 70,000,000 gun owners, some tiny fraction are just idiots). So you will save between zero and maybe 400 lives per year with "smart" guns. Alternatively, if you were to implement universal "smart" guns with a failure to fire rate due to the smart features of just 5% (real numbers right now with smart guns are somewhere closer to 20% which is why no one buys them, or 100% if someone has an RF jammer). However, just that 5% failure rate will wind up killing around 5000 people PER YEAR: police and crime victims who were unable to be protected by their own or others guns. For the "smart" guns to be a beneficial trade off you need the failure rate to be around 0.1%... and undefeatable by any reasonable means, let alone something simple like an RF jammer.
If gun control were the answer to reducing crime and murders, then why are the liberal gun control bastions the murder capitols of the US: Chicago 500 murders, New York 419 murders, Detroit 386, Philadelphia 331, LA 299, Baltimore 219, New Orleans 193, Washington DC 135?
As it stands, the US has a murder rate of 4.88/100,000. I could cut that to under 2/100,000 if we just executed convicted murderers, rapists and attempted murderers like we used to (recidivism/escalation rate is around 65%).
Most western European countries are/were homogeneous Europeans. If you look at the Caucasian murder rate in the US it is comparable to Western Europe or better. For better or worse, we have imported many immigrants from other regions and cultures that are much more violent and they are committing murders at higher rates (the stats are there, draw your own conclusions).
No argument from me that the Trump administration is not filled with career politicians. This added to the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of Obama holdovers trying to sabotage the administration (a la 121 leaks in the first 120 days) and numerous PR blunders by the administration has definitely been detrimental to the Trump administration, but you can't argue that the media is extremely hostile to Trump as well (CNN had something like 89% negative coverage of Trump since the inauguration).
California currently has a law on the books that requires all guns be sold with "smart" features withing 5? years of the technology being sold commercially. The gun grabbers tried getting the same legislation through at the federal level as part of the renewed AWB under Obama, but it failed to pass.
"Smart guns need to be evaluated statistically, not with fantasy scenarios. If it makes the chance of accidental injury/death 70% lower while only reducing effectiveness by 5%, it's probably with doing. If it's more like 30/30 then I imagine it won't be acceptable to a lot of people."
You seem to lack a basic understanding of the situation. First off, if someone uses an RF jammer your failure to fire is 100%, and it is fairly trivial to jam RF bands. Even the magnetic finger ring safety has a failure to fire of about 20%. However, lets say for the sake of your argument that all guns are required to be smart guns and they have the much lower 5% failure rate that you cite. There are about 700 accidental shooting fatalities per year (see my other posts for the stats used here). Lets assume that number is reduced by 90% (generously) due to smart guns, saving 630 lives.
Conversely, firearms are used about 40,000 times a year by police to protect lives (themselves or others) from violent criminals who will kill someone if they are not neutralized. If the effectiveness is reduced by 5%, you have just killed 2000 people with your "smart" guns because they didn't discharge when they should have.
Additionally, guns are used about 2,500,000 times per year defensively by citizens to prevent violent crime, rape, murder etc. (we don't have exact numbers on this due to anti gun Democrats blocking the FBI from collecting the statistics). Non-fatal and fatal shootings and defensive discharges account for around 60,000 of those incidents (the others involve verbal warnings, brandishing and pointing). Reducing the effectiveness of the discharge related events by 5% means you just killed 3000 law abiding, innocent citizens.
So you want to save 630 lives, more easily saved with education, gun safes, lockers, cable and trigger locks and strict gun safety laws and in return you are willing to let 5000 people die. When you consider percentages, you must also consider the actual numbers, which are where the rubber meets the road.
So to boil it down to a single line, universal smart guns will kill around 4400 more innocents than today.
The diminished usefulness is the fact that it won't fire when it needs to. This will cost far more lives than are saved.
Not enough regulations, apparently, based on the fact that their mistakes are now the third leading cause of death in the US...
"We should be focused on how to minimize all deaths." FTFY
OK, I will start: lets execute every violent rapist, murderer and attempted murderer (just because they suck at it doesn't let them off the hook). I just reduced the homicide rate in the US by 60% (the approximate recidivism rate) and cut the costs to our penal system by about the same amount. (I just saved about 12,000 lives per year)
I will go again: automatic death penalty for anyone who uses a gun in the commission of a rape, robbery or murder. (I just saved another 6,000 lives per year).
If we are serious about saving innocent life, that is the way to go, not blaming an inanimate object for the actions of self willed individuals.
"I also think that anyone other than a soldier in a foreign country who carries a gun in their daily life is a coward and a reckless idiot."
So you think all police, bodyguards, armored transport, armed security, bank guards, pawn shop owners, gem dealers, MPs, etc... are idiots? You might want to rethink your position.
"the possibility of a hostile person grabbing the gun away from your concealed carry citizen."
The number of times in the last 10 years where a gun has been grabbed away from a citizen are minuscule to the point of having a higher chance of being struck by lightning. Yes it is possible, but any idiot who grabs for a gun 99.99% of the time gets shot. Only in Hollywood does anyone grab for a gun.
"but then, properly locking up the gun makes it significantly less obtainable and therefore a less effective self defense tool, potentially endangering yada yada. In other words, your former "just lock it up" is belied by your latter "it must be immediately ready to fire at any second"."
There are methods for storing guns that allow for rapid retrieval. If you actually owned and used guns you would know this. Several types of rapid handgun safes are designed to be kept nearby in the home with loaded handguns. They can be accessed in about a second by anyone who knows the combination, in complete darkness. So no, locking your gun up does not make it inaccessible for self defense.
"Cowboy movies aside, guns don't "save" anywhere near that number. For example, even if you take every police killing as justified and "saving lives", a theory easily disputed, that's still only around 1200 killings a year. Each of those killings would need to save dozens of lives in order to achieve the same ratio as hospitals' unintentional deaths:lives saved in order for your analogy to work."
Please cite your source. The problem is the FBI is not allowed to collect those stats because the Dims blocked them by statute because the actual numbers put their arguments squarely in the toilet. Also, killing one criminal does not only save just one life. The Florida night club shooter murdered 49 people and wounded 58 more. If he had been shot after his first victim, it would have saved 48 people. Beyond that, you are not factoring in all of the non leathal shootings and just the threat of lethal force (defensive brandishing, etc.) is enough to often deter a criminal and subdue them. And those numbers fail to consider all of the citizens who brandish or defend themselves with their firearms. You cowboy movie allusion only reveals you ignorance and how brainwashed you are on the subject.
Lets look at some numbers that I was able to find:
1200 police fatal shootings 7,459 (est) police non-fatal shooting incidents (the ratio appears to be around 230/37) 22,750 (at least) police brandishing/aiming firearms to arrest dangerous felon criminals (virtually every arrest)
For police alone, the total number of lives saved is at least 2-3x the number of uses, or 94,200
The number balloons when you consider the 68,000,000 armed citizens:
258 fatal justified shootings by citizens of criminals 2,500,000 times per year firearms are used by citizens non-fatally to ward off criminal action (verbal warning, brandishing, warning shot, non-fatal shooting). Exact numbers not available due to obstruction by Democrat gun grabbers who know the statistics will not help their case.
If a life is saved or a woman not raped or a person not kidnapped or assaulted those are a lot of lives not lost or destroyed (ask any woman if she would rather be raped or murdered, either one is horrible) for every legal, defensive use of a firearm, you are looking at 2.5M lives affected. You don't get to say how many lives are saved because the gun grabber anti gun crowd has blocked our society from actually knowing the numbers.
Another way to look at this is look at countries like the UK. They banned guns and their violent crime rate doubled the next year. Sure, gun fatalities were down, but if some guy breaks into your house and chops up your family with an axe or a machete, it is no help to you that he didn't use a gun...
So if we start with the evidence that gun ownership halves violent crime rates, including murders, then if we take our current number of annual murders at 20,200 into account, gun ownership saves about 20,000 lives per year, not taking into account all of the rapes, beatings and other violence that is also stopped.
So do you think your argument becomes stronger the more F-bombs you drop? Obscenities aside, your argument is incorrect.
If I were a criminal and I knew that all citizens were required to own only "smart" guns, it is trivial for an engineer or hacker to build a small transmitter the size of a smartphone that jams the frequencies used by ALL smart guns (or just all frequencies) in a 30m radius (not one gun of one person, as you erroneously assume). And someone will be selling these jammers on the black market/criminal circles. Then the criminals can do whatever they want because they will either have older, dumb guns, or will stick a few neodymium magnets on their guns to circumvent the smart feature. Just wait until the cops have smart guns, then every criminal in the country will own one of those jammers and police shootouts will be extremely one sided...
"Smart" guns add unnecessary layers of complexity that are trivial to hack or defeat to a tool that may at some point be critical to a person's survival and that requires safe storage and handling practices at all times anyway. The "feature" is not desirable and the added potential and penalty for hacking/malfunction/non-function is high, potentially the gun owners life. This is why no one wants "smart" guns except the politicians who have realized that gun confiscation is never going to happen in the US. Smart guns are the next best thing, because they only work about 80% of the time, they are 2-3x more expensive, and it would be trivial to disable them remotely.
The gun industry has also made changes. Most gun owners these days store their guns in a full size or compact safe, and it is standard practice to cable lock or trigger lock all firearms not stored in a safe. Those are now industry standards that have greatly reduced the number of accidental shootings.
Just because doctors and hospitals are making an effort doesn't mean that it is effective. Maybe you missed the stat:
Medical mistakes: 250,000 per year, the third leading cause of death and on the rise http://www.npr.org/sections/he... Accidental shootings: 760 per year and the lowest in history with record gun ownership levels
Yet politicians want to force substandard, defective guns on the citizenry in the name of safety, but there is no outcry over the hundreds of thousands killed every year by doctors. It is not about the regulation or implementing more safety measures, it is about the political pressure to move in a direction.
Except on water most emergency calls are made using VHF, not cell phones which only have a practical range of a few miles (thus we have cells). My example was regarding finding a prank caller in an urban environment (i.e. SURROUNDING cell towers, you don't get surrounding towers offshore).
And you are apparently unable to distinguish hyperbole from the underlying point, while simultaneously thinking you are the smartest person on the web...
And you would probably be frightened of a loaded firearm laying on a table in front of you, thinking it might jump up and shoot you, but you will readily call armed strangers (police) to your house at 3am if you hear someone breaking in and rely on them getting there in time to save your family from whatever fate awaits them at the hands of the criminals breaking in.
And yet, medical mistakes account for 32,894% more of accidental deaths per year than guns. Logically, politicians should be calling for more regulation and safeties etc. than they do for guns, but that is demonstrably not the case, especially on the left...
Incidentally, that formulary that was shut down was only done so because in addition to the deaths, they had ignored multiple prior citations for violations and other people who had been sickened by their products, and I believe several administrators and pharmacists were charged with criminal negligent homicide in that case. My guess is they plead to a lesser charge, but what you had in that isolated incident was gross negligence.
The Obama FBI and Comey started investigating Russian Trump ties/collusion/influence whatever you want to call it back before (or right after) the election. That is easily 8 months plus. (That is how Susan Rice was able to unmask people and then leak it to damage the Trump administration.) They didn't find any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Muller has access to all of those records and works plus his own team looking for several additional months.
This is exactly opposite to how criminal investigations happen. Usually you have evidence that a crime has occurred, then you investigate who committed it. The Democrats are bat shit crazy that they lost the election and are convinced Trump is Hitler reincarnated, so they start with the person: Trump and try to work backwards to a crime that as of right now does not exist...
You have to read very closely, but unintended fatal shootings in the US from 2005-2010 resulted in 3800 deaths, or roughly 760 per year. As a frame of reference, approximately 250,000 people die from medical mistakes at hospitals every year, yet there aren't any politicians trying to ban hospitals or regulate doctors.
Smart guns are a dumb idea trying to fix a problem that is much more effectively mitigated by proper education, training and proper storage of firearms (as evidenced by the fact that gun ownership is at an all time high, but accidental shootings are at nearly the lowest they have been ever). Smart guns tamper with and make less reliable the most effective self defense tool on the planet, potentially endangering the thousands of lives that are saved daily (every day hundreds of citizens use their concealed carry to protect themselves or others, and police officers do the same).
As with any tool in this imperfect world, there are accidents, misuse and abuse, but we must weigh the cost vs benefit of guns, something that the fascist progressives and Dims refuse to do (and have prevented the FBI from collecting statistics on; there is a very cynical reason that you can't find statistics on incidents where citizens save lives or property using their lawfully owned firearm, you can only find "gun deaths").
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This is a good thing and a logical progression with regulating new technologies. Just as when cars were invented, there were very few laws, and lots of injuries and accidents, so too with any new technology society must develop new norms. Having almost run down an iPod zombie years ago, this law can't be adopted fast enough across all 50 states. At the very least, it will make the entire population aware that before crossing the street, they must disengage from their technology and then "look both ways" like we teach every child.
This will be my last post on this thread because you are clearly ignorant and I suspect trolling. On the off chance that you are just really ignorant and obnoxious:
Google maps and shopping for example on the web will use your IP address and zip code to guess your location (usually off substantially based on your zip code). However, if you allow it to on the permission request, it will use your GPS determined location, in which case it will be accurate to within 30 feet or so. Stop arguing your ignorance with me and go try it. You will have to turn on location services on your iPhone 4 and allow safari/google access to location services. I assume it will work on an iPhone 4, but it might be too old at this point. Owning antiquated tech doesn't invalidate the reality for the rest of us.
My iPhone 6s has an Arm9 dual core CPU as well as a GPU and 4 ALUs (what used to be called math co-processors). It also has a GPS processor, a GSM processor, etc. The main CPU is core zero of the Arm 9, all other processors are slaves (technically there are parallel logic pathways these days, but this is still essentially true for most operations or at least the start of operations).
Regarding Democrats blocking the collection of accurate statistics on defensive use of firearms, I am my own source. I watched and listened to it happen in the 90s during the first two years of the Clinton presidency when the AWB was passed.
Regarding the use of firearms to save lives: https://www.gunowners.org/sk08...
Regarding police using firearms in the US, it is standard procedure to perform all felony arrests at gunpoint. You can use Google yourself if you are that interested.
Regarding the UK violence stat, sorry it didn't quite double, it went from 11% to 18%.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DJ-K...
OK, sorry, I didn't realize I was talking to a fellow engineer. To clarify your confusion, your position is determined by GPS. Your cell phone utilizes the on chip GPS circuitry to calculate your position by interpolating time stamps from at least 4 satellites, which is then sent to main CPU, which utilizes firmware drivers to read the positional information. The main CPU is then capable of sending out those position values via Wifi radio or 3G/4G cellular band radio to anyone who requests it, within the permissions built into the phone and those permissions that you allow, including but not limited to app providers, web sites, your cell provider, e911 and probably others as well that I cant think of off the top of my head.
If you want to be taken seriously, don't be disingenuously ignorant of reality.
And I too am happy to look at solving the problems of accidental gun use (felonious gun use is a consequence of a free society, as is felonious car use, felonious knife use etc. the only solution there is to make the penalty so high that no one does it, and/or execute everyone who does so that there are no repeat offenders.)
As far as solving accidental gun use, any reasonable person should be able to agree that the solution to that relatively small problem (760 deaths per year out of 330,000,000 people is very small) must not result in higher overall deaths. You can check my other posts on this thread for the sources of the stats, but every year guns are fired in around 100,000 instances by police (40,000) or private citizens (60,000) to save lives (sometimes only one life, sometimes 50 or more lives are on the line) at either criminals or animals. Smart guns might reduce the accidental shootings by 50% generously (since there are a few intended users who are unsafe and result in some of those shootings.) So smart guns may save around 350 lives per year. In order for that to be a net positive for society, the failure to fire rate for the smart features of smart guns must be small enough to merit their adoption. If since guns are used 100,000 times per year and lets assume they save an average of 5 lives (sometimes only one, sometimes more than 50), guns save around 500,000 lives per year when used defensively by police and private citizens.
If the failure to fire rate for smart guns is 5% (right now it is actually around 20% or more, depending on the model; it is 100% if someone uses an RF jammer on the gun mentioned in the article), then smart guns will cause the unnecessary deaths of around 25,000 people each year. And that is at a 5% failure rate. You can see how people who rely on guns for their jobs and personal protection despise smart guns as a stupid idea poorly thought through and never implemented well. You are looking at trading around 350 lives for 25,000 lives. By the way, those 350 lives could more easily be saved by teaching gun safety in schools (why not, we teach safe sex in school) gun safes, cable and trigger locks along with stiff penalties for not properly storing your firearm. Smart guns, at the end of the day, are a solution to a problem better solved with other methods.
Is that why Chris Mathews had a thrill run up his leg during the Obama inauguration? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Obama had the friendliest media coverage in the last 30 plus years. George W. Bush was treated so unfairly by the establishment media that it literally launched Fox news as one of the largest cable news outlets because people (especially conservatives) were so sick of the rampant left wing bias. By any meaningful statistic George W Bush and Trump have both been treated horribly by the press, and Obama had a continuous love fest with the exception of Fox News (who he tried to kick out of the WH news pool and lied to a fedeal judge so he could spy on their reporters like James Rosen). With the exception of Rush Limbaugh and a few other COMMENTATORS with relatively small audiences (not the national news outlets) Bill Clinton got very favorable coverage until he was caught sexually harassing an intern in the white house (and there he earned what he got). Hillary Clinton was caught during the campaign getting questions passed to her ahead of the debate from Donna Brazile of CNN, a clear violation of debate standards, and an unfair advantage for which Brazile was fired. http://www.washingtonexaminer....
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
https://www.theatlantic.com/po...
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion...
"President Trump handles criticism very differently than earlier presidents. For one, reporters who interview him say that he speaks a little too casually, and often is the leak, which does him no favors. The other is that he "hits back" when criticized, even over trivial things."
I agree that Trump hits back every time, no mater how trivial, but I think that is due in large part to what happened with George W. Bush. Bush chose to be classy and didn't "stoop to their level" with the openly hostile media and that ended up with him essentially being constantly pounded by the press who saw it as weakness. Bush was certainly not the best public speaker, but he was also not a blithering idiot, anyone who thinks he was is an idiot and ignorant of historical facts.
"Most kids who survived an American high school know that fighting back against a crowd that's teasing you will only make matters worse."
Apparently Trump learned the same lesson that I did in high school. If you have a crowd that is teasing you, single out the most obnoxious one and beat the piss out of him. I only had to do that one time and I never go teased again. I tried ignoring them for a year beforehand (like George Bush taking the high ground) and that was definitely not the solution.
"The President of the United States has been the nation's punching bag for a very long time; there's just nothing new about scathing presidential criticism."
By commentators and comedians maybe, but hard news people are supposed to be sticking to facts, and so far with Trump that is clearly not the case. They are actively participating in an attempt to steal the election from Trump because they personally hate the man, and if/when Trump is cleared of any wrong doing (which he almost certainly will, after 8 months of investigation, all the facts so far do not indicate any criminal activity), I hope Trump sues each and every news outlet who reported falsely on the Russia "scandal". If CNN and a few other major outlets go the way of Gawker, the shit heads running the other outlets will get their minions under control for fear of losing t
Medical mistakes per year: 250,000 / accidental shootings per year 760. You tell me which is the bigger problem.
There are around 2,500,000 lawful uses of firearms by citizens in the US every year to prevent crime and save lives, so accidental death risk to lifesaving use ratio is 0.03%. We can use that number if you like, or that there are about 68,000,000 gun owners in the US so the irresponsible gun owner ratio is 0.001%. How about that number?
OTOH, there are 916,000 actively practicing physicians, so in a single year, the risk of a physician killing someone by medical mistake is right at 27%. Don't like those odds? How about this, there are 5,564 hospitals in the US, so the odds of a hospital killing a patient in a year is 4,493%.
Doctors and hospitals save lives as well, but so do guns, a fact that the liberal mind can't seem to fathom (likely a side effect of inexperience coupled with coddling by society). However, they firmly understand the concept of calling 911 to get armed strangers (police) to come and save them from criminals (if the criminals haven't already murdered them and fled 20 minutes before officers arrive). The question is, do you want unarmed police officers or armed police officers to come deal with your intruder. You really want that gun to come and save you at 3am with an intruder in your house. The cop is just the vehicle for that gun to arrive and be used. Myself and all other gun owners just don't like the delay so we cut out the middle man and own our own gun and get training ourselves.
For reference, I am talking about the US college/university system here. Maybe you missed the 1940s through the 1980s? Research and job training was the purpose of ALL the colleges founded in that time frame.
Education will never be a free market thing UNTIL THE PEOPLE FOOTING THE BILL DEMAND IT... FTFY
Fear #1: if someone starts selling these jammers for $25 (google RF jammers on Ebay the existing models probably just need a little tweaking on the frequency range), then every thief will have one, along with the universal pantyhose/ski mask. Maybe not every crack head, but 8/10 is still a massive problem for a smart gun. Any idiot can order that kind of stuff online and press a button to turn it on.
Fear #2: I'm not worried about organized crime, but see fear #1. If every 2 bit criminal is ordering these jammers from Ebay or the dark web, then every time an officer pulls someone over late at night on a lonely road and the suspect turns out to be a drug runner, the cop has to wonder if his gun will even fire, on top of all his other concerns. No officer in his right mind would put up with that shit, and I predict here and now that any department forcing "smart" guns on their officers will see massive numbers of officers quitting.
I am probably one of the most safety conscious people you will ever meet. I design systems that have zero margin for failure and that can kill instantly in multiple different failure modes if the designs are not right. I carry that sense of caution with me in my personal life as well. If smart guns were truly smart (pick it up and it recognized you 99.99% of the time in under 0.1 seconds) and had a battery good for 20 years, I would be fine with that. But they don't so I'm not.
I did the analysis in another post on this thread, but to boil it down for you, we are talking about saving maybe 50% of 700 lives per year from accidental shootings (some accidental shootings are the intended user/owner being unsafe; with almost 70,000,000 gun owners, some tiny fraction are just idiots). So you will save between zero and maybe 400 lives per year with "smart" guns. Alternatively, if you were to implement universal "smart" guns with a failure to fire rate due to the smart features of just 5% (real numbers right now with smart guns are somewhere closer to 20% which is why no one buys them, or 100% if someone has an RF jammer). However, just that 5% failure rate will wind up killing around 5000 people PER YEAR: police and crime victims who were unable to be protected by their own or others guns. For the "smart" guns to be a beneficial trade off you need the failure rate to be around 0.1%... and undefeatable by any reasonable means, let alone something simple like an RF jammer.
If gun control were the answer to reducing crime and murders, then why are the liberal gun control bastions the murder capitols of the US: Chicago 500 murders, New York 419 murders, Detroit 386, Philadelphia 331, LA 299, Baltimore 219, New Orleans 193, Washington DC 135?
As it stands, the US has a murder rate of 4.88/100,000. I could cut that to under 2/100,000 if we just executed convicted murderers, rapists and attempted murderers like we used to (recidivism/escalation rate is around 65%).
Most western European countries are/were homogeneous Europeans. If you look at the Caucasian murder rate in the US it is comparable to Western Europe or better. For better or worse, we have imported many immigrants from other regions and cultures that are much more violent and they are committing murders at higher rates (the stats are there, draw your own conclusions).
No argument from me that the Trump administration is not filled with career politicians. This added to the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of Obama holdovers trying to sabotage the administration (a la 121 leaks in the first 120 days) and numerous PR blunders by the administration has definitely been detrimental to the Trump administration, but you can't argue that the media is extremely hostile to Trump as well (CNN had something like 89% negative coverage of Trump since the inauguration).
California currently has a law on the books that requires all guns be sold with "smart" features withing 5? years of the technology being sold commercially. The gun grabbers tried getting the same legislation through at the federal level as part of the renewed AWB under Obama, but it failed to pass.
"Smart guns need to be evaluated statistically, not with fantasy scenarios. If it makes the chance of accidental injury/death 70% lower while only reducing effectiveness by 5%, it's probably with doing. If it's more like 30/30 then I imagine it won't be acceptable to a lot of people."
You seem to lack a basic understanding of the situation. First off, if someone uses an RF jammer your failure to fire is 100%, and it is fairly trivial to jam RF bands. Even the magnetic finger ring safety has a failure to fire of about 20%. However, lets say for the sake of your argument that all guns are required to be smart guns and they have the much lower 5% failure rate that you cite. There are about 700 accidental shooting fatalities per year (see my other posts for the stats used here). Lets assume that number is reduced by 90% (generously) due to smart guns, saving 630 lives.
Conversely, firearms are used about 40,000 times a year by police to protect lives (themselves or others) from violent criminals who will kill someone if they are not neutralized. If the effectiveness is reduced by 5%, you have just killed 2000 people with your "smart" guns because they didn't discharge when they should have.
Additionally, guns are used about 2,500,000 times per year defensively by citizens to prevent violent crime, rape, murder etc. (we don't have exact numbers on this due to anti gun Democrats blocking the FBI from collecting the statistics). Non-fatal and fatal shootings and defensive discharges account for around 60,000 of those incidents (the others involve verbal warnings, brandishing and pointing). Reducing the effectiveness of the discharge related events by 5% means you just killed 3000 law abiding, innocent citizens.
So you want to save 630 lives, more easily saved with education, gun safes, lockers, cable and trigger locks and strict gun safety laws and in return you are willing to let 5000 people die. When you consider percentages, you must also consider the actual numbers, which are where the rubber meets the road.
So to boil it down to a single line, universal smart guns will kill around 4400 more innocents than today.
The diminished usefulness is the fact that it won't fire when it needs to. This will cost far more lives than are saved.
Not enough regulations, apparently, based on the fact that their mistakes are now the third leading cause of death in the US...
"We should be focused on how to minimize all deaths." FTFY
OK, I will start: lets execute every violent rapist, murderer and attempted murderer (just because they suck at it doesn't let them off the hook). I just reduced the homicide rate in the US by 60% (the approximate recidivism rate) and cut the costs to our penal system by about the same amount. (I just saved about 12,000 lives per year)
I will go again: automatic death penalty for anyone who uses a gun in the commission of a rape, robbery or murder. (I just saved another 6,000 lives per year).
If we are serious about saving innocent life, that is the way to go, not blaming an inanimate object for the actions of self willed individuals.
"I also think that anyone other than a soldier in a foreign country who carries a gun in their daily life is a coward and a reckless idiot."
So you think all police, bodyguards, armored transport, armed security, bank guards, pawn shop owners, gem dealers, MPs, etc... are idiots? You might want to rethink your position.
"the possibility of a hostile person grabbing the gun away from your concealed carry citizen."
The number of times in the last 10 years where a gun has been grabbed away from a citizen are minuscule to the point of having a higher chance of being struck by lightning. Yes it is possible, but any idiot who grabs for a gun 99.99% of the time gets shot. Only in Hollywood does anyone grab for a gun.
"but then, properly locking up the gun makes it significantly less obtainable and therefore a less effective self defense tool, potentially endangering yada yada. In other words, your former "just lock it up" is belied by your latter "it must be immediately ready to fire at any second"."
There are methods for storing guns that allow for rapid retrieval. If you actually owned and used guns you would know this. Several types of rapid handgun safes are designed to be kept nearby in the home with loaded handguns. They can be accessed in about a second by anyone who knows the combination, in complete darkness. So no, locking your gun up does not make it inaccessible for self defense.
"Cowboy movies aside, guns don't "save" anywhere near that number. For example, even if you take every police killing as justified and "saving lives", a theory easily disputed, that's still only around 1200 killings a year. Each of those killings would need to save dozens of lives in order to achieve the same ratio as hospitals' unintentional deaths:lives saved in order for your analogy to work."
Please cite your source. The problem is the FBI is not allowed to collect those stats because the Dims blocked them by statute because the actual numbers put their arguments squarely in the toilet. Also, killing one criminal does not only save just one life. The Florida night club shooter murdered 49 people and wounded 58 more. If he had been shot after his first victim, it would have saved 48 people. Beyond that, you are not factoring in all of the non leathal shootings and just the threat of lethal force (defensive brandishing, etc.) is enough to often deter a criminal and subdue them. And those numbers fail to consider all of the citizens who brandish or defend themselves with their firearms. You cowboy movie allusion only reveals you ignorance and how brainwashed you are on the subject.
Lets look at some numbers that I was able to find:
1200 police fatal shootings
7,459 (est) police non-fatal shooting incidents (the ratio appears to be around 230/37)
22,750 (at least) police brandishing/aiming firearms to arrest dangerous felon criminals (virtually every arrest)
For police alone, the total number of lives saved is at least 2-3x the number of uses, or 94,200
The number balloons when you consider the 68,000,000 armed citizens:
258 fatal justified shootings by citizens of criminals
2,500,000 times per year firearms are used by citizens non-fatally to ward off criminal action (verbal warning, brandishing, warning shot, non-fatal shooting). Exact numbers not available due to obstruction by Democrat gun grabbers who know the statistics will not help their case.
If a life is saved or a woman not raped or a person not kidnapped or assaulted those are a lot of lives not lost or destroyed (ask any woman if she would rather be raped or murdered, either one is horrible) for every legal, defensive use of a firearm, you are looking at 2.5M lives affected. You don't get to say how many lives are saved because the gun grabber anti gun crowd has blocked our society from actually knowing the numbers.
Another way to look at this is look at countries like the UK. They banned guns and their violent crime rate doubled the next year. Sure, gun fatalities were down, but if some guy breaks into your house and chops up your family with an axe or a machete, it is no help to you that he didn't use a gun...
So if we start with the evidence that gun ownership halves violent crime rates, including murders, then if we take our current number of annual murders at 20,200 into account, gun ownership saves about 20,000 lives per year, not taking into account all of the rapes, beatings and other violence that is also stopped.
So do you think your argument becomes stronger the more F-bombs you drop? Obscenities aside, your argument is incorrect.
If I were a criminal and I knew that all citizens were required to own only "smart" guns, it is trivial for an engineer or hacker to build a small transmitter the size of a smartphone that jams the frequencies used by ALL smart guns (or just all frequencies) in a 30m radius (not one gun of one person, as you erroneously assume). And someone will be selling these jammers on the black market/criminal circles. Then the criminals can do whatever they want because they will either have older, dumb guns, or will stick a few neodymium magnets on their guns to circumvent the smart feature. Just wait until the cops have smart guns, then every criminal in the country will own one of those jammers and police shootouts will be extremely one sided...
"Smart" guns add unnecessary layers of complexity that are trivial to hack or defeat to a tool that may at some point be critical to a person's survival and that requires safe storage and handling practices at all times anyway. The "feature" is not desirable and the added potential and penalty for hacking/malfunction/non-function is high, potentially the gun owners life. This is why no one wants "smart" guns except the politicians who have realized that gun confiscation is never going to happen in the US. Smart guns are the next best thing, because they only work about 80% of the time, they are 2-3x more expensive, and it would be trivial to disable them remotely.
The gun industry has also made changes. Most gun owners these days store their guns in a full size or compact safe, and it is standard practice to cable lock or trigger lock all firearms not stored in a safe. Those are now industry standards that have greatly reduced the number of accidental shootings.
Just because doctors and hospitals are making an effort doesn't mean that it is effective. Maybe you missed the stat:
Medical mistakes: 250,000 per year, the third leading cause of death and on the rise http://www.npr.org/sections/he...
Accidental shootings: 760 per year and the lowest in history with record gun ownership levels
Yet politicians want to force substandard, defective guns on the citizenry in the name of safety, but there is no outcry over the hundreds of thousands killed every year by doctors. It is not about the regulation or implementing more safety measures, it is about the political pressure to move in a direction.
Fair enough, though as you point out, he has not.
Except on water most emergency calls are made using VHF, not cell phones which only have a practical range of a few miles (thus we have cells). My example was regarding finding a prank caller in an urban environment (i.e. SURROUNDING cell towers, you don't get surrounding towers offshore).
And you are apparently unable to distinguish hyperbole from the underlying point, while simultaneously thinking you are the smartest person on the web...
And you would probably be frightened of a loaded firearm laying on a table in front of you, thinking it might jump up and shoot you, but you will readily call armed strangers (police) to your house at 3am if you hear someone breaking in and rely on them getting there in time to save your family from whatever fate awaits them at the hands of the criminals breaking in.
And yet, medical mistakes account for 32,894% more of accidental deaths per year than guns. Logically, politicians should be calling for more regulation and safeties etc. than they do for guns, but that is demonstrably not the case, especially on the left...
Incidentally, that formulary that was shut down was only done so because in addition to the deaths, they had ignored multiple prior citations for violations and other people who had been sickened by their products, and I believe several administrators and pharmacists were charged with criminal negligent homicide in that case. My guess is they plead to a lesser charge, but what you had in that isolated incident was gross negligence.
The Obama FBI and Comey started investigating Russian Trump ties/collusion/influence whatever you want to call it back before (or right after) the election. That is easily 8 months plus. (That is how Susan Rice was able to unmask people and then leak it to damage the Trump administration.) They didn't find any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Muller has access to all of those records and works plus his own team looking for several additional months.
This is exactly opposite to how criminal investigations happen. Usually you have evidence that a crime has occurred, then you investigate who committed it. The Democrats are bat shit crazy that they lost the election and are convinced Trump is Hitler reincarnated, so they start with the person: Trump and try to work backwards to a crime that as of right now does not exist...
The only gun that should have electronics is the M-27 phase plasma pulse rifle in the 40 watt range.
You have to read very closely, but unintended fatal shootings in the US from 2005-2010 resulted in 3800 deaths, or roughly 760 per year. As a frame of reference, approximately 250,000 people die from medical mistakes at hospitals every year, yet there aren't any politicians trying to ban hospitals or regulate doctors.
Smart guns are a dumb idea trying to fix a problem that is much more effectively mitigated by proper education, training and proper storage of firearms (as evidenced by the fact that gun ownership is at an all time high, but accidental shootings are at nearly the lowest they have been ever). Smart guns tamper with and make less reliable the most effective self defense tool on the planet, potentially endangering the thousands of lives that are saved daily (every day hundreds of citizens use their concealed carry to protect themselves or others, and police officers do the same).
As with any tool in this imperfect world, there are accidents, misuse and abuse, but we must weigh the cost vs benefit of guns, something that the fascist progressives and Dims refuse to do (and have prevented the FBI from collecting statistics on; there is a very cynical reason that you can't find statistics on incidents where citizens save lives or property using their lawfully owned firearm, you can only find "gun deaths").