Why wouldn't someone who wants to buy a gun want one that only he can fire? It's cool and it might reduce one's chances to get hit from behind by someone wishing to take the gun. (An honest question from someone who never wanted to own a gun.)
A gun is a tool of absolute last resort. They are simple, mechanical devices, and that's a good thing. I have no interest in adding complications and additional points of failure.
"I have no interest in adding complications and additional points of failure."
This is also how I feel about my clothes washer and dryer. Simple dials and minimal buttons. I want to be able to repair and replace a part at minimal expense.
I agree, and I hate the trend toward more complication. But for the washer and dryer, anyway, my life doesn't depend on them operating 100% reliably. (Which is good, because they don't.)
Couldn't it actually be easier for the owner to fire, overall? You could make it much more responsive to the trigger if you assumed that it knows you're actually trying to fire it, not? I heard there's a trade-off today between guns which easily fire unintentionally and guns which are quite difficult to fire intentionally from several people. (Of course there are the cases where I don't see how it even works, like if you're wearing gloves.)
As in, a gun like this might not need to include a manual safety? There are already lots of guns that don't, like Glock--one of the most common, if not the most common handgun in the world.
I'm not totally sure what the people you're talking to were referring to with "guns which easily fire unintentionally and guns which are quite difficult to fire intentionally."
A safe does indeed make it slower to get to the gun. That's a tradeoff lots of people are willing to make, however, and safes are generally a mature technology.
I don't know a single gun owner who has any interest in so-called smart guns.
tradeoffs... That was the point I was trying to make. You can either have safety or convenience/reliability. It seems to me that this offers another option.... do you trust a dongle or do you trust your ability to get into your gun safe before the "bad guys" "get" you. Seems weird to me to just write it off without knowing which is actually better.
That's fair enough, ignoring your scare quotes. I think a lot of the visceral reaction that gun owners have against these things is the (totally justified) fear that they'll be foisted on us by law sooner or later.
I can't directly respond to bruceb, but a child getting ahold of a gun is the fault of the parent, who neglected to responsibly secure it. If someone with a child isn't willing to buy a safe, they shouldn't buy a gun.
1) How old is wise enough? At age two there's no way a toddler can physically reach a rifle on a top shelf that weighs half his body weight and what's he supposed to load it with? On the other hand Uncle Sam handed me a M16 when I was still 17. Then the banners want 21 yrs, or 65 years, or 150 years to effectively ban in practice. There are gun safety course and familiarization classes for roughly grade school and up kids that boil down to "here take a look, no need to (dangerously) sneak when your parents aren't around, its a tool not a toy, no playing and no pretending, tell an adult if you find one laying around". Complete with coloring books and sing along songs. So the peak "danger zone" seems to be perhaps 2 to 5 years old.
2) The second sensitive topic is parenting skill. If I abandoned a two year old in a house alone with no supervision at all and he somehow dragged a folding ladder thats twice his weight into the bedroom and climbed (and how does he know how to do any of this and how does he know anything is up there anyway?) It would take a toddler a long time to figure out how to load a gun or put the bolt in or remove the trigger lock or defeat the safety or find the hidden ammo on the other side of the room or any number of technical challenges. Fundamentally you have to ask how long the little kid really had to live if it was abandoned for the hours it would take the kid to arm himself. A fatal kitchen accident or fatal stairway accident or fatal swimming pool accident was inevitable in that case, just a gun got the kid first. Likewise the kid who offs themselves because of a post on the internet or anti-depressant use or whatever isn't "really" a gun problem, its a mental health problem, take away the gun and the kid makes a noose or takes pills and ends up just as dead, not having used a gun is very little consolation to the survivors. So file that as awkward discussion about parenting skills or whatever.
If you have 300 million people in one little country Darwin will take a few but things that show up in headlines can none the less be very rare indeed. Up there with getting struck by meteors and by lightning.
This will differ per child. Some parents take their kids hunting/to a range when they're 9. Others wait til they're 13. Others wait til 16. Some never take their child hunting/to the range. My father took me and my brother to a firing range when we were 6 years old.
Not all guns are rifles. A large assortment of handguns are reasonably dangerous to kids ages 3-7 and even the most staunch advocates for firearms recognize that. They're children - they don't know better unless taught.
>what's he supposed to load it with
Firearms used for self defense rather than sport should remain loaded. But that's another argument for another time. I'm not an advocate of keeping one in the chamber, though I know people who are.
2.
I don't think I followed the point you were trying to make.
If I could have a gun that only I could fire, and which I could fire with 100% reliability, that would be something I'd want.
But I've never seen a particularly fast or reliable fingerprint scanner, my hands might be dirty or greasy, and presumably the gun can run out of battery.
I don't have a gun, but if I did, I wouldn't get one of these.
There is something to be said about this. Remember the scene from Unbreakable where the son steals Bruce Willis' handgun and points it at him? If that was a smart gun, this would be a comical scene rather than an extremely tense one.
"Don't Rely On Your Gun's "Safety" Treat every gun as though it can fire at any time."
Basically throwing money away for no real increase in safety. Spending the same money on a better more convenient more likely to be used safe or trigger lock or best of all, even the most basic safety and familiarization training, would save a lot more lives.
Its not necessarily bad in itself as a technology, its just an awful system wide allocation of money.
Guns have seen the benefit of hundreds of years of improvement, they are now incredibly reliable tools despite the fact that they basically operate via partially contained explosions which put a tremendous amount of stress on parts. Modern guns have been streamlined and refined to an enormous degree. When you pick up a gun you want it to work, because the assumption is that it working is going to save your life. The last thing you want is to add delay or unreliability to using a gun. And while having your own gun used against you is a concern it's much less of a concern than having a gun work reliably.
> But times are changing, says Conway. He believes a new generation of tech-savvy people, especially young parents, will embrace the hi-tech smart guns eventually, even overcoming the politics currently holding them back. "You cannot stop innovation. And this is an area where innovation is taking over...for technology and innovation, we have to ignore politics," he tells Stahl.
This seems like an awfully hand-wavy plan for taking on the most powerful special interest lobby in American politics, which happens to hate "smart guns" like poison.
Most powerful in terms of money spent? Because they don't even make the top 30. CVS, the pharmacy chain, spends more money on lobbying.
Or do you mean more powerful because they're backed up by the huge percentage of gun owners in this country? How big does a group represented have to be before you stop calling them a "special interest lobby"? There are more gun owners than there are teachers, but the teachers spend more on lobbying.
You're right, nobody is attempting to act against them. All the (ludicrous, unworkable, unenforceable, sometimes blatantly unconstitutional) bills that get drafted (and sometimes passed) in California, NY, Illinois, and Washington DC, those are just figments of gun-addled imaginations.
> Another basic argument Sanetti makes is that Americans like guns the way they were. "Guns of the Old West, they like them the way Davy Crockett used them...years ago," he says.
I'd be fine with capping weapons tech at 1830s flintlocks if it means giving up smart guns. I'm guessing Sanetti has something a little more modern.
Conway is certainly welcome to try to sell these guns, but given their unpopularity it's unclear what the market is -- unless he's relying on the government to require them by law. In which case the statement "for technology and innovation, we have to ignore politics," is not an accurate description of what he's doing.
The market could be for families with children in the house who want self defense, but haven't yet taken the plunge for safety reasons. I'm not sure how large this market would be.
Don't people have guns for self defense? What if someone invades your home in the middle of the night - do you want to have to start fiddling around with your gun vault?
Keeping guns stored in a vault with children present is generally a good idea if you have one or more weapons that you occasionally use. However for self defense purposes, you typically don't want to be fiddling around with a vault if someone is invading your home. I'm not commenting on the likelihood of that scenario, but it is something people consider when they own firearms.
A surprising number of people like the idea of fingerprint scanning, biometric sensing, bluetooth bracelet detecting ... gun vaults. Inside of which is a 100% reliable non-smart firearm.
Everything is a tradeoff. When I have kids, I'll probably have a small bedside safe of some kind... and just be willing to accept that it makes it a little slower to get the gun out.
I was actually referring to a specific product called a Gunvault. It isn't great for preventing a burglary, since it can just be carried off, but it opens quickly and is a decent way of keeping children's hands off of a gun.
I have kids and guns and I don't trust this technology to work when it needs to work, both in a defensive scenario and with my kids. Keep-It-Simple-Stupid.
Basic gun safety dictates that a gun is always loaded, even if your fingerprints don't match.
There's a theory behind handguns like Glocks that manual safety switches are too complicated when you're experiencing the intense response of a defensive shooting. Taking gloves and jewelry off, adjusting your grip, or the nightmare of having to screw with electronics is just asking for problems.
I don't think I would ever purchase one of these things...
> Smart weapons recognize their owners' fingerprints or hand grip, or unlock when they wirelessly interact with a special watch or ring worn by the shooter.
So what happens if I'm wearing gloves? What happens if I lose the ring or it comes off while I'm drawing? What happens if my girlfriend needs to grab my handgun out of my nightstand while I'm in the shower? There are so many ways for this to fail, I would never purchase it over a regular firearm.
What specific case are you afraid of? You are outside in the wintertime with a gun concealed on your person, and a would-be assailant comes along? Then get the kind that uses a ring, not a fingerprint.
And when you lose the ring, get a new one immediately instead of waiting for the would-be assailant to come along.
* What is the ring/watch material made of? How durable is it.
* For the "smart ring", can I get this sized-to-fit?
* What exactly is powering this scanner? What happens without power?
These are just concerns off the top of my head; I'm sure there are other concerns I'm not thinking of. Should my fob become damaged/dislodged in a scuffle what happens then? With a firearm, what you don't want is fragility.
I don't know personally, but presumably companies designing these guns have thought of the same concerns and made the rings to be durable and sizable.
Re battery dying - if I was designing a smart gun, I would have it default to a regular, usable-by-anyone gun if the power dies. That way you don't have to worry about mastermind criminals with EMP devices either.
I've got kids toys that require a minute or two of swearing to get the battery compartment open. If my would-be assailant has the power to keep me contained for that long while he tinkers with my smart gun, I've got other troubles.
It'd at least prevent someone from grabbing your gun and immediately shooting you with it.
Do you have small children in the house? Do you regularly use your gun for hunting or practicing? That seems like the intersection where you want a smart gun.
PS: Adding more than one user seems like a really simple feature.
Reliability is a huge, huge concern with guns. That's why a weapon like an AK-47 is so popular. It shoots if it's muddy, sandy, you name it.
A failed fingerprint recognition (even due to the conditions listed above) when you intend to use a gun means you're probably dead.
Edit: I listed wet as a condition an AK would fire under, but I don't believe that's accurate. The original point is still true though, the AK is touted for it's reliability.
Ultimately, when it comes to firearms, you really don't want a lot of failure modes. This piece of technology adds way to many. Something I didn't see in the article, but how is this device getting power? What happens if my battery dies?
Most people manage to keep their phones/laptops charged. A smart gun should have less ongoing drain and surely you could hook it up to charge in your gun safe. Never going to happen if people start issuing death threats to anyone trying to market one, though.
Meanwhile, more attention to the "shoots curious kids" failure mode seems appropriate.
> more attention to the "shoots curious kids" failure mode seems appropriate
This is a solved problem. The negligent parents who store guns in the open without securing them (and who don't teach their kids to be safe with guns) are abhorrent. But they're also not likely to be buying "smart guns."
It's less a matter of convenience than reliability. Inserting electronics into the cycle of operations adds additional points of failure, and purely mechanical devices are not vulnerable to firmware bugs or electromagnetic interference.
> What happens if I lose the ring or it comes off while I'm drawing?
You secure the gun, pick up the gun and continue practicing.
> handgun out of my nightstand
A handgun should be stored securely in a safe.
All those questions were answered on the assumption that you aren't specially threatened in some way. Except for those very few persons that are specially threatened, weapons actually lead to a greater risk than the security they can provide. Even in the case you are going to get robbed at home, it's more likely that the robber takes control of your guns and uses them against you than that you can use the guns against them.
> Even in the case you are going to get robbed at home, it's more likely that the robber takes control of your guns and uses them against you than that you can use the guns against them.
Sorry I'm currently unable to find the source where I got this from under the tons of statistics how having a gun at home is actually making you more unsafe. Maybe I'm just not using the right vocabulary because English isn't my native tongue.
I don't know about robbers wrestling your gun from you and using it against you, but the data suggest that your idea about "I'm going to protect myself with guns" is a fiction.
(though I suspect it'll make you uncomfortable and you'll just look for ways to discredit it, because it's a heck of a lot easier to hold onto a John Wayne-esque "I'm a big man with a gun" self-identity...)
> So only people with some special justification are allowed to defend themselves?
In many countries the legislation is like that. For most of the rest, if there's no extraordinary risk of someone targeting you you're actually putting yourself and those around you in an unnecessary risk.
It isn't wrong. The data show so very clearly that guns are far, far, far more likely to accidentally (i.e. negligently) injure someone than to be used in self-protection.
You might feel better to carry one with you, but that is a feeling. Reality does not reflect that personal feeling.
Why? You're acting out of feelings, not out of a respect for data. Your position on guns is faith-based, not reality-based, and saying "show me a study so I can disagree with it" just confirms that.
As a parent of small children, if I were ever to buy a gun I would want to have a smart gun.
Seems to me the real obstacle is the NJ law that would restrict regular gun sales once smart guns are sold, which should be revised ASAP as it gives the NRA a semi-legitimate reason to oppose the sale of smart guns.
> the NJ law that would restrict regular gun sales once smart guns are sold, which should be revised ASAP as it gives the NRA a semi-legitimate reason to oppose the sale of smart guns
Even if that particular law is revised or repealed, gun rights advocates will always argue (correctly, I believe) that such legislation is in the pipeline once these devices become more common/workable.
You need to keep them simple unless you're improving their ability to kill, in which case this is the latest in super complex death machines http://tracking-point.com/precision-guided-firearms/precisio.... Takes care of all your "herd management" and "homestead defense" needs.
The iP1 which nearly went on sale last year was going to be sold for $1800 with the watch, and was only available in .22lr.
AFAIK, nobody has posted dissassembly pictures or video yet, but I would be surprised if the electronic disconnect can't be easily removed by anyone with time to field strip it.
Call me when this type of technology has been in mandatory use by 100% of law enforcement and military for 10 years without a greater failure rate than traditional safety systems.
The problem with smart guns is that they add an additional point of failure to an otherwise reliable piece of technology. In the unlikely situation where I need to defend myself I need to know that my gun will go off when I pull the trigger. The finger print technology on my iPhone is maybe 90% reliable. On a firearm that would be unacceptable. Until smart guns are reliable enough that they are adopted by law enforcement I'm not interested.
What parent out there is so concerned about his child's safety that he'd buy one of these, and yet so unconcerned that he wouldn't just buy a regular gun and a safe?
I noticed pg linked to this.[1] I don't know his opinions on the matter, but I doubt smart guns will take off. I own several firearms, and I find smart guns completely unappealing. The technology adds cost, increases complexity, reduces reliability, and makes it impossible for me to maintain the weapon myself. If the electronics go haywire, I'd have to ship it back to the manufacturer. That's no fun.
It's unclear what problem smart guns are trying to solve. Is the point to replace gun safes? Is it to prevent the weapon from being used against you if taken from you in a fight? Is it to deter gun theft? Is it to stop children from firing the weapon if they discover it? The latter scenario seems particularly silly to me. If you're dumb enough to leave a loaded weapon out in a house with children, you're probably not going to have the sense to get a smart gun.
Even if the cost and reliability issues are addressed, smart guns still won't help much. First, the majority of guns used in crimes are obtained through corrupt dealers and straw purchases. Only 10-15% of firearms used in crimes are stolen.[2] Second, this will do nothing to help secure the 350 million guns already in the US.
It seems to me that a much more effective way to reduce theft and accidental gun deaths is to make better safes. Right now, the best safes on the market are mechanical lock boxes.[3] They use no batteries or electronics, and they can make a gun available in seconds. Still, they're less than ideal. Many are hard to program, causing users to leave them on the default combination. Almost all of them have small buttons which are hard to press if your adrenaline is going. I'd love to get something better.
It's hard to imagine 100 years from now that guns won't be smart. The only question is when and how they are implemented. IMHO: 'smart' guns will be first about improving their effectiveness not safety. Similar to things like tracking point.
Primers and firing pins replaced by magnetoelectric ignition. Trigger used to designate targets, while the smart electronics use gyros and lasers to fire only when the loaded ammunition is most likely to hit the designated target.
The safety lock might possibly be disengaged by numeric PIN or capacitative gesture recognition (like playing a certain sequence of notes on a theremin). Biometrics and proximity-based authorization tokens will have been discarded as untenable long before.
I agree. I think future "smart" abilities in guns will be things like target detection. For example, I could see a fire selector for "safe", "semi-auto", and "vital areas only". Flip it to the latter and if you hold down the trigger, a computer vision system only fires a round when it determines you're going to hit a vital part of a person/animal/whatever. TrackPoint sorta had the beginnings of that, but it was intended for long range.
A core belief on both sides of the discussion is the assumption that this will be the first bug free software ever written, which is somewhat comical.
You're somewhat likely to have guns randomly firing in peoples pockets or when a high power trucker CB transmits or not work at all when the battery is dead or in the rain or when a police officers own radio is nearby transmitting. Hold on while I reboot my service pistol, its "patch tuesday" time to rob the bank with our non-smart guns, etc.
Also there is the assumption that this won't be DRMed to hell and back to screw owners over, when of course it will be. Sure you can add your wife to the list of authorized users, just submit .gov paperwork and licenses and it'll only be $500 to unlock 2 users.
So this is going to have some kind of electronic interlock to prevent firing. Nope. Give me something that works reliably despite blood, sweat, mud, dirt, and wild temperature variations, not to mention the repeated shock of thousands of firings necessary for proper training. In an emergency situation, you don't want to pull the trigger and realize the batteries are dead...
Anything that needs a wireless connection is an absolute non-starter. A gun can jam mechanically, but having a simple weapon be disabled by active ECM is just stupid.
This article gave me a fantastic idea for a new invention--Smart Parachutes!!
A battery operated sensor on the ripcord will analyze the operators fingerprint and pulling position to computer whether the chute will or will not actually be deployed!! No more stolen parachutes or accidental premature deployments!
We'll make millions, guys!
BRB gotta find some non-sky divers to invest.
It's already illegal to possess a gun outside your home or business in New Jersey (with very few exceptions for rifles and shotguns) yet Trenton, Camden, and Newark still have a whole ton of gun violence and are basically giant ghettos. A gadget like this won't make any difference whatsoever. Let's not even get into the reliability nightmare and the terrible designs like having an additional ring to wear.
I'm saying all the laws currently banning every single type of gun outside ones home/business on books currently aren't doing shit to stop gun violence and this won't either, not that smart guns shouldn't exist.
Will smart guns introduce new and unfamiliar failure modes? Absolutely yes.
However I think the real question that needs to be examined is whether or not the adoption of smart guns would lead to fewer accidental injuries/fatalities on a national basis.
Requiring that a smart gun introduce absolutely no new failure modes misses the bigger picture... that too many accidental injuries/fatalities are happening right now (presumably... it would be nice to see research on this but researching gun deaths is too controversial get funding).
No one wants to be injured or killed because of a smart gun failure, and the same is true for an accidental gun injury or death. Who wants their kid to accidentally shoot them? Who wants their smart gun to fail in the face of an armed intruder? The answer in both cases is no one and these questions miss the point, much like the 'seat-belts cause injuries' advocates of yesteryear.
It really is all about reducing the total number of accidental gun injuries/deaths.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadThe people who want these guns to be sold are not the people who would buy them.
This is also how I feel about my clothes washer and dryer. Simple dials and minimal buttons. I want to be able to repair and replace a part at minimal expense.
I'm not totally sure what the people you're talking to were referring to with "guns which easily fire unintentionally and guns which are quite difficult to fire intentionally."
I don't know a single gun owner who has any interest in so-called smart guns.
1) How old is wise enough? At age two there's no way a toddler can physically reach a rifle on a top shelf that weighs half his body weight and what's he supposed to load it with? On the other hand Uncle Sam handed me a M16 when I was still 17. Then the banners want 21 yrs, or 65 years, or 150 years to effectively ban in practice. There are gun safety course and familiarization classes for roughly grade school and up kids that boil down to "here take a look, no need to (dangerously) sneak when your parents aren't around, its a tool not a toy, no playing and no pretending, tell an adult if you find one laying around". Complete with coloring books and sing along songs. So the peak "danger zone" seems to be perhaps 2 to 5 years old.
2) The second sensitive topic is parenting skill. If I abandoned a two year old in a house alone with no supervision at all and he somehow dragged a folding ladder thats twice his weight into the bedroom and climbed (and how does he know how to do any of this and how does he know anything is up there anyway?) It would take a toddler a long time to figure out how to load a gun or put the bolt in or remove the trigger lock or defeat the safety or find the hidden ammo on the other side of the room or any number of technical challenges. Fundamentally you have to ask how long the little kid really had to live if it was abandoned for the hours it would take the kid to arm himself. A fatal kitchen accident or fatal stairway accident or fatal swimming pool accident was inevitable in that case, just a gun got the kid first. Likewise the kid who offs themselves because of a post on the internet or anti-depressant use or whatever isn't "really" a gun problem, its a mental health problem, take away the gun and the kid makes a noose or takes pills and ends up just as dead, not having used a gun is very little consolation to the survivors. So file that as awkward discussion about parenting skills or whatever.
If you have 300 million people in one little country Darwin will take a few but things that show up in headlines can none the less be very rare indeed. Up there with getting struck by meteors and by lightning.
This will differ per child. Some parents take their kids hunting/to a range when they're 9. Others wait til they're 13. Others wait til 16. Some never take their child hunting/to the range. My father took me and my brother to a firing range when we were 6 years old.
Not all guns are rifles. A large assortment of handguns are reasonably dangerous to kids ages 3-7 and even the most staunch advocates for firearms recognize that. They're children - they don't know better unless taught.
>what's he supposed to load it with
Firearms used for self defense rather than sport should remain loaded. But that's another argument for another time. I'm not an advocate of keeping one in the chamber, though I know people who are.
2.
I don't think I followed the point you were trying to make.
But I've never seen a particularly fast or reliable fingerprint scanner, my hands might be dirty or greasy, and presumably the gun can run out of battery.
I don't have a gun, but if I did, I wouldn't get one of these.
* Firing with the opposite hand
* Firing with hands slick with fluid (blood, sweat, mud, whatever).
* Reloading and firing with a single hand available.
* Firing with broken or missing digits.
The world of gunfighting is a great deal messier than fingerprint scanners can handle.
"Don't Rely On Your Gun's "Safety" Treat every gun as though it can fire at any time."
Basically throwing money away for no real increase in safety. Spending the same money on a better more convenient more likely to be used safe or trigger lock or best of all, even the most basic safety and familiarization training, would save a lot more lives.
Its not necessarily bad in itself as a technology, its just an awful system wide allocation of money.
This seems like an awfully hand-wavy plan for taking on the most powerful special interest lobby in American politics, which happens to hate "smart guns" like poison.
Or do you mean more powerful because they're backed up by the huge percentage of gun owners in this country? How big does a group represented have to be before you stop calling them a "special interest lobby"? There are more gun owners than there are teachers, but the teachers spend more on lobbying.
I'd be fine with capping weapons tech at 1830s flintlocks if it means giving up smart guns. I'm guessing Sanetti has something a little more modern.
Basic gun safety dictates that a gun is always loaded, even if your fingerprints don't match.
There's a theory behind handguns like Glocks that manual safety switches are too complicated when you're experiencing the intense response of a defensive shooting. Taking gloves and jewelry off, adjusting your grip, or the nightmare of having to screw with electronics is just asking for problems.
Funny you say that! New Jersey has a law that will ban the sale of all guns except smart guns once they become available: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325...
> Smart weapons recognize their owners' fingerprints or hand grip, or unlock when they wirelessly interact with a special watch or ring worn by the shooter.
So what happens if I'm wearing gloves? What happens if I lose the ring or it comes off while I'm drawing? What happens if my girlfriend needs to grab my handgun out of my nightstand while I'm in the shower? There are so many ways for this to fail, I would never purchase it over a regular firearm.
Are you currently holding the gun? If not, take off the gloves and then pick up the gun.
> if I lose the ring or it comes off
Same thing that happens if you lose your wallet or car keys. You go find it immediately or get a replacement quickly.
> girlfriend needs to grab my handgun
Hopefully they can make smart guns that can have two authorized users.
> so many ways for this to fail
Regular handguns can also fail - anyone can pick them up and shoot anyone else. Some people consider that a bug, not a feature.
Sorry would-be assailant, please hold-by while I remove these gloves.
> if I lose the ring or it comes off
Sorry would-be assailant, please hold-by while I drive to my local sporting goods store and have them clone me a new ring.
And when you lose the ring, get a new one immediately instead of waiting for the would-be assailant to come along.
* What is the ring/watch material made of? How durable is it.
* For the "smart ring", can I get this sized-to-fit?
* What exactly is powering this scanner? What happens without power?
These are just concerns off the top of my head; I'm sure there are other concerns I'm not thinking of. Should my fob become damaged/dislodged in a scuffle what happens then? With a firearm, what you don't want is fragility.
Re battery dying - if I was designing a smart gun, I would have it default to a regular, usable-by-anyone gun if the power dies. That way you don't have to worry about mastermind criminals with EMP devices either.
It'd at least prevent someone from grabbing your gun and immediately shooting you with it.
PS: Adding more than one user seems like a really simple feature.
It might not apply for an average american shopping guns in Walmart, but hopefully it will be important for defense forces, police, etc.
edit - typo
A failed fingerprint recognition (even due to the conditions listed above) when you intend to use a gun means you're probably dead.
Edit: I listed wet as a condition an AK would fire under, but I don't believe that's accurate. The original point is still true though, the AK is touted for it's reliability.
Meanwhile, more attention to the "shoots curious kids" failure mode seems appropriate.
This is a solved problem. The negligent parents who store guns in the open without securing them (and who don't teach their kids to be safe with guns) are abhorrent. But they're also not likely to be buying "smart guns."
When those start being enforced, then we can examine whether it's a solved problem.
An AK-type will actually fire whilst a metre or so underwater... and cycle too.
Don't wear gloves on the shooting stand
> What happens if I lose the ring or it comes off while I'm drawing?
You secure the gun, pick up the gun and continue practicing.
> handgun out of my nightstand
A handgun should be stored securely in a safe.
All those questions were answered on the assumption that you aren't specially threatened in some way. Except for those very few persons that are specially threatened, weapons actually lead to a greater risk than the security they can provide. Even in the case you are going to get robbed at home, it's more likely that the robber takes control of your guns and uses them against you than that you can use the guns against them.
Care to back up that claim?
Here's one thing worth reading:
http://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/defensive-gun-use-armed-with...
(though I suspect it'll make you uncomfortable and you'll just look for ways to discredit it, because it's a heck of a lot easier to hold onto a John Wayne-esque "I'm a big man with a gun" self-identity...)
So only people with some special justification are allowed to defend themselves?
> weapons actually lead to a greater risk than the security they can provide
Wrong, although this "fact" is bandied about depressingly often.
> it's more likely that the robber takes control of your guns and uses them against you than that you can use the guns against them
Completely wrong.
In many countries the legislation is like that. For most of the rest, if there's no extraordinary risk of someone targeting you you're actually putting yourself and those around you in an unnecessary risk.
That may be. But of the many worthy things other countries have that we might emulate, this is not one.
> you're actually putting yourself and those around you in an unnecessary risk
This is just 100% wrong.
You might feel better to carry one with you, but that is a feeling. Reality does not reflect that personal feeling.
http://www.tbuckner.com/KELLERMANN.htm
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2011/01/william-c-montgomer...
http://www.guns.com/2015/08/24/kellermanns-gun-ownership-stu...
Seems to me the real obstacle is the NJ law that would restrict regular gun sales once smart guns are sold, which should be revised ASAP as it gives the NRA a semi-legitimate reason to oppose the sale of smart guns.
Even if that particular law is revised or repealed, gun rights advocates will always argue (correctly, I believe) that such legislation is in the pipeline once these devices become more common/workable.
1. Significantly more expensive, at least in the short to medium term.
2. They can only reduce reliability, and they probably will.
3. Easier than the manufacturers would have you believe.
AFAIK, nobody has posted dissassembly pictures or video yet, but I would be surprised if the electronic disconnect can't be easily removed by anyone with time to field strip it.
Call me when this type of technology has been in mandatory use by 100% of law enforcement and military for 10 years without a greater failure rate than traditional safety systems.
I won't hold my breath.
It's unclear what problem smart guns are trying to solve. Is the point to replace gun safes? Is it to prevent the weapon from being used against you if taken from you in a fight? Is it to deter gun theft? Is it to stop children from firing the weapon if they discover it? The latter scenario seems particularly silly to me. If you're dumb enough to leave a loaded weapon out in a house with children, you're probably not going to have the sense to get a smart gun.
Even if the cost and reliability issues are addressed, smart guns still won't help much. First, the majority of guns used in crimes are obtained through corrupt dealers and straw purchases. Only 10-15% of firearms used in crimes are stolen.[2] Second, this will do nothing to help secure the 350 million guns already in the US.
It seems to me that a much more effective way to reduce theft and accidental gun deaths is to make better safes. Right now, the best safes on the market are mechanical lock boxes.[3] They use no batteries or electronics, and they can make a gun available in seconds. Still, they're less than ideal. Many are hard to program, causing users to leave them on the default combination. Almost all of them have small buttons which are hard to press if your adrenaline is going. I'd love to get something better.
1. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/660920179904266240
2. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/gu...
3. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000T24OFG
The safety lock might possibly be disengaged by numeric PIN or capacitative gesture recognition (like playing a certain sequence of notes on a theremin). Biometrics and proximity-based authorization tokens will have been discarded as untenable long before.
You're somewhat likely to have guns randomly firing in peoples pockets or when a high power trucker CB transmits or not work at all when the battery is dead or in the rain or when a police officers own radio is nearby transmitting. Hold on while I reboot my service pistol, its "patch tuesday" time to rob the bank with our non-smart guns, etc.
Also there is the assumption that this won't be DRMed to hell and back to screw owners over, when of course it will be. Sure you can add your wife to the list of authorized users, just submit .gov paperwork and licenses and it'll only be $500 to unlock 2 users.
Anything that needs a wireless connection is an absolute non-starter. A gun can jam mechanically, but having a simple weapon be disabled by active ECM is just stupid.
A battery operated sensor on the ripcord will analyze the operators fingerprint and pulling position to computer whether the chute will or will not actually be deployed!! No more stolen parachutes or accidental premature deployments!
We'll make millions, guys! BRB gotta find some non-sky divers to invest.
However I think the real question that needs to be examined is whether or not the adoption of smart guns would lead to fewer accidental injuries/fatalities on a national basis.
Requiring that a smart gun introduce absolutely no new failure modes misses the bigger picture... that too many accidental injuries/fatalities are happening right now (presumably... it would be nice to see research on this but researching gun deaths is too controversial get funding).
No one wants to be injured or killed because of a smart gun failure, and the same is true for an accidental gun injury or death. Who wants their kid to accidentally shoot them? Who wants their smart gun to fail in the face of an armed intruder? The answer in both cases is no one and these questions miss the point, much like the 'seat-belts cause injuries' advocates of yesteryear.
It really is all about reducing the total number of accidental gun injuries/deaths.
This is a noble sentiment, but it really isn't. It's about gun control, plain and simple.
For individuals, no.