House Bill Would Mandate Smart Gun Tech By U.S. Manufacturers 750
Lucas123 writes "U.S. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass) is pushing a bill that would require all U.S. handgun manufacturers to include 'personalization technology' in their weapons. Tierney said he got the idea for The Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 from the latest James Bond film, Skyfall. In it Bond escapes death when his handgun, which is equipped with technology that recognizes his fingerprints, becomes inoperable when a bad guy picks it up. 'This technology, however, isn't just for the movies — it's a reality,' Tierney said. Tierney pointed to a myriad of cases where the smart gun tech could prevent children from being harmed or killed in firearms accidents. Jim Wallace, executive director of the Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League, the official state association of the NRA, said he knows of no gun owners who would want smart gun technology on their weapons. Wallace said any technology that may impede the proper function of a weapon is a problem. He pointed to the fact that any integrated processor technology would also require a battery of some kind, which could pose a system failure if it lost power."
LET THE CHILDREN DIE ALREADY (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Movies are real! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Movies are real! (Score:4, Informative)
Interestingly enough, they (liberals) count suicide as a "gun crime", or "gun violence" or whatever, so they can vastly inflate the numbers of actual gun crimes. Some 60% of all gun deaths are suicide. Another interesting fact, suicides in the US, per capita, is very similar (statistical blip) to countries with strict gun controls, which only prove that suicidal people will kill themselves, regardless of method.
All of this doesn't matter, because "guns are scary" (tm)
Re:Movies are real! (Score:5, Informative)
You willing to bet your liberty in a (snip)
No, he probably just looked up the statistics on the number of people that have been killed with their own gun. This is why police officers are trained to always keep their hand on their weapon during a traffic stop or during any other time when they're questioning someone who isn't in custody, and why once their gun has been drawn, they typically move away and don't holster it again until backup arrives and a second officer can approach and subdue. The risk is very real.
self-defense case on microcircuitry that is never checked or maintained
Your computer has tons of microcircuitry. Far more than this technology would require. If your life depended on being able to complete a call to the police using a VoIP product, do you think you could do it as fast as with a regular, land-line phone, assuming you had the software already installed and configured?
The fact that something isn't checked or maintained is not an indictment against its reliability. Maintenance usually happens on a schedule -- days, weeks, years, even decades. You don't just assume your car is going to run out of oil because you haven't checked the oil since the last time you started it -- you know that as long as you check it every 7,000 miles, or whatever the manual says, you do not have to worry about that. Why would a gun be different?
a lens that might be obstructed or smeared,
You know, you're working this technology all crabbed. A police officer could be issued a gun with a RF component in it that operated around 800 MHz or so. At this frequency, the signal clings to a person's skin and clothing. A low-power, short-range transmitter, perhaps embedded in the officer's radio, could complete the circuit. Thus if the officer was not in physical contact with the gun, it wouldn't fire.
Biometric identification isn't the only way of securing a weapon.
and the assumption that if there isn't a perfect picture, you're hiding some kind of guilt?
That's a social and legal problem, not a technical problem. Let's try and keep on topic here; This is a feasibility study, not an exhaustive analysis of "what if" scenarios...
"Mr. Johnson, how do we know you didn't put your blood all over the end of that gun before your wife used it to murder a poor, helpless transient you two had lured to your home for deviant sex? There's no picture. You must be trying to hide something."
Strike my last; ... not an exhaustive analysis of conspiracy theories.
Now, as has become increasingly common on Slashdot (I miss the old days), nothing in what I've said is either for or against whatever political cause or position you're advocating. It is simply, and purely, an engineering analysis. What Congress is, or isn't doing, or whatever your political beliefs are, or even mine, are irrelevant here. This about answering IF we can do this with the technology available today, not should we do it.
Re:Movies are real! (Score:2, Informative)
List of countries by suicide rate [wikipedia.org] in suicides per 100,000 people per year:
#25 France 14.7
#34 USA 12.0
#35 Sweden 11.9
#36 Norway 11.9
fuck fuck nigger shit cuntnozzle. I cussed a lot so these facts are now progressive.