A Look at Smart Gun Technology 765
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget takes a look at smart gun technology currently available and what the future might hold. From the article: 'While the idea of a gun that couldn't be turned on its owner seems like an obvious win for everyone involved, there are a number of problems with the concept. Chief among those worries: the safety mechanism will fail when it's needed most. If you're relying on a weapon for defense, the last thing you want is another avenue for failure. Electronics aren't perfect. Sometimes cameras can't autofocus. Cable boxes freeze up when browsing the channel guide. The equivalent, seemingly small glitch in a smart gun could be the difference between life and death.'"
guns are stupid (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are defending yourself with your smart gun and the person takes it away from you, I'm pretty sure that if they can't shoot you with it that they will still be able to beat you to death with it. And if they are the kind of person who can and will disarm someone then they probably can beat you up, too. Either way, I'll take my chances that someone else might get my gun over my gun not firing when I really need it to. I can train to deal with misfires, not with electronic malfunctions.
False choice: Electronic != unreliable (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes cameras can't autofocus. Cable boxes freeze up when browsing the channel guide.
But fly-by-wire airliners, military radios, targeting systems, medical implants, even Internet backbone routers all have absurdly high reliability stats and are all based on electronics, sensors and firmware.
So don't buy your smart gun from a factory in China producing crap for Comcast or Sony. Buy it from someone who knows how to build high-reliability electronics for the military, like Siemens or ATK.
Would you leave your house unlocked all the time because you might lose the key while you were being chased by a mugger? No, because on the other 30,000 days of your life burglars will come and go as they please. It's the same with a gun, where it is easily stolen or grappled from you before you use it, or worse, found by a child.
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:4, Interesting)
To me, the big potential advantage of smart gun technology would be to decrease the black market for guns. If you have a gun and in a confrontation, it gets taken from you and you get shot, I don't really care to be honest. That's your problem. The societal problem I care about is criminals buying guns on the black market. If smart gun technology could make stolen guns useless, I'm all for it. It seems like guns used in crimes are generally stolen (judging from a google search, there's far more bullshit and propaganda than there is hard studies on the subject, and I'm not willing to spend time getting to the bottom of it to be sure).
To me, it seems pretty unlikely that smart gun locks will do much of anything with the black market. Screen locks haven't really prevented a thriving black market for stolen smartphones. So I suspect that smart gun technology is pretty dumb for everyone but the patent holders and their lobbyists, and maybe REALLY incompetent gun owners.
Re:Flawed reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all about the probabilities of various scenarios, and anyone failing to incorporate that that in their evaluation is not worth listening to.
The probabilities might surprise you.
It is true that police, for example, are shot more frequently than many people think with their own guns.
On the other hand, that represents such a small percentage of overall gun confrontations that it is not very statistically significant.
Statistically, the need to prevent "unauthorized" people from using your gun against you is vanishingly small. Yet for the sake of doing that, many people seem willing to compromise the ability to do something that is statistically vastly more likely: defend yourself with a gun.
That is irrational.
Re:The bigger picture (Score:4, Interesting)
Marine corps are trained to handle firearms. The US is a scary place where you can get a half hour gun safety course and buy several Rugers.
With your Marine Corps training, you probably think you could best me in a fist fight. You're probably pretty certain I won't just kick your ass, and then probably take your gun and shoot you. You've been trained for that situation, and I'm sure they actually kicked your ass a whole lot to make sure you were serious about trying to not get your ass kicked.
The modal average civilian has a gun because he knows he can't kick my ass. He somehow believes I'll jump him and then get shot, somehow without noticing him reaching for his gun and then taking it from him. Considering most street criminals have more experience in gang fights than I, this reasons toward an even worse scenario.
Besides, marines get swords.
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. The argument often made for women not to carry firearms is that it'll be taken away from them and used against them.
If they're willing to fire it, it's very, very hard to take a gun away from somebody if it's in their hands.
Still, for a statistic on how many people are killed by their own weapons after being disarmed, I came up with a rate of 5% of police officers being murdered by their own weapon [fbi.gov], as an average over the last decade(25 out of 535).
It's important to note that I figure that the guns were probably stolen out of the officer's holster, not out of his hands in most cases.
Review of FBI reports on slain officers in 2012 shows that 1 officer is listed as being killed with his own weapon, however I did not find such in the narrative, but the FBI site mentions that not all cases have a publically available narrative, for various reasons. I only found one where such a system would have been helpful, [fbi.gov] which involved using a slain officer's weapon to injure a tow truck driver and 2 other officers(1 fatally).