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.'"
Tech isn't there yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like many of the current rube goldberg-ish "less-lethal weapons", the tech to make a "smart gun" just isn't there yet. Every entry in this field has it's list of failures and impracticalities.
That's not to say we shouldn't stop trying. We'll probably get there eventually. It's just not something we can do right now. At the very least progress has clearly been made. I remember years ago they'd talk about "smart guns" and they'd involve special clips or holsters which would have been absolutely ridiculous in the kind of scenarios where you'd want a gun. At least now the ideal case seems practical and we are arguing about reliability.
Camera gun (Score:2)
They can put a camera on the gun today. That's what they ought to focus on. Maybe someday we'll have guns smart enough to only take disabling shots, or phasers on stun. But today, we can at least establish where a gun was pointed when it was fired, and get an idea of the situation in which it was fired which doesn't depend on testimony. These ought to be mandatory on cop guns, and optional everywhere else to start with. Maybe you need a camera on your gun for it to be legal to also possess the ammo at the s
Re:Camera gun (Score:5, Insightful)
Disabling shots are irresponsible, unsafe, and ineffective.
If you can deal with a situation without lethal force (accounting for disparity of force, ability to do act, and reasonable-person standard of self defense), then you are obligated to do so. You are more likely to miss (especially under stress), will achieve far less knock-down, tells a jury that you are so goddamn awesome that you probably didn't need to shoot, and you are trying to hit something still filled with things like femoral and brachial arteries so it may result in you BOTH being dead.
Center mass if you can, Mozambique if you have to.
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The system just isn't that concerned if the convict being "disabled" ends up dying. If the correctional officer "misses" and the disabling shot goes center mass, the only thing that is going to happen to him is some more range time
Its a really bad idea on the street though
Mozambique Drill (Score:4, Informative)
He was referring to a common 'failure to stop' drill called the Mozambique (Drill). Translation: 2 to the chest 1 to the head.
It works out very quickly because of muzzle climb. First round to around nipple level, a bit below the armpits. Second round to just below the collarbone area. Third round to the face, forehead specifically.
The idea is that even if somebody is wearing body armor it doesn't protect against head shots. So you shoot twice to the chest, the largest easiest disabling target. If that doesn't work, you put a round into the brain.
I'm a bit hesitant to believing that a fold up shield can withstand small arms fire, but I agree with deescalating to the maximum extent possible. But if you have to shoot, you should be effective at it. Tueller drills help reduce your reaction time if somebody is coming at you with a knife, as well as help inform you how close you can get and not be threatened by a knife. Mozambiques help in case you encounter somebody wearing armor. Or hopped up on crack/meth/bath salts for that matter.
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"Disabling shots" are not used intentionally, and for a reason. Stating that they are "used frequently" is an outright fabrication.
You watch too many movies and/or play too many video games.
Re:Camera gun (Score:5, Insightful)
the second amendment is literally 3 or 4 sentences long. I dont know why its so hard to understand the law that says the government "shall not infringe" Mandating ANYTHING is infringing
And dont give me that BS about how well regulated means regulations, it does not. It means well armed. I am all for smart guns, as long as I have my choice to buy a non smart gun signed, this non gun owner in a home with many
Re:Camera gun (Score:5, Insightful)
Without doing that, all gun regulations are unconstitutional.
In the real world... (Score:4, Insightful)
im all for individual freedom, not being told what I can and cant do.
So you are an anarchist then? Personally I prefer to live in a civilized society where we have meaningful and ongoing debates about what rules we should all live under including those relating to weapons. I'm generally a supporter of the right to bear arms but I also recognize that there are significant real world issues with how to manage weapons while simultaneously ensuring people's rights to life and security. "Anything goes" is not a sane position to hold on the issue.
Without doing that, all gun regulations are unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you [latimes.com] and their interpretation of the law is the one that actually matters.
Re:In the real world... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well regulated means has access to working guns, not regulated by the government.
the 2nd amendment and ALL amendments apply to ALL americans.
Re: Camera gun (Score:5, Insightful)
"Handguns" didn't exist in 1789, so if you're holding up a 1789 piece of paper, you should only get to use a 1789 gun! If you accept a gun made in 2014, then you have to accept ALL the technological features required. It's not that complicated.
Handguns existed at the time the Second Amendment was passed. They weren't nearly as good, no question, but they did exist. More importantly, though, I doubt you'd accept that kind of limitation with respect to the First Amendment, which would allow only handwriting, unamplified speech, acoustic megaphones, woodcuts, manual printing presses, and a few other, mostly one-off or impermanent, means of expression. No internet. No microphones. No audio recording and playback. No video or photographs.
Re:Camera gun (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, the militia is not a condition for gun ownership. Gun ownership is a condition for having a militia.
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The FN303 is a pretty solid piece of less-lethal technology.
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Just like many of the current rube goldberg-ish "less-lethal weapons", the tech to make a "smart gun" just isn't there yet. Every entry in this field has it's list of failures and impracticalities.
I wouldn't exactly call Tasers "Rube Goldberg", but you have a point. Here's mine:
Correct, the tech isn't there yet. Because as I showed here last year, the weapon has to work for the authorized user approximately 99.999% of the time in order for this tech to be feasible. (Yes, I know that seems like an outrageous number, but there are solid statistical reasons for it.)
The problem isn't rejecting unauthorized users. The problem is that nobody has come close to being able to reliably reject unauthorize
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It isn't just that the electronics are not yet up to snuff. Simply relying on anything powered by a battery reduces the reliability to well below that essential 99.999%. So at this particular moment in time, even trying to do this is probably a massive waste of effort.
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99.999% might be a little high. But there is no doubt at all that the requirement is higher than 99.99%.
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I agree with the point you're making, in this post and others, but what if the smart gun manufacturers erred on the side of an operational, not disabled, weapon? In other words, if the battery dies or fails, or if it's determined that a fingerprint scan couldn't be gathered successfully (if it's using fingerprints), then default to an enabled state?
This would still put the onus of making the gun safe on the gun's owner, much like making sure a trigger lock is in place, requiring that the battery be checked
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I'd weigh the chance of losing my life from the smart gun malfunctioning vs. the chance of losing my life from the dumb gun being used against me.
Flawed reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
the last thing you want is another avenue for failure
That's not a very bright statement. What you should wish to avoid is for something bad to happen. One way that can happen is indeed for a gun to fail when it needs to work, but there are others, for example having an unseen companion assailant seize the gun and shoot you with it.
It's all about the probabilities of various scenarios, and anyone failing to incorporate that that in their evaluation is not worth listening to. (For the record, I have no opinion about what those probabilities are, but live in such a safe place that I don't consider bothering with a gun.)
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Having a gun fail is bad.
We have a Right to functioning guns and "wish[es] to avoid is for something bad" are irrelevant. I always want my semis to work. Always. What someone else wishes is up to them.
Re: Flawed reasoning (Score:2)
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Always? If someone did manage to grab your gun and aims it at you, I think you'd prefer your gun to fail at that point.
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I always want my concealed pistol to work. That's why I went to carrying a double action revolver. Simple mechanically, if the round fails to fire, pull the trigger again and load the next chamber. No safeties to deal with and with practice loading time is just as quick with a speed loader.
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.
Life or death (Score:5, Insightful)
This probably isn't going to be a popular post but as someone who lives in a country where guns aren't allowed, having a gun or not is not a difference of life and death. Like not even remotely.
That sentence makes it sound like where the poster lives he has to deal with gun violence daily. Like going to a supermarket might have you end up in a gunfight where you better be prepared to go Rambo on someone's ass.
That's not a place I'd want to live in and luckily I don't.
Surely this is scaremongering right? Or does anyone actually worry about such scenarios on a daily basis?
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This probably isn't going to be a popular post but as someone who lives in a country where guns aren't allowed, having a gun or not is not a difference of life and death. Like not even remotely.
Glad to hear you live in a country with zero deaths from violent crime ever.
Where is that again, exactly? So we can check your statistics.
Which is more likely? (Score:3)
The question, then, becomes obvious: Is it more likely that the perp will take your gun and shoot you (there has got to be statistics for this somewhere) or that the identifying electronics will fail and render the gun inert?
Furthermore, should it be obvious to the guy being aimed at that the gun is inert? Just the threat of being shot might be enough to deter a lot of people.
Re: Which is more likely? (Score:2)
When police and military start using them . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll start using "smart" guns when the police and military issue them as primary guns. Any reason for those organizations to use or reject them applies to the citizens.
This is a solution in search of a problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Gun enthusiasts have no interest in this technology. Who wants something that will reduce reliability and increase price?
The only people pushing for it are those who dislike the idea of civilian firearm ownership.
That's more than enough to make me suspicious.
LK
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I want it. Maybe I am not a current gun owner, but have small kids. Maybe I live in a safe area so the likelihood of needing a gun is low, but I might still want one in case. Maybe I don't want my kids to accidentally use it. So I can see a need for it.
You could get a trigger and slide lock if you're just trying to keep kids from using it. The cable lock prevents you from loading any ammunition and the trigger lock prevents you from being able to pull the trigger even if you cut the cable lock. That's pretty foolproof. Not great for self-defense, but great to prevent unauthorized use in general. Of course if someone steals the gun and has the time and tools, they can defeat both locks.
Re:This is a solution in search of a problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
I too have small children. I too am concerned for their safety.
I buy safes to store my firearms. For far less than the cost of one of these guns, you can buy a regular gun and a good safe.
LK
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Re:This is a solution in search of a problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be conspiratorial, but here we go. The first step is to have "smart" guns that will only fire when in the hands of the owner. The second step is to require all firearms to be "smart" guns. The third step is, for everyone's safety, to combat crime, and of course for the children, is to require that all smart guns now have a kill switch. That way the government can safely disable a criminal's firearm.
Since people like Bloomberg are unable to remove firearms from the populace entirely (right now), this is the kind of thing they will push for because it will effectively give them the control they want.
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Gun enthusiasts have no interest in this technology. Who wants something that will reduce reliability and increase price?
The only people pushing for it are those who dislike the idea of civilian firearm ownership.
That's more than enough to make me suspicious.
LK
It pains me to do this, but I'm going to have to bring forth the "Think of the children" argument.
Its well known that if you have a gun in the home that you are more likely to die a violent death. At that also includes family members who also reside in your home. Now you could say a responsible gun owner would make their weapon safe (and I know there are plenty of responsible gun owners) - but that smacks of a true scotsman argument as its the irresponsible ones who are leading this death charge. And as
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Who wants something that will reduce reliability and increase price?
The problem being searched for is "I'm sure it's not loaded" [gawker.com].
When the gun lobby ensures that "responsibility" in gun ownership can only be enforced after the fact (can't even require insurance!), just how reliably must firearms kill innocents?
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I'm guessing that at least some of the people pushing for this aren't necessarily against the idea of civilian firearm ownership, but are against gun violence or gun accidents that lead to injury or death. I can imagine such a person might like the idea that a child might not shoot themselves or a sibling accidentally because such technology prevented the weapon's discharge.
Now that you know there is more than 1 type of person who might be for this technology, maybe you won't need to be so suspicious.
The bigger picture (Score:2, Insightful)
The odds of your gun being grabbed and used against you are high. The odds of your toddler picking up your gun and using it on family or friend are significant - it happens at least several times a week in this country. So any instances of this new tech failing and depriving you of use of your gun when you need it should be balanced against the lives saved, including your own, by the tech working as designed.
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[citation needed]
Re:The bigger picture (Score:5, Insightful)
The odds of your gun being grabbed and used against you are high.
Weird that we carried guns at all when I was in the Marine Corps then, huh? The enemy might have taken it away from me!
The odds of your toddler picking up your gun and using it on family or friend are significant - it happens at least several times a week in this country.
Wow, really? A couple hundred deaths a year from toddlers alone? Please cite a source for that, other than your ass.
Re:The bigger picture (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, really? A couple hundred deaths a year from toddlers alone? Please cite a source for that, other than your ass.
A couple hundred deaths per year of children 12 and under, not toddlers, with no info on the ages of the shooters.
Re:The bigger picture (Score:5, Informative)
> Please cite a source for that
Hard to find a non-biased source for this, most of my searches pulled up anti-gun advocacy pages whose figures wouldn't stand up to scrutiny, but I did find this article from 2009 [cnn.com] that cites a CDC report stating that around 100 children annually, on average, died from accidental shootings between 2000 and 2005.
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:The bigger picture (Score:4, Insightful)
The odds of your gun being grabbed and used against you are high.
No... not really. The odds of you EVER needing your gun to fight off a "bad guy" who may try to grab your gun are slim to not.
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The odds of your gun being grabbed and used against you are high.
No, they are infinitesimal. This basically never happens.
The odds of your toddler picking up your gun and using it on family or friend are significant - it happens at least several times a week in this country.
Now that does indeed happen, tragically. But: 1) there are simpler ways to prevent it, 2) the actual odds are way down in the 1 in something-100,000 range.
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The odds of your gun being grabbed and used against you are high.
[citation needed]
Specifically: annual number of "gun grabs" per year (from reputable data) versus total number of firearms, correlated by geographic location.
Re:The bigger picture (Score:5, Informative)
According to CDC data, there were 62 firearm deaths among children 1-14 in 2012. Considering that range goes far beyond toddler, and includes deaths resulting from negligence by older household members, your assessment of the odds seems unlikely. I would suspect that older children are far more likely to misuse firearms.
But the idea that accidental deaths are "high" in general bears scrutiny as well. For perspective, each year about 390 children drown in swimming pools. There are somewhere in the range of 32-37 million households that own guns, while only 8-10 million households own pools. Even if you don't have a pool, drowning is still a more present danger than a gun, with at least a hundred children a year drowning in bathtubs.
Other dangers lurk around every corner. Poisoning sends hundreds of children a day to the emergency room, and kills several every week. Over a hundred a day die in car accidents. Then you have fires and accidental suffocations.
TL;DR: the absolute level of risk is not particularly high.
So the main question is what the countervailing benefit is. Citing only statistics about gun deaths is disingenuous. People do not only kill in self defense; they may not even discharge their weapon. The broader measures of defensive gun use vary pretty wildly, from as low as 67,740 from pro-gun control sources to as high as 2.5 million from other surveys. The true number is likely somewhere in between, but difficult to discern because the survey data does not include all categories of crime, unreported incidents, unrealized incidents (surveys of prisoners have stated they avoided households where they suspected there were firearms), and do not reliably ask whether firearms were employer.
But even if you look at the low water number conceded by control advocates, the number of defensive uses is far higher than the total number of firearm deaths (~ 31k in 2012) including not just homicides and accidental deaths, but also suicides.
That isn't to say efforts to mitigate risks are not valuable, but the efficacy of fire arms as a defensive tool should be kept in mind. The consequence of forgetting to put on your watch should be having to ask what time it is, not being raped or murdered. Even if these sorts of things became mandatory, the kind of gun owner irresponsible enough to leave guns where small children can get at them are probably the type who will just velcro the damn watch to the gun.
Solution without a problem (Score:3)
This topic keeps coming up, but there isn't a market for this product. Are the target audience also people who want:
Bicycles for fish
Mouse traps that don't kill mice, but embarrass them into moving next door
Any item advertised via spam
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The problem isn't the lack of market. You develop a smart gun because you think you can get politicians to mandate smart guns. That's why there's all the hate mail and threats from gun nuts. They don't want these guns, it's a dumb idea, and it will probably be forced on them eventually.
Re: Solution without a problem (Score:2)
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Suburban households with kids present.
If those people are that concerned about it, why buy a gun at all?
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a sign of lack of seriousness (Score:5, Insightful)
A sign that all this legal posturing is not about what it claims is the perpetual exemption of law enforcement from being subjected to technological gun-tracing / -smartening efforts. The lives of police are no more important than ordinary citizens'. If it's not good enough for the boys and girls in blue, it's not good enough for civilians. After all, civilians are almost always closer to the place & time of crime than the police.
Cops Won't Carry 'Em, Neither Will I (Score:5, Insightful)
Should that battery die, the gun could fail to fire. In fact, most models designed for civilian use are designed to fail if the battery dies. It's been suggested that smart guns designed for law enforcement should automatically disable the safety if the battery dies.
If a government agent won't carry a default-LOCKED "smart" weapon, why should anyone else have to? The people pushing for such mandates apparently slept through Civics class.
How about this: If a person wants to buy a "smart" gun, let them; if a person wants to buy a regular gun, let them. If a person wants to use any weapon of any kind to harm another in a non-defensive manner, let them suffer the previously agreed-upon social consequences (i.e., jail time, fines, death, etc.). Thus freedom is preserved, and only those who are actually guilty of harming others are punished, rather than the population as a whole.
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Thus freedom is preserved, and only those who are actually guilty of harming others, and those who get shot by them, are punished, rather than the population as a whole.
FTFY...
It's called a safety... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the only "safe" thing I need on a gun. I know the risks of my gun being taken away from me during a break-in/robbery/assault or anything else that a criminal can perpetrate against me and mine.
The ONLY thing I want to have to deal with or worry about is "Did I flip the safety off?" Most guns are purely mechanical in nature and I see no reason to introduce electronics into making them "safe," do you? Let's add in additional points of failure into what should be a mechanical object that needs to JUST WORK.
This falls under the "Just because we can do a thing, should we do a thing?" category. For fuck's sake, leave guns alone. If you don't like them, feel you don't need them, or just don't understand them then please sit quietly in the corner while those of us that do defend your life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever the hell you want to do.
And remember one thing: Criminals are criminals BECAUSE THEY DON'T FOLLOW THE LAWS ALREADY. One more isn't going to make them change their mind. Removing guns from the hands of (mentally stable) citizen's is absolutely not the answer. It is a path to disarmament, oppression of the people, and a new class of slavery. Read your history.
Reliability (Score:2)
The ONLY thing I want to have to deal with or worry about is "Did I flip the safety off?"
Fair enough. Electronics can be a sort of safety but I agree that a simple, reliable safety is an important consideration and if you are in a situation where a firearm is actually necessary you definitely do not want to be dicking around with lots of frippery.
Most guns are purely mechanical in nature and I see no reason to introduce electronics into making them "safe," do you?
The first half of that sentence has little to do with the second half. The mechanical design of most firearms alone has nothing to do with whether or not we should introduce electronics in the interests of safety or for any other reason. There is at
Folks who don't know nothin' about guns . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . shouldn't be messin' around with guns.
Folks who know even less about guns . . . shouldn't be legislating about guns.
If you do want to learn about guns, visit a nearby shooting range. You'll be surprised how friendly these "gun freaks" are, and how polite and patient they are with newcomers. It's just like any other sport. People like to show off, when they know a lot about something, and are good at it.
All these smart guns ideas . . . well, we know where that's coming from, and where it is going . . .
Why not, that's the American way! (Score:2)
We have congressman and senators who couldn't tell a mouse from a bar of soap legislating Net Neutrality. The FBI put Kevin Mitnik into solitary because they were worried he could whistle into a phone and launch nuclear missiles.
Almost *all* of American History is folks who don't know what the F they are talking about deciding what the rest of can do, say, read, or think. Especially when the church is involved. If the Christian Taliban had their way, America would be forced back to the stone-age. Except we'
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I've been to a gun range in the U.S. a few times, and you're right that most of them are a friendly bunch just shooting for fun.
It's not them that people are worried about, though.
It's more the people who will threaten with targeted physical violence when faced with even the potential for something they ideologically dislike; like the people who felt the need to threaten a gun store owner; that gun store owner had planned to sell a so-called smart gun, even gave good arguments as to why he wanted to sell th
Everyone (Score:3)
Um, except for the intruder/burgler. Not that I'm pro-intruder/burgler, but... "everyone involved"?
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.
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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.
Except those devices don't have to deal with the substantial shock/impact/vibration/temperature realities that a firearm would. That sort of an environment is deadly to electronics. Military systems generally have pretty wide operating temperature ranges, but the likes of medical devices and backbone routers have a pretty narrow operating range.
...And that's *before* we consider the implications for the batteries.
Need Smart Gun Owners (Score:2)
I wonder just how often the "bad guy shoots gun owner with his own gun" situation comes up. That aside, though, part of the motivation for this comes from the all-too-common tales of kids who get at their parents guns and accidentally (or purposefully) shoot someone. To solve this, though, we don't need smart guns, we need smart gun owners. (Disclaimer: I'm not a gun owner*, but I've heard the following from gun owners who seem to be smart about their guns.)
1) Never treat guns as toys. They aren't toys,
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Good luck with that. While your impractal solution fails to be implemented, the rest of us would prefer to have one in place that saves lives.
We can agree that the problem is people. That doesn't mean that the workable solution involves fixing those people.
The answer is obvious (Score:2)
NANOMACHINES
An engineer's perspective (Score:5, Informative)
I was recruited by a company working in this area, to help them fix their electronics & firmware. Seemed like the classic case of a product that started as a prototype by one guy in the company as a side-project or skunkworks, then management saw a bandwagon they should jump on.
The quality of the engineering was horrible. Most of my work is in safety-critical or life-critical applications, and I've seen it all, from poor to excellent, but this was appalling. Needless to say, I ran! (Yes, I see the jokes coming a mile away). But seriously, I was worried about getting sued if somebody got injured, and even worse, I was worried about somebody getting injured or killed by defective electronics or firmware. This isn't the kind of industry I work in anyway, but I thought I'd give it a look out of curiosity, and man was I shocked.
I know this is anecdotal, YMMV, blah blah blah... just thought I'd provide a little "real world" insight based on my (admittedly very limited) experience and exposure.
RFID Not a great idea (Score:2)
Sure nobody can jam a pretty weak signal. Once you have electronics especially with an RF pickup nobody with openly or worse clandestinely require that it safety itself when it see some broadcast. Openly I can see it be something like will not fire within 400 yards of a school think of the children BS. Nobody will figure out what the broadcast is. If you really want this it needs to be open hardware/software so it can be fully vetted, considering some of the silicon level back doors people have come up w
Advanced Safety (Score:3)
A smart gun sounds like one that will somehow be self aiming or stabilizing.
When it's needed the most? (Score:3)
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
Fail when it's needed most? Isn't the *actual safety mechanism* needed the most when a child has the gun (300 people in the US shot and killed by children under 6), or another family member pulls the trigger on someone in an angry rage, or even themselves (guns kept in a home increase the suicide rate for all family members and 75% of teenage gun suicides are with other's weapons stored in family homes).
How many of these preventable deaths stopped per one person whose smart gun doesn't fire in self defence makes it worthwhile?
You could even say the same thing about keeping a gun unloaded and locked in a safe, what's the point of doing that if your gun isn't going to be under your pillow "when you need it the most" ?
source for gun statistics [smartgunlaws.org]
Redundancy (Score:2)
It's nothing more than a theoretical discussion, anyhow, but putting aside all of the various arguments for and against gun ownership, if the primary concern here is whether a "smart gun" is a compromise between safety of the gun owner over safety of everyone else, I would prefer if a gun owner had two smart guns over one conventional gun.
I don't think the technology is there yet anyhow, but if it could guarantee a gun could only ever be fired by a legally registered gun owner, then I think that's a good th
Re: (Score:2)
Well actually an idiot with a soldering iron will probably "brick" the weapon. It might make a nice club or hammer afterwards. Now a skilled technician with a soldering iron is another matter.
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:5, Insightful)
[bad guy disarms person with smart gun] "Wait, hang on"... [he pulls out soldering iron]... "I'm gonna shoot you".... [soldering].... "hey where are you going?"
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:5, Insightful)
[bad guy disarms person with smart gun]
Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
"Wait, hang on"... [he pulls out soldering iron]... "I'm gonna shoot you".... [soldering].... "hey where are you going?"
I think OP's contention is that the criminal is going to steal the gun and, at some later point, disable the disabling mechanism, at his leisure. Hell, mayhaps someday there will be groups of criminals that specialize in de-smarting firearms, presuming there's ever an actual market for the damn things to begin with.
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:4, Insightful)
> Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
Yes. The argument often made for women not to carry firearms is that it'll be taken away from them and used against them. (...which is a bit condescending and sexist but let that pass for now.) Although I don't have my copy of the book in front of me, I think it was Paxton Quigley that pointed out the difficulty of finding instances where this has actually happened, as opposed to the quarter million or so of women yearly who successfully use firearms in self defense. In other words, the "smart gun" appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
Re: (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).
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:4, Informative)
A recent report by Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states [nap.edu] "“almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year. [slate.com]” (Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013.)
I've never seen a gender breakdown of defensive gun use, but with a lower bound of a half million annual, the 250K number is not unreasonable. Even the extremely anti-gun Violence Policy Center estimates average annual defensive gun uses at around 67K.
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I'm not the person you asked for a citation from, and I don't have any for anything specific to women, but, more generally:
1,029,615 incidents per year of a gun used in self defense (162,000 incidents a year where the person using a gun believed somebody "almost certainly would have been killed" if they didn't use their gun)
Source: "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun." By Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995.
989,883 incide
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In my opinion, if you're going to carry, you have an obligation to yourself and others to get some training, not only to operate the weapon safely, but also situational awareness and some rudimentary rules of engagement. There are some well known rules of thumb -- like the "21 foot rule", and easy to train and remember tactics to increase the odds of successfully defending yourself.
What you say is true -- if you wait until the attacker is touching you, it may be too late. There are solutions to this, incl
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:4, Insightful)
[bad guy disarms person with smart gun]
Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
Right, and after they provide those statistics, they can also provide a stat showing how this smart gun + watch technology would have prevented said shootings. The gun will fire if it's within 10 inches of the watch. In an up-close scuffle (you know, the only kind where a disarming is plausible), would the distance be great enough to prevent the criminal from shooting the owner once he grabbed the gun from the owner's hand?
I wouldn't count on it.
This is a "solution" in search of a legal mandate to force people to buy it. Welcome to modern capitalism: "building a better mousetrap" is secondary to regulatory capture.
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.
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I never said bludgeoning a person was easy.
. I said that someone who can and will disarm a person with a gun probably has the skills to then beat the crap out of you with your gun if it for some reason does not fire.
Although it is not "easy" to bludgeon someone to death, it only takes the right kind of strike to knock a person unconscious, at which point the perpetrator can take their time pistol whipping the limp body.
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.
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Yeah, but we're talking about gun ownership so this is all about fantasy. You might as well have the cool sort of fantasy where the bad guy takes your gun with trigger lock, can't fire it, then you kick the crap out of him with your awesome martial arts skills.
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:5, Informative)
From the user manual for the Armatix iP1:
"The iP1 pistol is intended for target shooting only and will not function if it is not within 10" of the referenced iW1
wristwatch and the PIN code entered, or it or the referenced iW1 wristwatch do not have sufficient battery power, or
communication between them is blocked. It should not be relied upon for purposes of self-defense."
Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I can get a decent handgun for about 500 bucks, or I can buy a $2000 smart gun and ruin it with my soldering iron?
I wouldn't mind buying a smart gun if it was a good, quality firearm. Choices are good. I just don't want it to be the only kind of gun I can get.
You know The Party will demand a killswitch on your smart gun, right? And telemetry metadata on where the gun has been. Perhaps a smart round that the gun owner must digitally sign with two-factor.
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Remember, when the law is passed requiring all guns be 'smart', only criminals will possess the unlocked guns and will use them to do great bodily harm to your children.
If you're trying to imply that the introduction of "smart" gun mandates will magically cause the cops (who won't be required to have them) will instantly become a pack of criminals... I'd say that horse has already left the barn.
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Note to self - start proofreading your own proofreading, dork.
Re: And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypas (Score:2)
Re: And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypas (Score:4, Insightful)
If this bill were to pass and the second smart gun approved for sale also had the "not intended for self defense" notation in its manual (as it surely would - I doubt any gun manufacturer would open themselves up to lawsuits because defective smart guns failed to work and, as a result, the gun operator was injured or killed), I doubt the law would survive the scrutiny of even the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Much as most of the judges on the Ninth Circuit court hate it, they have to follow Heller (recognizing a Second Amendment right of individuals to keep and bear arms for self-defense) and Chicago (via application of the Incorporation Doctrine and the Fourteenth Amendment to Heller, subjecting state and local governments to the constraints of Heller). Any law which bans the sale of any handgun which is effective for self defense is unlikely to survive.
Re: Have a nice time (Score:2)
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It may actually be in the government's own financial interest to do so, especially if such technologies actually do reduce deaths and injuries from firearms.
I don't know which government you're referring to, but the United States profits from deaths and injuries. Cold to say it, but they do. Inheritance taxes are significant. The medical system is rife with taxation at every level. In a world where there are fewer deaths and injuries, the government almost certainly loses money.
There are a lot of accidental deaths due to children getting hold of guns... that alone gives the government a moral imperative to support smart guns already.
Except governments don't have any moral imperative to protect children, unless granted one by the voters.
Re: Have a nice time (Score:2)
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Once it is proven to work once, it will work the same way FOREVER.
I have a DTV converter for an old analog TV set. No Internet connection, no way to upload new s/w. About once a month, I turn the TV set on and there's a kernel panic dump on the screen. Unplug, count to ten and plug back in.
Fortunately, this is not a life or death situation unless the Superbowl is on.
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