Amazon Alexa and Smith & Wesson R8 (courtesy thetruthaboutguns.com)
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“The greatest weapon of all is intelligence.” – Amazon’s Alexa app, when asked “what’s the best gun?”

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73 COMMENTS

  1. What other type of ” pearls of wisdom” did you expect ? From a preprogrammed computer program? A specific model say a S&W model 66?

  2. IMHO, anyone who puts one of these in their house is a sucker. You are handing your voiceprint over to Google/Amazon/Apple, you are trusting they aren’t listening “except when you verbally command it to listen”, and you are default allowing/using their search engines to build up a massive database of your interests, banking, shopping, politics, conversations and communications with others.

    • “…and you are default allowing/using their search engines to build up a massive database of your interests, banking, shopping, politics, conversations and communications with others.”

      And you are *giving* them that valuable data that they turn around and *sell* to who-the-Hell-knows-who.

      Be wary, people…

      • Works great for me. Haven’t seen a single ad for Springfield armory since I installed it. All the anti Springfield trash talk around here keeps away ads for the trash products.

    • If you think about it, Alexa (and Siri, Hey Google, etc.) has to be listening at all times, in order to hear the command for it to pay attention. It’s just not supposed to do anything unless specifically instructed.

      Until, of course, a law is passed that demands it do more, or it’s hacked, or (gasp) the company lied in the first place…

      • Agreed. Which is why I have not activated Siri on my phone. My work makes having a smart phone a necessity, but I try to limit the damage it can do to me as much as possible.

      • My cell has no voice activate features (yeah, a relic from another age), my computer has no camera and no mic. I have no face book account, never did, never will. About the only listening anyone could do is to my posts–but I don’t think anyone “listens” to those either!

        • Completely agreed of FB. No one in my house has an account. We have one laptop with a camera built in, but a piece of black duct tape takes care of that issue.

        • any electronic comunicating devise has ‘saved’ the document someplace . mess up and some DA will know more about it then you do.

    • I’ve been a cop for a long time, I’ve been a gun guy for a long time, but I get really embarrassed when I read this type of paranoid dribble from people who don’t know anything about technology. It’s that paranoia that makes the tree huggers think all of us are warmongers and paranoid of our shadows. The government’s not going to come and take your guns and they’re not conspiring against you because you use electronic devices like Alexa. Try asking Alexa what paranoid is.

      • The governments in California, New York and Connecticut are ALREADY confiscating firearms from citizens deemed undeserving of their constitutional rights. Just because I’m a little paranoid doesn’t mean “they” aren’t actually after me.

        • Add Washington state to that, particularly Seattle. I have to laugh at all the people who said a few years ago that the government was not going to confiscate people’s guns, and then the reality of the current political environment makes them either look like fools or Liberal trolls.

  3. True … but not everyone is equally well-armed. And if I need to go build a makeshift lathe before defending myself … well, let’s say it’s more useful in a strategic, rather than tactical, sense.

    Plus, Amazon now has a pretty good idea that you have a gun in the house. (Which they may have had from your order history anyway, to be fair.)

    I don’t want one in my house. Apart from annoying commercials “telling” the thing to order something, or comms between it and the TV via ultrasound, I really want freedom of expression without oversight in my own home at least, and that’s a potential end-state of this sort of thing.

    • “If we didn’t have intelligence, we wouldn’t be able to make weapons or tools.”

      Before you get all high-and-mighty about humans using tools as a proof of superior intelligence, be aware a number of the lower animals fabricate tools, usually for food-gathering :

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals

      We ain’t the only ones who are clever… 🙂

      • I know what you mean, but monkeys with rocks and sticks don’t really impress me. Call me when they figure out how to tie knots and start fires.

        • You mean like this?

          “Chimps Master First Step in Controlling Fire”

          ” The researchers said that human control of fire involves three distinct stages:

          An understanding of the behavior of fire under various conditions that enables one to predict its movement, permitting activity in close proximity to it.

          The ability to control fire by containing it, providing or depriving it of fuel and perhaps extinguishing it.

          The capability to start a fire.

          So far Pruetz noted the chimpanzees they saw have mastered the first stage, which is the prerequisite to the other two. In fact, they are very aware of fire and its power — they have even developed a unique fire dance.”

          https://www.livescience.com/5946-chimps-master-step-controlling-fire.html

          Give ’em a few hundred thousand, maybe a million years.

          Look how long it took us to figure it out… 😉

        • Oh, and some birds have been seen carrying burning twigs from wildfires and dropping them in un-burned areas to set them ablaze to drive out insect ‘game’ for eating.

          Humans were at the ‘rocks and sticks’ stage a *long* time before things began to ‘click’.

          (But fortunately, *never* Melissa Click. Until a year or so ago, anyways…)

        • Charlton Heston never actually died- the Bush Administration sent him into space where he got stuck in a future where apes have displaced humans as the dominant life form. We should exterminate all the non-human primates now before they exterminate us!

      • i read somewhere, probably an old “field and street” (jerry sullivan, there is a compilation entitled “hunting frogs on elston”) about crows placing mussels on the roads adjacent to the waterway with the express purpose of having a vehicle crack the shell. they went on to say that there was no evidence that crows had designed these vehicles specifically for that purpose.

        • I’ve heard the same. Some birds fly up a few hundred feet with shellfish in their claws and drop them on rock or roads to get at the ‘goodies’, some park them on roads and let traffic crack ’em…

        • GPR
          Reminds me, the definition of “Pussy”
          The only fur bearing animal that can swallow a bone whole, and get the goodies out of nuts, without cracking the shell!

  4. On the one hand, her answer is correct. Intelligence is the best weapon of all.

    But that wasn’t the question. The question was, “What’s the best gun?”

    You fail, Alexa.

  5. “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.”
    – Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787

    “The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
    – Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book (quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria), 1774-1776
    https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/gun-quotations-founding-fathers

    • Last time I checked, the Hi-Point carbines met the statutory definition of a prohibited “assault weapon” in at least three states.

  6. Feel free to fact check me, but I think a conservative fellow tested Alexa out, and found out that Alexa thinks there are more than 2 genders, that Jesus was a fictional character while praising Mohammad, and that Communism isn’t all that bad.

    Needless to say, there’s no way in hell I’d put one of these totalitarian eavesdropping machines in my home.

    • I had to laugh when I first read your comment. Instead of “culture” I saw CIRCULAR, for some strange reason. As in the circular “war” going on in Mordor on the Potomac now. Alexa is only a tiny part of that, and is still completely voluntary.

      But there should be no war among people over culture. There are thousands of them in America today, and if everyone just minded their own business there would be little conflict.

      • Wars are not fought over civic issues, they are fought over cultural ones. To say there should be no war over culture is to ignore all of history. It is because of multiculturalism that we are now mired in identity politics and not just governance.

        The “if everyone minded their own business” point is admirable, In reality the Libertarian philosophy only works in a homogeneous society with shared language, customs and morals and even then cant account for human nature.

        As it has always been Diversity+Proximity= War.

  7. Because of my job I had one for t&e purposes for a year or so. Did not find one useful feature of the damn thing. It’s amazing how eager people are to pay a company for the privilege of being turned into a commodity while receiving literally nothing of value in return.

  8. Why the hell does anyone want spyware on their PC let alone their own home? That’s why don’t believe in big brother how is the government going to spy on you where you’re so stupid you’ll even post criminal acts on Instagram?!?!?!?!

  9. Yeah put a gizmo in your crib specifically to spy on you…anyone catch Tucker last week with a dude being tracked in real time with 2 “smart” phones?!? Both not even enabled or internet connected-one on airplane mode! Don’t make it easier for scum to track you. “The whole world wondered after the beast”😡

  10. Stick with duckduckgo.com for a search engine, since they don’t collect data about you and share it out, like Google, Siri, etc.

  11. My wife asked me why I carry a gun around the house, I said government surveillance. I laughed, she laughed, the amazon echo laughed. I shot the echo. It was a great time.

  12. Well, I think it’s an appropriate response. Judging by the mass of arguments for or against various good firearms, no one answer is correct. Avoiding the question is the best answer. However, I think a better response would have been
    “The only winning move is not to play.”

    • Only if we are talking tic-tac-toe or nuclear chess. No one seems disinclined to stop playing cops and robbers or, in a broad sense, cowboys and Indians.

  13. well it obviously transposed gun with weapon and in that case it would be right. brains over brawn. but yeah that is kind of hokey and annoying.

  14. Alexa…what is the best pistol / revolver?

    Alexa…..what is the most popular rifle in the United States?

    Please advise

    Thanks

  15. Hey Alexa, how many children have been killed by -guns while in school? Hey Alexa, why would anyone need an “assault weapon” unless they intend to assault someone? The first part of that word is the key to the answer. Hey Alexa, what is the -gun industry doing to protect children, including elementary, middle and high school kids from getting their hands on military weapons and killing their classmates because they don’t like them? Alexa? Are you there?

    Want to create an application that’s worthwhile? Create one to give you empathy and understanding beyond your own self-serving beliefs.

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