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“Why are you trying to take my firearm and add something to it that’s going to make it more prone to failure?” – NSSF President and CEO Steve Sanetti in Smart gun sales poised to change US gun market? [at cbsnews.com]

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48 COMMENTS

    • As a professional software engineer I can say they actually don’t fail very much. They do exactly what we tell them to do. We just fail to correctly tell them what we want them to do.

      • And often, as in this case, a lot of us don’t want them to “do” anything at all.

        If this stuff is optional, no problem. You go right ahead. 🙂 I’ll opt out. Even if somebody thinks it should be mandatory.

    • This “smart gun” crap is about the same as these self-driving cars that are all the rage just now – at what point in the testing of this technology are you willing to risk your life trusting it will work perfectly EVERY time?

      • Anybody paying attention to the fact that we are about to dedicate $80B to build 100 new bombers, with the capability to accomplish the mission (delivering nuclear weapons) without pilots? Nobody even had a comment, just reporting the news.

      • “…at what point in the testing of this technology are you willing to risk your life trusting it will work perfectly EVERY time?”

        The government is currently working up regulations for the testing on public roads of autonomous vehicles.

  1. “But the failure rate is 1 in 1 bazillion for solid-state electronics!”

    RFID is subject to interference, finger/palm print readers don’t work if your hand is wet or dirty, and anything can run out of battery.

    • I used to work at an RFID company. With a cheap reader and a few minutes to write some code, I could send a signal that could turn off any RFID tag in range that follows the Gen2 standard (which is almost all of them).

  2. This is easy. Mandate that all government employees who carry a firearm in the course of their duties will use these technologies. Once they prove the technology is sound, private gun owners will flock to this system. I’m sure the military and police in states like Massachusetts, New York, and California would love to prove how safe and effective these guns are.

    • Don’t fool around, fancy and expensive new technologies are deserved by the leaders in our society, we should not withhold them. The Secret Service should be the first, with the presidential detail right out in front. I’m amazed Barry hasn’t demanded it already!

  3. Well, not to sound snarky, reliability isn’t the only factor… as long as you don’t put yourself in stupid situations, have situational awareness, can scoot and shoot, can hit what you aim at… Then you should be ok… Right? Or have we forgotten what we posted yesterday?

    • You’re confusing reliability with defeatability.

      Even if I didn’t worry at all about reliability, every external access point that is used to enable a device, can also serve as a way to disable (defeat) it. Cut off the trigger and the gun will be quite hard to fire. But as with that example, defeats are hard to come by the way guns are usually made today. A “smart” gun, which has active communications with the person trying to use it, offers more opportunity and, depending on the technology, distance to do it in.

      For instance, if the gun works via RFID, a jamming system – which wouldn’t have to be high powered – would defeat the ability of the gun to fire.

      All that said, reliability at some point does matter. As reliability improves, it stops being the dominant factor overall, but being highly – but not perfectly – reliable is quite different from being unreliable. And then there’s the type of failure mode. Did it fail because it had a failure to feed which I can clear quickly, or did it fail because the battery died and replacing it requires disassembling the grip?

    • Of course it isn’t the ONLY factor. But it happens to be FACTOR #1. Fail at the first factor, forget about all the others. That horse never gets out of the gate.

  4. Accidental deaths caused by guns for those 14 Y/O and younger is at the bottom of the list of all the different accidental ways that children are killed in a year. Poisoning, drowning in buckets and bathtubs, falls, vehicle wrecks; all cause significantly higher deaths than accidental gun deaths.

    But some how deaths by gun shot is so much more horrible. It’s for the children.

    • It’s much easier to design, manufacture, deliver and maintain hardened electronics with fool-proof authentication than to empty a bucket.

    • +Ya
      Oppression is a bitch when firearms means anyone else can coopt the idea.

      You give up your gun, and I’ll get you to give up everything else.

      KEEP YOUR GUNS MANDATORY-TECH FREE

      KEEP YOUR GUNS FOR THE END OF AMERICA. THE LEFT IS HUNGRY FOR IT AND WORKING TIRELESSLY TO GET THERE BEFORE THE END OF THIS PRESIDENCY.

  5. “poised to change” means they aren’t selling. Hell of a leap to turn that fact into a purported tidal shift in buying patterns. Well, at least the media is getting tricked into advertising guns; winning.

  6. Smart or not as long as the base function of the firearm is mechanical any sort of chip/lock/block can be gotten around.
    I guarantee I could get a “smart” gun to fire without being an “authorized” person.
    Now if the mechanical parts were removed entirely and everything was digital it’d be more difficult but if we can spoof credit cards, key fobs, hotel room locks and anything else with similar wireless/RFID tech then we can certainly spoof our way past the smart guns lockout.
    The biggest problem with technology is a select number of people in unfortunately high places can’t seem to accept the reality that it is all flawed and open to attacks and hacks.

    These are the same clowns who try to tell us deleted emails can’t be recovered or marvel that their fucking Aol account got broken into. These imbeciles are worse than virgins teaching sex. Their ignorance of the tech all around us coupled with their half-assed adoption of said tech is a threat to every one of us. The worst part is they have access to real professionals who know this and can fix this yet they routinely ignore their warnings to save partisan face.

    • They think life is like a movie, and they’re convinced that if they can keep tweaking the script, the ending they envision can be effected.

      You are NOT going to enjoy that ending.

  7. The free market.
    It’s a wonderful thing.
    Let the market determine if the technology and the theories have merit.
    Any government intrusion into that process would serve no one.
    Except the government.

  8. My revolvers are not smart, not meant to be smart, just a point & shoot thing.
    I shoot pistols for recreation, shoot revolvers for self defense.

  9. I think we should all have smart guns that can read our finger prints, have GPS location transmitters, have the ability to be disabled remotely, A sensor which transmits when shots are fired and even in which direction the shots are fired. The smart gun could even have a little camera and mic which transmits images and sound both when the gun is fired and at other times activated by remote control. I was thinking of calling the gun My Little Big Brother.

    • Maybe we could put a small screen on top of the slide. Any time the safety goes off, up pops the screen, and officer Tom starts preaching about, is shot really necessary? Do you know the consequences of your anticipated action, and on, and on, and on!

  10. Smart guns are a great idea and is in the same league as micro-stamping. Gun buyers and manufacturers should just flock to these badly needed technologies which should be immediately required by the wisdom of the US Government. Of course police and military are exempt because they are so professional.

  11. Want a gun-related glitch? I loaded about 450 rounds into various AR, Sig, Ruger and Glock mags last weekend. I got a blister on my right thumb bad enough to cause my iPhone 6 to have issues reading my thumbprint. Unlocking my phone quickly is not a life and death issue. Shooting fast in a DGU is.

    • That’s probably the biggest reason I bypassed the print reader when setting up my phone. I still tap in my security code to unlock it.
      I use my hands a lot. The joke around my house is “it’s not a project, until I leave blood on it”.

  12. The technology to make a gun “smart” is likely easily defeated. If it is anything short of rewriting code it will be on youtube at some point. The guy in the article is going to say it’s the “way of the future” because he has a pony in the race. It’s not like this hasn’t been tried before, and failed before too. Maybe it will be different as technology evolves but considering there are more than a few people who look for S&W revolvers with no trigger lock, I some what doubt it.

  13. I have to agree with a poster on the CBS site, if some punk can hot wire a fancy new car with all it’s security features, what makes anyone think they couldn’t do the same with one of these so called smart guns.

    • They can. This would be cracked within days. It has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the thin end of the wedge. After this gets mandated “for the children” it moves to “well, now we need a police controlled kill switch on all of them” and after that “since the police decide when you can shoot you shouldn’t have a gun anyway, turn ’em in.”

      This is just another attempt to get thing going down that slippery slope.

  14. The term “smart gun” is a misnomer – smart phones have processing power. A “smart gun” is nothing more than a gun with an electronic lock.

  15. Read the article.

    “State Senator Loretta Weinberg, who sponsored the original mandate, tells 60 Minutes that as early as next week, she will ask her state’s legislature to repeal the law and replace it with one mandating at least one smart gun be for sale wherever weapons are sold in her state.”

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/smart-guns-finally-poised-to-change-u-s-gun-market/

    That NJ legislator wants to repeal that NJ law about smart guns.

    And replace it with a law demanding gun stores stock at least 1 model of a smart gun when they eventually come to market.

    That’s her compromise. She wants to FORCE gun stores to stock a (quite likely very expensive) smart gun that damn few will want to buy.

    Unbelievable.

    Scratch that – It’s New Jersey. It’s believable…

    • Actually that’s a huge improvement even if the shop has to physically carry the inventory.

      However, based on the wording of the eventual legislation, it could be as simple as having the ability to order one from a distributor. Which translates to my mind to “if the customer really wants one, get it for him/her.”

  16. “All circuits are busy, please stall you attacker and try to shoot him again later”

    Hey, hang on a minute don’t shoot, can’t you see I’m rebooting my gun?

    So, if a “smart” gun was running windows and it malfunctioned, would you see a real “Blue screen of death”?

  17. Here’s when I’ll buy a smart gun.

    I’ll buy a smart gun when the computer is there to control the charging system for the railgun power supply, or to keep the magnetic confinement stablized for the plasma discharger, or to run the laser’s thermal blooming compensating adaptive optics.

    As in, when the smarts are needed for the gun to do what it’s supposed to do.

  18. Only ne person has mentioned the number one problem with fingerprint locking/unlocking systems.
    They do not work when you have a bandaid on your finger or gloves on your hand.
    ” I am sorry sir, please stop stabbing my children while I remove these gloves and then my bandaid”

  19. A Smart gun is actually less smart. In order for the mechanism to perform its designed function an additional complication is added increasing the possibility of a failed operation. The best designs are the most simple yet excel to get the job done. Smart gun technology takes a step in the opposite direction. K.I.S.S. not being followed.

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