“Our approach to gun safety has always been holistic. We always knew that there were other ways to approach this issue than standing in front of your senator’s office, yelling until you’re red in the face about legislation.” – Sandy Hook Promise founder Rob Cox, Promoters see technology as key to gun safety [at gazette.com]
Great. I love innovation. Innovate as much as you f*cking want. If you make a better gun, I’ll probably buy one, even pay extra for the high tech. Just don’t try to pass any asinine laws requiring unproven technology that you saw in a movie, mmk?
Sorry, sir…you’re still not an expert on the matter. Please stop grieving in public. It’s not very becoming of you.
As shown on their website, they are advocating for “common sense” gun control.
Same old same old.
“We always knew that there were other ways to approach this issue than standing in front of your senator’s office, yelling until you’re red in the face about legislation.”
And there’s THAT again. There must be better approaches since EVERYTHING Lanza did was ALREADY illegal. I know, let’s write some more laws!
Taking upon oneself the Arbiter’s Mantle RE: common sense. Same old same old, indeed.
Okay… Make “smart” guns. It still wouldn’t have prevented Sandy Hook or Aurora since the people shooting the guns owned them or shot them with supervision.
This has been tried time and time again. Biometric or RFID tech in a gun isn’t appealing to consumers because it’s one more thing to go wrong, and the examples produced to date have only served to support this position.
He compares smart guns to airbags; the difference is that if your airbag doesn’t work, you’re no worse off than if you didn’t have it…whereas if your “smart” gun doesn’t work, your firearm won’t fire.
I’m gonna be that guy and say that if your smart gun doesn’t work then you are no worse off than if you didn’t have it
Not quite. If the airbag doesn’t work, you still have functional use of the car. If the biometric scanner doesn’t work, you do not have fucntional use of the firearm.
I understand the above now. I was looking at it as in an emergency situation I would be killed (certainly I’m worse off in a crash). As opposed to the idea that I can still drive my car but not use my gun.
Actually, if your air bag doesn’t work you can still rely on your seat belt, collapsible steering wheel column, interior padding, and crumple/crush zones to save the day immediately. At worst you’ll be badly bruised, with perhaps a broken collar bone or ribs.
OTOH, if your smart gun fails, you’re wounded at best or dead at worst.
Yes, you are worse off, because you relied upon the functioning of the firearm to make rational decisions.
If there were an active shooter situation in a mall.
If you are carrying, your actions may be to intercept the shooter, either by direct engagement, or distraction, knowing that you have a reasonable chance to defend yourself against the attacker, and your actions may allow others to live.
If you are not carrying, your likely plan will be to retreat to safety, though this could very possibly lead to many more casualties, but there is not much you can do.
If your firearm fails, you aren’t back to square one, because you don’t KNOW it’s going to fail. If you chose to engage that active shooter, because you trusted the reliability of that firearm, and now you find yourself cornered, and with a non-functioning firearm, it’s not the same as not having a firearm.
Tools are included in the mental calculations on what to do, they failure of that tool is not the same as not having the tool, because a course of action has already been taken, and the tool relied upon.
One similarity to air bags is that they’re mandatory, whether you want them or not, and they cause more harm than good. When I’m in a marginal situation in my car, the last thing is need is explosives going off in my face.
And, of course, anything mandatory is evil.
Seems to me a better comparison would be a gun to a fire extinguisher. Would this twerp find “safety features” on his fire extinguisher acceptable?
That’s like saying that the last thing you need in a crash is a belt wrapped around your chest. Do you think there’s a grand airbag conspiracy?
That said, none of it should be mandatory for adults, including seatbelts.
Who needs a furshlugginer air bag or seat belt anyway? Just look in front of the car. If there’s something there, don’t go there. Duh!
Seat belts save the wrong person anyway – they shift the deaths from the negligent driver to innocent bystanders. Here’s how to get a zero car crash rate:
http://richgrise.tripod.com/images/Safe-Car.gif
So, the fundamental design of firearms has been unchanged for over 100 years, yet this guy, who probably doesn’t know the difference between a barrel and the muzzle, is somehow going to revolutionize the industry… for safety? RIIIIGHT.
They’ve been flogging “smart guns” for decades, ever since there have been microelectronics. First, they were touted for soldiers, so that The Enemy couldn’t capture and use our guys’ guns. Needless to say, they quietly abandoned that brilliant idea.
(For the slow-witted: it’s “needless to say,” simply because there aren’t any.)
Firearms that only unicorns can use.
Talk about a targeted market. Unicorns only.
Listen, you want safe kids or not? Sometimes the only ones that can be trusted with guns are unicorns.
In my experience, holistic approaches usually end in failure.
“Our approach to gun safety has always been holistic.” Wonderful – an ADHD gun designer. And his $ponsors. Just what’s needed.
Examples?
Have you ever had that Tom’s Holistic Toothpaste? Jesus, it’s worse than genocide.
I’ve seen smart gun advocates propose, in all seriousness, that the 400 million (or so) guns in private hands should be required to be retrofitted with smart gun technology. At the owner’s expense, of course.
Forcing someone to mutilate a $5,000 Colt SAA? Yeah, that’s the way to win over gun collectors!
Dow Chemical Company did make a recipe for Naplam that would not stick to kids when the jungles were firebombed. Maybe Remington, Winchester and a few other ammo makers can make a kid-friendly bullet…..
we can dream right?
That ‘Naplam that would not stick to kids’ was a old joke from my ROTC days.
Because the entire idea behind napalm is to make something that will stick to things, i.e., people. It’s a weapon of terror.
Holistic dog food
A million bucks on developing these technologies are a million bucks in anti gun political ads that I won’t have to see. I’m all for this! I’d consider this technology if the army and local police force adopt it.
I’ll consider using it when the Presidential Detail of the Secret Service uses it.
My butt is at least as important to me as the President’s butt is to them.
There’s also that slight problem of ~300 million “dumb” guns that currently exist and will be operational for approximately another 100 years or more…
Let’s look at this mathematically… the probability of these smart guns preventing a crime could be modeled as: Probability = (Pc * Ps), where Pc = Probability of any gun being used in a crime, Ps = Probability of that particular gun being “smart”
Let’s say there are 30,000 “gun” crimes a year per 300,000,000 guns. Pc = 0.01%
Even if we’re generous, and somehow 1% of the guns sold are smart (3,000,000 guns), then Ps = 1%
Total probability of crime prevention = 0.01% x 1% = 0.0001%
This also assumes the actual owner uses it in a crime. If a gun is stolen we can also add in that probability as well, but why bother for such a low % to begin with?
You’re premiss is off. This is to prevent accidental deaths by children and being shot by your own gun. I would assume that any stolen gun would be hacked or tossed/notstoleninthefirstplace if it was unhackable and therefore the smart tech does nothing notable for stolen guns.
Doubt the stats for being shot with your own gun (by someone that you wouldn’t have already authorized) are very high. And it gives incentive for the gang bangers to catch you at home so that you can authorize the gun they’re going to steal from you. And then shoot you in the face with it to make sure it works. This of course means they will need enough friends to subdue you, and judging by police actions that’s 20-30 armed preps. Now we all need high capacity clips (60+ rds) and the cycle continues.
Then a lot of their examples for which they are trying to justify this technology are irrelevant. Smart guns would have saved ZERO children in the Sandy Hook school.
Oh no, if all guns in Unicorn-land were ‘smart guns’ then when Lanza stole his mother’s non-assault weapon (it being legal under the CT AWB) he would have never been able to make it fire.
Disregarding of course that since she took him to the range his biometrics would probably have been in the gun’s ‘memory’.
But then the 4 percenters disregard things like that (and other aspects of reality) all the time.
You don’t know that. Maybe Adam Lanza’s mother would have bio-printed that AR and glock so he would have been left with the .22.
I’m not saying we should force smart guns- I’m saying we can’t engage in the “think of the children” argument on their terms. I’m not willing to give up freedom for the life of one child, or twenty. My personal number may be somewhere around 3,004, but then you have to consider how many children’s lives are saved by guns…
Because “for the children”. What have you got against children, you cad? 😉
The wink is to prevent me getting angry when someone misunderstands my question. Thank you in advance for not making me angry!
“Holistic”, developing an “ecology”, AHHH, don’t you just love all the feel good huggy touchy buzz words that tell other people you have the poitically correct perspective to solve all the worlds problems.
It also tells us that any solution will have no basis in history, experience, reality, human nature, constitutional law or respecting of our civil rights.
Oh, and a new government agency will have to be created to administer the solution, which will end up costing 10 times the initial estimate.
Don’t forget the Gun Safety Czar. Wait, do we already have one of those? Is it Holder?
The vast majority of the people “killed by guns” are _intended_. They’d save a lot more lives if they came up with a drown-proof swimming pool.
Every single person who reads that article and falls for the bull or says they’re all for it but for some silly caveat, is a damn fool. There is no such thing as “smart gun technology” – it is a bad joke.
Ignorant people need to stop acting like they have a say in things they don’t understand at all. Personal self defense tools will NEVER be dependent on RFID transponders or identification sensors of any kind, it defeats the entire purpose of carrying the tool. Uphold the KISS principle or face the consequences of your own stupidity.
It’s one thing to keep reinventing the wheel. It’s something else entirely to keep trying to invent a workable square wheel.
I hate hippies.
Watch it, bub – most of my friends are armed hippies!
Hippies are pacifists. What are they doing with arms?
You don’t have to be a warmonger to love shooting!
And there are quite a few examples of pacifists fighting when sufficiently motivated and with arms available.
I hate … pathetic r-selected Liberals.
there – I fixed it for you.
I had to find out what “r-selected” meant, and 30 minutes later I’m back… That was a very interesting diversion.
I’m going to read more about R/K selection and neurobiology — some great insights into the liberal/conservative dichotomy to be had there, I think.
Not all of us hippies are Commies.
Present company excepted, of course.
The only smart gun I want is the one that wireless connects to your cybernetic eye to give you a perfect sight picture directly from the barrel and bullet drop compensation, as well as information on the condition of your weapon such as ammunition left, barrel temperature, and muzzle velocity. Oh, and it’s so simple, even a Troll or Orc can use it.
You want a safe, responsible solution? A “holistic” solution, that can take advantage of technology? I got a few:
1. Offer tax credits for the purchase of safes and training, just like we do for retrofitting windows and insulation. People don’t like mandatory, they do like incentive.
2. Remove the stupid “LE Only” restrictions on revolutionary training tools like Simunition, so that outfits big and small can offer training that really gets them involved.
3. If you really love biometric gun safeties so much, fit em to the Police first. They seem to have a harder time holding on to their weapons than your average owner, be it being taken from them violently, or just leaving them in their cars, in the can, etc.
Excellent ideas, especially the first two.
I agree Police are the ideal guinea pigs for “smart gun” non-tech… let’s see how long the idea lasts when it is foisted upon the LEO community.
Think about how many innocent New Yorkers could be saved? It is like giving Don Knotts one bullet for his revolver, 21st century style.
It wouldn’t do a blessed thing about the hot-shot Dirty Harry wannabes who empty their magazines into mentally ill homeless people.
They could get anywhere from an extra half to one and one half seconds to start running for their lives while deputy dickhead fumbles with the finger print sensor or what have you. Then he has to lead the shot with that NYC trigger, so remember to zig zag.
Word.
“TECHNOLOGY” = P0LICE-STATE / BIG BROTHER
(this fits in nicely with other groups who want massive criminalization)
BTW: what about the 300M-600M guns already floating around? TURN ‘EM IN?
http://www2.sandyhookpromise.org/innovation SANDY HOOK P0LICE STATE PROMISE
Sandy Hook Promise has partnered with the nation’s leading technologists and venture capitalists, who formed the Technical Committee to Reduce Gun Violence (TCRGV) in the months following December 14th, to oversee this initiative. While Sandy Hook Promise does not directly fund new technologies, we have inspired the work of The Technical Committee to Reduce Gun Violence to find and vet ideas that promise to equip Americans and their communities with the tools they need to create healthier and safer places to live. Examples of focus areas include, but are not limited to:
Gun safety technologies (e.g. electronic firing pins, RFID, GPS, biometrics, and enhanced software systems)
Background check processing (for public and private sector sales)
School safety technologies (including emergency response systems)
Mental health applications
Shot and gun detection systems
Big data analytics
REAL GOAL OF THIS TECHNOLOGY: A WAY FOR YOUR GUN TO BE TURNED *OFF* WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION.
The real issue here…parents who’s children are murdered in mass long with adults hoping they can stop bullets with flesh…is they cannot accept death. They continue to live the fantasy that if they’re good, go to church, make friends, abide by laws then life will be good to our family.
The failure to accept death leads them to insist on the rest of the world sharing their pain. Which leads to legislators creating ineffective laws, making silly videos about electronic locks, creating moms demand action, and in the end, empty words on a backdrop of no real actionable results while continuing to ignore facts. The only fact that would limit the murders that day was a good guy with a gun. AND the reason that solution wasn’t available is good families cannot imagine evil and did not want to pay the coin.
I’m in favor of smart gun Owners. Many more of them. And armed guards in schools because they disarm everyone on the property including parents who pick up their kids.
How about that for a holistic smart response?
Let’s not forget that initially airbags killed children in otherwise harmless fender bumps because parents didn’t know better than to put the kids in the back seat.
Sometimes the cure is as bad as the disease. until it’s not.
The only “smart guns” that interest the government are guns that can be disabled remotely. Automobile disablers have been available for at least four or five years. Gun disablers can’t be far behind.
I went to the source doc, and this is the very first comment posted. I couldn’t say it any better.
John Skiba · Top Commenter · Columbia University
Of course! We must equip every firearm with WiFi capability. Then, in the same way computers automatically update virus protection, the guns could download photos of felons-at-large. Then, using the same facial recognition features currently being used in other areas, plus the “terrorist recognition” ability currently being touted by our TSA in airports, the guns would only operate when aimed at known evildoers.
One possible “bug”: What if the owner abuses the gun, not cleaning it or lubricating it properly. or perhaps not storing it in a warm, comfortable, humidity-free environment? Under such circumstances, might not a “smart” gun grow angry with its’ owner, with tragic consequences?
Generation II firearms would fire automatically fire when the gun is properly aimed at an “approved” target. This would prevent the tragedies when innocent bystanders are shot, sometimes by the police themselves.
Generation 3 weapons would be mounted on robotic arms in public places. It’s an obvious next step. You object, because our Constitution requires trial by jury? Zero tolerance laws have negated the principles behind this requirement, eliminating the moderating factor of judges and juries, so this is no great loss.
Result? Bad guys (oops, I forgot – and girls!) (oops, I forgot, bad “persons”!) would be shot on sight, efficiently ridding society of their evil influence.
The weak point in all this is the people, who will inevitably find a way around such laws and technology. If only we could get rid of all the people …
The third and fourth “areas to concentrate on” actually make some sense. That’s why I’m sure they are there only to help camouflage the real focus, which is on the first two areas. Unless this whole article was released by mistake before the intended date, which was April 1.
If they really wanted to save lives, they would invest their money in projects to make cars that would automatically prevent collisions between them and pedestrians and other cars. The technology required would actually be similar to what the author proposes.
As soon as I saw the word “holistic,” I knew this guy’s a weenie.
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