TTAG reader RA writes:
“A properly functioning smart gun holds out the prospect of eradicating, like smallpox, those unbearable horror stories we still come across about twice a month,” Roger Parloff writes at forbes.com. “That was the easy part . . . Like the one last December, in which a 2-year-old at an Idaho Wal-Mart reached into his mom’s purse, pulled out her pistol, and shot her to death. (In 2010, 62 children, age 14 or younger, died in gun-related accidents, including 25 under the age of 5, according to the National Safety Council.)” Eradicate gun violence like small pox? Sign me up! However . . .
I don’t think gun safety for children is a technology problem. I think it’s a problem of society’s elites oppressing the common man.
The technology to limit negligent discharges leading to childhood gun deaths – education, situation awareness and locking devices – has been available for a few hundred years or more. Unfortunately, the elites have managed to keep firearms safety-related information/technology out of the hands of the common man. In many places, by keeping guns out of the hands of the common man.
Groups of resistance exist in deep dark corner of those places where the anti-gun control gestalt holds sway. Men and women teaching common sense and providing information on safety techniques, locks etc. They live under constant fear of harassment due to the instruction they provide. Or the “illegal” guns they possess.
[sarcasm] Fortunately, this all started changed in 2008 with the promise of “hope and change” from a young community organizer. Having spent much of his life in Chiraq, this community organizer knew firsthand what gun violence was all about. He promised that no longer would the majority of Americans have to suffer due to “gun violence.”
President Obama gave it his best effort. But he’s been unable to stem the tide of gun deaths. Vice President Joe Biden tried to help focus support on gun violence, but for some reason his “shotgun” message never caught on.
Here we are six years later and all of a sudden we have a “new technological breakthrough” to stem the tide of gun violence. Hopefully the Armatix iP1 can circumvent the elites’ brick wall of anti-gun vilification and finally put a stop to all the senseless gun violence.
Perhaps 500 years from now historians will look back on the iP1 compare its inventors to Johannes Gutenburg and the impact his printed bible had on millions of people.
As for me, I’ll continue to hope for a better future. But until I see some change, I guess I’ll have to continue to lock-up my guns and teach my kids gun safety in a deep dark basement, hoping no one finds out. [/sarcasm]
hahah that’s well written sarcasm. You have to stick with it all the way to the end to realize the author’s position.
+5 internets for trolling.
Someone contact this guy and ask him how he feels about almost 1,000 kids a year drowning in backyard pools, 250 ingesting poison and pills and 120 falling out of windows. All left open unlocked and unattended by irresponsible parents.
Obviously, the solution for drownings in pools is a Federal law mandating that all swimming pools be enclosed in buildings with no windows and double locks, keys held by different people. Only the children of elites should be allowed to swim in such indoor pools under the supervision of professional life-guards wearing blue swimming suits and government badges.
Children of elites must be taught never to speak of the fact that they are privileged to swim in pools reserved for them alone. Swimming is a privileged reserved for a select few and inappropriate for discussion among the proles.
I disagree. Government will mandate that pools be filled with a higher density substance that prevents minors from penetrating and drowning.
AKA: fill it with gelatine.
That’s ridiculous. Obviously the solution is to limit the volume of water you’re allowed to have in any one container. Nobody needs 50,000 gallons to swim. States like New York could pass laws that say your pool can be up to 15,000 gallons in size, but you can only put 7,000 gallons of water in it.
Or fill every pool with concrete
If people don’t feel safe they should just hire water bodyguards like us. In fact, we should leave water protection to the professionals and make it where only those vetted and licensed by the government can protect people, none of this willy nilly taking of life into their own hands. Private water ownership is a privilege, not a right. Only the government can be trusted to decide who decides who lives or who dies. #poolsense
Or, we can just make pools “Drowning-free Zones,” complete with signs, and pass tough, commonsense [sic] laws making it illegal to drown in a pool. #poolsense #everytownforpoolsafety #mda #nra
You just described Californians, water rationing and the current drought.
Did you read to the very end perchance?
Yeah let’s give our guns digital locks that big brother can hack from space and make our firearms and bio bracelets useless.
Sounds like a great idea to give the illusion of protection..
That why I wear a tin foil hat.
Nice satirical Exposé.
The Touch ID on my nearly $800 iPhone doesn’t work when my hands are even slightly sweaty… Am I to believe that the ID mechanism on a smart gun is going to be as “reliable”?
That is what you are being told. Who are you to doubt it? Now get back to work while we send the men in white coats to make sure you don’t infect the rest of us.
PFHT! In 10 years everyone’s going to have a 3D printer that’ll churn out friggin untraceable laser pistols. By the time they make a smart gun that truly works weapons technology would have left it wwaayy in the dust.
And five years after that, you’ll be able to clone your own sharks, and then you can attach the frickin’ laser beams to their heads.
Or at the very least some sea bass.
And yet the flying car will still be 20 years away.
The point we ought to be emphasizing is that the Antis are the catalyst for STOPPING smart-gun technology.
There is just a single visible market for smart-gun technology today. Parents with small children under-foot could make a calculated decision that it’s better to keep a smart-gun on the nightstand vs. a dumb-gun in a safe. (We can debate the wisdom of the decision, but this is not the occasion for such a debate.) Parents CAN NOT choose to buy a smart gun because the industry of inventors, manufacturers, distributers and FFLs are exceedingly reluctant to invest in bringing such technology to market.
Why such reluctance? Why is this single technology unable to overcome the normal obstacles to bringing a new product to market? What explanation could possibly be identified?
Just one. The Antis have used – and continue to try to use – the force of law to infringe on the 2A by forcing “smart-gun” technology as the ONLY legal technology. The industry – including it’s mass consumer base that supports that industry – will not tolerate this infringement.
If any voter has any hope for the potential for smart-gun technology, she knows where to place the funeral wreath. Place it at the feet of the Antis whose actions preclude – or at best – delay the development of that technology.
This is the general thrust of the article, without getting that specific. A lot of folks probably read the teaser and hit “comment” without reading the article.
Let them foist smart gun technology on the police and the military first. After it’s been in use by them ten or more years I’ll conider buying one myself.
Until then, it’s teach and practice safety.
A complete different branch, but do these jackasses really think I am trading my 18K Rolex for THAT?
Rolex, ha! Ever heard of Apple? Smart watch? It syncs all your info to your iphone, tv, mac, ipad, ipod, imicrowave! That way all your info is up to date on every device always. Plus it conveniently sends it all directly to the NSA for emergency backup in case your isystem crashes. Time to ditch the Rolex grandpa.
“Smart Gun”!?#!
I have a big issue with that name as it implies failure proof success and safety, which such a so called “smart” weapon will *never* secure.
In fact, simply by introducing another layer of unreliable “safety” technologically based on an identifier processes using an electrical power source will *always* make a gun less reliable.
Using the term “smart gun” is like using the term “gun violence”. BOTH are non-starters as a gun is an inanimate object that can neither be “smart” nor “violent”.
But HUMANS can be both.
However no “smart” human would give up control of his/her destiny to an inanimate object meant as a field leveling self-defense tool to accommodate disarmament types and government who would relegate everymans’ ability to protect himself to…chance.
Modern firearms are already intrinsically safe by design when used as intended. Adding another layer of technology dependent disablement to a firearm simply makes it a much less reliable tool and will serve to defeat the use of a gun for its intended purpose, with ZERO benefit to crime prevention.
Right up the pro-disarmament anti-gunners alley.
The correct answer to unintended gun incidents is that HUMANS must educate themselves to Keep and Bear the gun, an effective self-defense tool, properly.
I consider any satire that doesn’t make eating babies appealling a failure.
B,
After reading that satire i am now pro eating babies… same affect as smart guns and safety
It occurs to me that even if the mother in the example cited by RA had a “smart” gun in her purse she might still be dead today. What if her transponder had a strong enough signal that the gun was effectively unlocked in her purse? Her child would still have been able to shoot it.
Nothing is fool-proof. NOTHING.
Entertaining as it is here, the satire is completely lost on the average faux-fainting from micro-aggression claiming Social Justice Warrior, and of course, on the mendaciously self-promoting FakeBook MILFs and privately funded lefty PR spinners, who are happy to go on message in the most disgusing way (blood dancers). Not hard to see the patterns, in the familiar faces, funders, and channels – ie moveon.org, change.org, OFA-tards, etc.
What I find both entertaining as a sign of late stage hysteria before a collapse, is the stoopid in feelings vs facts justifications in Brady Amici-
And scary- when you see federal judges stoop to apply the kind of mendaciously corrupt application of Lenin’s edict- “the ends justify the means” that has formerly been the standard protocol among the Reliable Party Organs, the tinglers and shouters at MSNBC, CNN, NYT…
Best example is federal Judge Easterbrook in his opinion on Freidman v Huntington Park.
( fyi also the dissenter in minority on Heller at district level)
who are actually applying the latest nutty use of ‘critical theory’ nonsense,
‘my feelings trump your facts’ and
whats worse, have apparently forgotten their law school year one basic logic classes-
and stoop to using the logical fallacy of the “appeal to authority” justifications,
to support the vague insinuations and mutterings by LEAs for ‘public safety’, ‘officer safety’
(union rules inspired mindset = get home at end of shift)
One can forgive these hysterical constructs in Brady amici,
but to see someone in a position of authority actually applying this same Bloomberg funded disinformatzia as the basis of reason, applied in the federal courts, is genuinely chilling.
Smart Guns are the means to apply the thought process, using “technology”…
kind of makes you want to go follow the money behind smart guns, at New Jerseys Fed Gov armory, the Silicon Valley VCs and funders of things like I-495, Smart Gun prizes…
You wonder who got paid on the last green-grant ripoffs, and how they are working the system for this latest exercise in political hackery and bureaucratic government stoopidity…
Nick, Bill, you out there?
As it always is…follow the money.
Nice comment.
My patrol car cruiser has a $19,000 electronics package. It has a boot-up period of about 60-90 seconds. Sometimes it needs to be re-booted. Sometimes the dispatch system loses connectivity. I can’t tell if a car I’ve stopped is stolen, or if a driver has outstanding arrest warrants. I cannot speak to dispatch in a “dead spot” such as underneath a parking structure. Outside electronic intereference of sufficient strength can jam my radio.
Often we have to leave our cars running so that the separate car battery and electronics batteries can maintain their respective charges. It’s terrible for fuel economy – I get an average of 6-10 MPG per shift. But it keeps the vehicle electronics working. Usually.
My belt-mounted extender radio does a little better. It has a start up time of about 6-7 seconds. Unfortunately, the batteries tend to die prematurely. About a month ago, dispatch was trying to call me. After several non-responses, the radio was put on an emergency clearance. The dispatcher thought I was in peril because I wasn’t answering the radio.
The culprit was a dead battery. I was given no disciplinary action because the batteries are known to fail without notice. The same thing has happened to most of the people on our shift. Our portable radio batteries don’t indicate remaining battery life, and there aren’t enough batteries in the roatation to take spares. A dead battery is a constant risk.
Even if my battery doesn’t die, moderate electronic interference can jam my radio. So can heavy concrete walls or a distance of more than 100-300 yards from my patrol. The rated range of 1 mile is incredibly optimistic. The computer / reports writing room in our office is a dead spot. I literally have to step out of the room to acknowledge a call, even though there is a 250′ tall radio tower in our office parking lot.
As I write this, the autocorrect feature is glitching on my iPhone 6.
My Smith 4006 TSW has a lock time that is a fraction of a second. I can draw from a double retention holster and can place 3 rounds center mass in less than 1.5 seconds. Add a few fractions of a second if I botch my initial draw. Although my gun light has batteries, the pistol itself is still fully functional with dead batteries.
My firearm cannot be remotely jammed by any radio signal. I do not need any electronic infrastructure whatsoever to fire my pistol. The same is true of my Glocks, Sigs, Smiths, Rugers, Winchesters, etc. My firearms can be used anywhere.
You’re welcome…??!
“Perhaps 500 years from now historians will look back on the iP1 compare its inventors to Johannes Gutenburg and the impact his printed bible had on millions of people.”
But I doubt it ….
A corollary to the education issue:
Don’t provide sex education because it causes pregnancy.
In the mid 2000s, the government regulated that all car power window switches had to operate in a manner that if you pushed down, the window went down. This was because roughly half a dozen children every year were killed because they were leaning out open car windows and pressing the power window switches, rolling up the windows and suffocating themselves to death.
Why am I bringing this up? The government passed federal regulations over something as trivial as a WINDOW SWITCH over half a dozen deaths per year. The number of accidental handgun deaths is an order of magnitude higher than that. If you don’t think legislation regulating “smart” guns is coming, you’re an idiot. The only thing stopping it so far has been groups like the NRA, and as we’re hearing there’s a good chance this investigation they’re conducting might very well end up weakening them, allowing the Feds to run roughshod over our rights once and for all.
“If you don’t think legislation regulating “smart” guns is coming, you’re an idiot.” This is a good point; however, the contexts of your car window switch and smart guns are quite different. You are extrapolating quite far.
To a large degree, government regulation is adopted in consultation with industry and a consensus is reached. The affected industry isn’t eager to field product liability litigation nor ill-will. So, I could easily imagine the window switch to have been initiated by an engineer for one car company and propagated via the government to avoid anti-trust implications of conspiracy in restraint of trade.
I doubt there would be ANY opposition from gun users to the introduction of a smart-gun BUT FOR the fact that the Anti’s want to MANDATE smart-gun technology. Had there been no move on the Antis’ part we probably would have seen a couple of products on the market by now. They might have failed commercially, but another would have followed.
The Antis made smart-gun technology a 3rd rail. Now, parents of young children will have to do without just as they done without for the past 300 years. If there is anyone to blame, look to the Antis.
If the Antis had the political clout to push through a smart-gun mandate in Congress then this would be the least of our problems.
ROBERT
Can you fix your link? the moron article is in “Fortune” magazine – tabloid crapola pubished by Time Inc. Your hyperlink says “Forbes” – a respected business, economic, and conservative social commentary publication.
Confusing the two is a huge insult to Forbes. Would be akin to mistaking TTAG for Huffingandpuffingtonpost.
Some people’s sarcasm detectors are broken, in need or calibration, or just plain need to be installed in the first place.
I don’t have a problem with personalized guns it’s the laws mandating their use over conventional guns that is a problem
See the movie West World for an example modern SMART guns.
All I know is, I don’t want to wear a big nasty watch.
They always forget that it’s not the guns that are “dumb.”
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