Why the NRA hates smart guns

http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/30/why-the-nra-hates-smart-guns/

by jonstokes • 10 years ago

115 309 10 years ago

hirundo• 10 years ago

The article makes it sound theoretical, but New Jersey already has the Childproof Handgun Law that makes it illegal to sell a non-smart gun "three years after it is determined that personalized handguns are available for retail purposes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_...

hga52• 10 years ago

And that's been seriously proposed in California, which is pushing through another wave of gun control legislation, one bill of which would effectively shut down all gun stores in the state, and certainly favorably talked about elsewhere ... maybe Maryland?

Just skimmed it (too much going on right now to look at it in depth), but I'm seriously impressed they did so much work to get in things like the classic "shoulder thing that goes up". In their defense, New Jersey's law is, as I recall, much older.

I'll mention one other bottom line: we wouldn't even consider it prior to all law enforcement officers in the nation being required to use them, and only them.

curun1r• 10 years ago

Part of the push for smart guns for law enforcement would come from law enforcement's negligent inability to keep track of their own weapons. A local news channel covered the story of one Bay Area city's police department releasing a report on an inventory of the weapons used by police officers. They were literally missing hundreds of them. Often, the weapon would be lost when an officer left it in an unlocked car, either a police car or their own and the thief simply opened the door/trunk and took it.

joesmo3• 10 years ago

All guns are illegal anywhere outside your home and place of work in New Jersey with very few, minor exceptions for certain types of guns which will be sorted out after your arrest. This is the model gun control advocates want for the whole nation. Our cities are perfect examples of gun free zones. No gun violence in years. No one is afraid in Camden, Trenton, Newark, AC, etc. because guns are illegal so there is no gun violence. Criminals respect all laws in New Jersey. Of course we are the first with smart gun legislation.

sanj• 10 years ago

If the better approach is to focus on the "who", why does the NRA oppose background checks?

fdhj4094njdf• 10 years ago

They don't oppose background checks.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/nra-supported-backgrou...

ixtli2• 10 years ago

It says they do on the NRA-ILA website. https://www.nraila.org/issues/background-checksnics/

lionsdan• 10 years ago

Sometimes they do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njBvpxhsa_Y&feature=youtu.be...

BookmarkSaver• 10 years ago

I don't think so. They've opposed any background check legislation proposed before, and that bill seems more like it is about "augmenting" "background checks" rather than actually augmenting background checks in a useful manner.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

The pertinent part of that bill is about listing mental health information in the background check system. It doesn't increase the number of transactions where a background check would be required.

The NRA regularly opposes such expansions (for instance they oppose closing the so called gun show loophole).

ixtli2• 10 years ago

I think we all know why. In fact. This author implies it: the NRA actually represents the business interests of people who manufacture and sell firearms. They may mask these interests as a public service, defending your rights and hobbies and whatnot but it is always the case that they oppose anything that would reduce firearm sales and support anything that makes it easier for you to get a gun.

fiatmoney3• 10 years ago

That's absolutely false. The NRA's membership drives their policy, not the other way around - manufacturers have historically been perfectly content to give into things like the assault weapons ban or magazine capacity limits (they make roughly the same amount of money if they sell their guns with a scary flash hider or a sanctified muzzle brake). In fact there are numerous groups, like the Gun Owners of America, who are even more membership-driven and essentially exist in order to keep pressure on the NRA to avoid making "deals" with gun control partisans.

This idea of the NRA as a manufacturer-driven astroturf organization seems to have been made up out of whole cloth over the last 5 years or so and is only sustainable to the extent that its proponents avoid actually talking to any gun owners.

crazy1van• 10 years ago

NRA actually represents the business interests of people who manufacture and sell firearms

But this is in no way mutually exclusive from representing the interests of citizens who want to buy and possess those firearms.

It makes total sense that an organization lobbying against outlawing a product would be supported by both the manufacturers and consumers of that product.

jboggan5• 10 years ago

I disagree. The NRA has 4 million American members which I think makes it the largest lobby by membership. I doubt they're all pawns of the gun industry.

If the NRA wanted to solely juice sales and sell more guns they would give heavily to elect more Democratic candidates. The current presidency has been great for sales [0].

0 - https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/nics_firearm_...

hga52• 10 years ago

Except that organization is the National Shooting Sports Foundation, NSSF. The NRA represents the interests of gun owners, you know, the 5 million or so dues paying members.

Looking at their 2013 Form 990 (http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/530/5301161...), member dues totaled $175,577,863, which swamps the money they get from the industry including advertisements, and that's not counting the donations from members which are on top of their dues.

Which is a large part of the $83,356,202, from the figures I saw in one of the linked hit jobs, I would guess the majority, and advertising is a mere $24,468,824.

No dice.

gozur886• 10 years ago

No it doesn't. The domestic US gun industry is tiny - not nearly big enough to have this kind of influence. Beyond that, the government is a big customer, so they have a history of going along with regulations as long as the police and military contracts come through.

koenigdavidmj• 10 years ago

Banning private sales means that I have go to into a gun shop to transfer a gun to a friend. That implies:

- Buying new now no longer has additional hassle compared to buying used, since the difficulty of the latter has been increased.

- Two people are now forced to go into a gun shop where they wouldn't have before. They might browse for accessories or maybe a new piece.

This is rather similar to the software industry's attacks on the ability to resell. If the NRA was just a lobby for gun businesses, why would they not support private sales bans? They should want this kind of captive audience.

brandonmenc• 10 years ago

the NRA actually represents the business interests of people who manufacture and sell firearms

NRA member here.

I neither manufacture nor sell firearms, and the NRA represents my interests re: gun ownership.

adrusi• 10 years ago

If you commit a felony and are as a result never again allowed to purchase a firearm, your rights are being perpetually limited, and I and a lot of other people object to that, and it's arguably a violation of the 8th ammendment.

If background checks were more limited in the kind of background they checked for, say only restricting people who had injured someone using a firearm, then there might be fewer objections.

And felons who want to buy a gun for nefarious purposes are either smart enough to pay up and get an unregistered one on the black market (so you're not targeting them with background checks) or dumb enough to get one at a local gun store. But the dumb ones are still felons, which means they likely have criminal connections, and if they need a gun they probably can find another way to get one. So by stopping them from buying a firearm legally, they're more likely to end up with unregistered weapon, which makes the DoJ's job harder. I concede that a fair number of them might be inconvenienced enough to just not buy a gun, but then many of them will just go on to stab people instead of shooting them. The number of actual lives saved by background checks is probably much lower than people think.

Further, background checks are notoriously unreliable, turning up plenty of hard-to-resolve false-positives and dangerous false-negatives.

And then there's restrictions on mental health conditions. The problem with these is that people like guns, and if someone who likes guns thinks they might have a mental health disorder like bipolar or schizophrenia that would perclude them from owning one, they won't see a doctor. The result is that they won't get treatment and are more likely to hurt themselves, and indeed, others. Shootings and violent crime have been declining for decades, but the lives of the mentally ill have not been improving. I find the mental health problem much more important than the gun control issues to the proper functioning of our society, it's just that gun violence is more visible. This is a hard problem, and there will have to be compromises but it has to be part of the debate.

I don't know why the NRA opposes background checks, but there are good reasons to.

SpaceX_Tech7• 10 years ago

I agree with you that on the fundamental level I don’t like the idea of rights being perpetually limited on the basis of being a convicted felon. As far as I’m concerned once a person has served their sentence, including parole, they have paid their debt to society in full and shouldn’t be barred from exercising any rights that non felons enjoy. This isn’t limited solely to the right to bear arms but also the right to vote, which many states still bar for convicted felons. If we as a society are so uncomfortable with the people who have paid their debt that we deem they must be prevented from exercising their rights even after serving their sentence, then perhaps it’s time we take a hard look at the failings of our “corrections” system.

On a hypothetical level, even if I did support the current laws barring convicted felons of certain rights in perpetuity, I would still have a problem with the way this is being administered today. I’ve read some pretty damning reports on some of the discriminatory practices that continue at the institutional level within the broader criminal justice system which seem to primarily affect certain segments of our population. Poor people, particularly minorities and specifically black males, face some very specific challenges when it comes to things like selective enforcement, pretrial plea bargains, rates of conviction and length of sentencing. At this point I can’t really describe our justice system as anything but blatantly discriminatory.

Even in a more equitable and just system, I personally wouldn’t support the taking away of rights in perpetuity, and I certainly don’t support it when it seems to have such a deliberate and specific impact on certain groups.

space_fountain• 10 years ago

The argument I have heard is that a universal background checks system would require the government to keep a registry of gun owners to be at all useful. You have to be able to go back and prove whether a seller performed the proper background check before selling a gun to a particular person.

A possible alternative I thought and have always wondered why it doesn't get used would be some sort of private public key cryptography where the seller would get a signed certificate proving they ran a background check and it's result, but the government wouldn't store anything.

hga52• 10 years ago

The argument I have heard is that a universal background checks system would require the government to keep a registry of gun owners to be at all useful.

Bingo, and the imposition of a registry would inevitably spark our next hot civil war. Best to avoid that....

where the seller would get a signed certificate proving they ran a background check and it's result, but the government wouldn't store anything

Unfortunately, a lot of people are really really bad about keeping records. It would also be open to abuse by the government seizing and disappearing the certificate of someone they wanted to persecute. Heck, the government sucks here, the BATFE's machine gun etc. registry is in horrible shape, and they sometimes abuse that.

SpaceX_Tech7• 10 years ago

I've also heard the argument that having a national registry makes the possibility of future mass confiscation much more palatable.

There are probably a good deal of people who wouldn't mind amending the Constitution to rid it of the Second Amendment but who still view the 4th Amendment favorably. It would be very difficult to enforce a policy of mass confiscation without the aid of a national registry that wouldn't be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

dpflan• 10 years ago

Smart guns have an interesting history. In the 90's Colt developed a smart gun, but the results "backfired." Anti-gun groups were against it because of the idea that safer guns meant that the barrier to entry to ownership was lower (now that guns are "safer", why not have one?); people who depended upon guns for their livelihood were skeptical: when you need to use one there needs to be no questions that it will function (barring all the traditional issues of "dumb" gun); if successful, other manufacturings would have to follow suit and there could be legal actions against "dumb" gun manufacturing and ownershpi...etc.

I've linked some articles that touch upon this attempt by Colt.

NRP Article: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/07/473416699/how-an-idea-to-devel...

Hacker News Discussion of Article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11462297

hga52• 10 years ago

From the beginning of the first comment in the HN discussion you link to:

he explained that it was only supposed to fire if the shooter was wearing a special wristband with a little radio frequency transmitter inside. The CEO put on the wristband and went to pull the trigger. ... And it didn't shoot. Just silence.

An "oops" which is entirely unacceptable for any law enforcement/self defense use case.

pbh101• 10 years ago

Slightly redundant, but I also enjoyed the (apparently contemporary) Planet Money podcast episode on the same topic:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/08/473581490/episo...

jboggan5• 10 years ago

Good article, glad to see some knowledgable firearms writing in the general press.

This is how I've felt as a gun owner over the last two decades, translated into computing:

Imagine that someone in California hacked into a power station and caused a blackout. Police responded and found the hacker and their equipment. Shortly thereafter an "anti-hacking" bill appeared in the state legislature to prevent a repeat of such a disaster. The attacker used some strange system called Ubuntu which most computer users have little or no reason to have, so that was specifically outlawed in the state (while any other Linux distro is fine). They had a quad-core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and a USB 2.0 keyboard for "faster hacking"; the bill mandated a limit of 9 gigs, 2 cores, and PS/2 connectors only. The attacker also used something called the "TCP protocol" (misnomer intended); the bill also mandated that the protocol include a 4th and 5th step transmitting "I am not a hacker" and acknowledging "You will be prosecuted with a felony under California SB1137 for improper use of this TCP protocol".

The bill passes and no more hacks occur. Other states don't want to be seen as soft on crime, so they draft copycat bills and randomly ban openSUSE, Gentoo, and trackballs with more than 6 buttons. Within a few years computer enthusiast sites pop up detailing which states are safe to travel to with your laptop. 1 gig RAM chips get unexpectedly expensive as everyone wants to get up to that 9 gig limit in restricted states. California legislators visit university computer labs disapprovingly and talk about closing the "Linux loophole". Activist groups lobby Congress, maintaining that the Founding Fathers never could have conceived of computers as an evolution of the printing press and therefore the 1st Amendment did not apply to electronic devices or communications. Programmers everywhere grumble about coding for two different communication protocols depending on whether or not your users are in California (but it's such a big market you can't ignore it). Your mother wonders why you can't just get your work done on an 8 year old laptop running Windows 7, it's good enough for her web browsing!

The contractor maintaining the power plant control system again leaves the web admin panel open and unsecured after testing from home and forgetting to unflip a poorly labeled feature flag on the production server.

cvwright2• 10 years ago

Unfortunately that's not too far from what they've been trying to do with the Wassenaar Arrangement lately, with export restrictions on "intrusion software".

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/us-to-renegotiate...

Vexs3• 10 years ago

What's kinda funny is that's very similar to what's actually going in computing, especially with encryption most recently.

incongruity2• 10 years ago

Absolutely - because the fundamentals are all the same - highly technical specifics being mandated by people who have no clue about the technology nor the impact of their proposed mandates. As systems get more complex and integrated, we're going to see more of this, not less, I fear. Also, note - this happens in the courts as well.

muglug• 10 years ago

Except that metaphor falls flat because Linux has many uses beyond hacking businesses and utilities (or rehearsing such activities).

fiatmoney3• 10 years ago

Guns have many uses besides killing people.

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

mmastrac• 10 years ago

Yes, exactly, and the primary purpose of a computer is not for causing damage to people and/or property. I find the argument that a gun is not primarily designed for causing harm to be disingenuous.

sgnelson• 10 years ago

You forgot one of the key reasons that specific computer is banned. It's Black and looks evil, just like the computers that hackers in the movies use.

superuser22• 10 years ago

Computers have uses beyond hacking. Guns are for killing. Killing in self-defense, honing your killing skills as a sport/recreation activity, deterring bad behavior by threat of killing, killing things that are socially acceptable to kill (i.e. game animals), sure, but the theme is killing.

Lockpicks might be a better example. Many similar arguments apply: their use is to open doors without the correct keys, which only a few specialized professions should have a legitimate need to do. Yet on the other hand we ought to be able to tinker with our private property, evaluate its security (bad guys will get lockpicks anyway), let ourselves in if we get locked out, publish security research on "unpickable" locks and participate in locksport.

Or for a more direct computing analogy, Metasploit. It is unambiguously a hacking tool, but it remains legal because bad guys will always get hacking tools, and the good guys need to be able to evaluate their defenses.

tbirdz• 10 years ago

Don't forget about starter pistols for telling runners when a race starts. Also flare guns for signalling, although that might not count as a "real gun"?

wyager2• 10 years ago

Target shooting isn't just practice for killing things. That's as absurd as claiming "racing is just practice for running people over".

Target shooting is a sport all on its own, and is probably the single most prevalent application of firearms in the US.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

well I am all for keeping them around for the self defense aspect alone though I did for a long time love target shooting; boy it gets expensive fast. The police aren't there to save you, they prevent crime by penalizing it but mostly when it comes to violent crime all they can do is figure out what happened and hope to find the perp

Turing_Machine6• 10 years ago

"Computers have uses beyond hacking. Guns are for killing."

There are somewhere around 300 million guns in the United States. There were around 30,000 deaths by firearm (including homicide, suicide, and accidents) in 2013. So... approximately 1 out of every 10,000 guns was used for "killing" in that year.

If their only use is "killing", one is forced to conclude that they really aren't very good at it.

vacri4• 10 years ago

Ironically, you've just described the concealed-carry laws that are proliferating through the states right now, which are all based on hunches and gut feeling. As a gun owner over the last two decades, do you feel as uneasy about that proliferation?

hga52• 10 years ago

hunches and gut feeling

How about decades of experience. Vermont never banned carry in any form, and now has been joined by 9 other states in "Constitutional Carry", many for some years. Washington state went shall issue in the early '60s. Florida started the modern wave in 1987. "Normal" states like Colorado have allowed concealed carry on the grounds of public colleges for years.

Experience, especially in the "50 Petri dishes" of the states, is one of the ways we figure out such things, and this "proliferation" has been a wild success.

partiallypro2• 10 years ago

If the government really wanted to push "smart guns," they could do it easily. How? Well, the U.S government is the single biggest purchaser of guns & ammo in the world. If they required all of their guns to be smart guns, manufacturers would suddenly shift production to make smart guns and it would raise the cost of production (and thus the price) for traditional weapons. But as you and others in this thread have stated, this has a number of problems not only for the government but for users and their legal rights.

hga52• 10 years ago

Well, the U.S government is the single biggest purchaser of guns & ammo in the world.

Not even close. E.g. they annually procure by an order of magnitude less small arms ammo than the 12+ billion produced in the US alone for civilians every year (and that doesn't count the seconds that ATK sells to us from Lake City).

Similarly, by now we civilians are every year or two buying as many new guns as all the governments in the US have in their active inventories (not going to count old stuff in Cosmoline, which they should sell more of to us, next up are 10,000 M1911s, maybe).

Nope, any existing companies that manufactured so much as one smart gun would be boycotted by us civilians and go out of business, as Colt is close to doing for various reasons including depending too much on the DoD, and, yeah, that smart gun flirtation and general cooperation with the gun-grabbers.

Frompo4• 10 years ago

So, is it the Stockton schoolyard or 101 California Street shooting that you liken to a blackout? I guess its a pretty dramatic blackout since at least 5 people dies...

You also neglect the detail that the police response was of little consequence as the hacker had committed suicide before they police was at the scene.

I'm unsure what the web panel remark can mean concretely, exactly what did the children at Sandy Hook Elementary do to cause a "blackout"?

cloakandswagger7• 10 years ago

While we're on this wild and irrelevant tangent, people frequently die from blackouts. See the Northeast blackout in 2003 where a dozen people died.

khedoros2• 10 years ago

Why not all of them as a category, or shootings in general? They all fit the concept of "negatives that legislation would attempt to prevent" in the analogy. That's the great thing about analogies: They compare concepts, but the scale of the concepts doesn't necessarily have to match. But I'm sure that you understand that already.

popmystack• 10 years ago

This reminds me of the "cars can use kill people too!" disingenuous line of thought.

Cars can kill people, but they are primarily used for transportation.

Guns have no other purpose but to kill. You may use it for other stuff (sport, in general). But it was created to kill something. Any analogy where you take some other object that has the potential to be purposefully misused is pretty much invalid when you're talking about the other object's primary purpose.

bdowling4• 10 years ago

Smart guns are to self-defense and the gun industry what the Clipper chip was to encryption and the communications industry, except the Clipper chip actually worked.

grahamburger• 10 years ago

Except that literally no one would die if clipper worked or didn't work. I lean toward the side of fewer restrictions on guns, although I don't own any - but I don't think that any comparison that removes the possibility of people dying will really hold up.

bdowling4• 10 years ago

The reason that the government wanted the Clipper chip was to make it possible for police agencies to listen in on the encrypted communications of suspected criminals, often ones whose activities would certainly involve the possibility of people dying.

Both cases are examples of government attempting to interfere with a technology to further some legitimate public government interest (catching criminals, reducing accidents) while compromising the private interests of citizens (effective self-defense, privacy).

xorgar8313• 10 years ago

The irony being is that the gun community acts just as irrational and certainly impractical. Even as a non-gun owner, I know what gun I'd rather have for self defence than these guys. :)

Does a 50cal really seem like a sport rifle? The inventor goes on towards the end of this video to suggest it's useful for personal self-defence?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n3usocws0E&t=0m42s

Here's an example of a guy who has 1.5M subscribers explaining how he'd protect himself answering the door in the middle of the night with a completely impractical close range weapon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiWhFTfUCg&t=3m33s

gnu8• 10 years ago

Those youtubers are just jerking off. A .50 caliber rifle is just a big expensive dangerous toy. No one is going to commit a shooting spree with one. It's not practical. Regulating them only impacts people who like loud bangs and will never hurt anyone.

xorgar8313• 10 years ago

That's the point, that same impractical rational gets applied everywhere. Even in cases where people get hurt.

Scramblejams• 10 years ago

My congresscritter a while back put out a statement supporting the 50 BMG ban in California, because she wanted "these dangerous weapons off our streets." I emailed her, asking how many of these weapons, exactly, she'd happened to find on our streets! I figure, they're so rare and expensive, if I could walk outside and trip over one, I might as well go out and pick one up that'd been left in the nearby hedges! She didn't respond. :-(

Tangent: It made me wonder what the longest distance criminal shot in American history is. Anybody got any ideas?

hga52• 10 years ago

"Does a 50cal really seem like a sport rifle?"

People who have a chance to fly over fly-over country might look down and ask themselves what the possible utility there is to rifles that can shoot that far. It also hits very hard, it's an anti-material round, and that has its own utility, for, you know, non-sporting purposes (no Cape Buffalo in the US, fortunately).

As for sport, long distance shooting including serious competitions is a thing. Your basic medium-big game hunting round is capable of, say, 800-1000 yard use, .338 Lapua Magnum gets you at least half again that distance, beyond that you need something like .50 BMG.

rdl5• 10 years ago

Actually with the right ammo .338 and .50 are pretty similar for precision long-range fire. The difference is the .50 has anti-materiel/anti-armor capability at many ranges; the .338 is just anti-personnel.

(Source: Sako TRG-42 .338 Lapua Magnum owner. Would own a .50bmg rifle, but California, and not yet rich enough to keep it fed either.)

jboggan5• 10 years ago

Have you ever shot the rifle in the latter video (Kel-Tec Sub 2000)? It's actually very lightweight, ergonomic, and favored in my experience by women and those of smaller stature as opposed to say, a handgun. Everyone I've ever trained to shoot that rifle have had a very easy time hitting what they are aiming at and more importantly not hitting what they are not aiming at. Why do you think it is completely impractical?

xorgar8313• 10 years ago

Because a rifle isn't practical for close targets. A handgun is much better suited for that.

RUG3Y2• 10 years ago

It's seriously fun to shoot at a target a mile away and hit it with one of this rifles. The people that I know who own these types of guns also own many, many other guns. The .50 cal is more like a sports car, it's really fun to shoot, very expensive to own, etc.

rdl5• 10 years ago

I'd be a lot more interested in a smart gun SAFE than in smart guns.

What I want most, specifically, is a bedside pistol safe, the size of a "gun vault", which is actually secure, but still rapid-access.

(The problems with the "gun vault" style safes are numerous -- some of them can be simply dropped 6" and they pop open from inertia on the locking mechanism. Others can be defeated surreptitiously by peeling off a sticker and inserting a paperclip to hit the reset button inside. They're not suitable for leaving a loaded firearm inside when you have untrustworthy people about for extended periods. The only reasonable model right now is to take a carry gun and put it in the safe every night (which is great IFF you carry every day), or to transfer a weapon from a "real" safe to the bedside vault every night. The problem is at some point you might forget, and both false-positive and false-negative kind of suck there.)

The tradeoff I'm willing to make is spending $1k for this vs. $100, and accepting two distinct entry modes: an slow-path "unattended/unprimed" mode which uses a UL group II electronic lock for access, with timeout-access, and a fast-path "day gate" (which would actually be night gate...) which opens quickly using (ideally) a chording keyboard mechanism, or biometric, or something else.

What I absolutely want to defend against is surreptitious entry when unattended -- i.e. for someone with kids, capable of entering hundreds or thousands of combinations in a week, there should be very low risk of users brute forcing the combo or otherwise gaining access in a way which doesn't leave evidence/alarm. Ideally, tamper events would lock the safe down to full TL-15 mode; if your kids can defeat a TL-15 safe, particularly surreptitiously when it is monitored every day, they might deserve the firearm for their new life of crime.

I'd be willing to have no override capability on the fast-path -- if it misreads, or is at all suspicious, if fails back to the slow-path. The mechanism for enabling fast-path might be unrelated to the slow-path entry mechanism (i.e. you don't need to open the door); what I was thinking of was some kind of presence-detect using bluetooth watch (Apple Watch) challenge-response, or something like that.

I could accomplish this today by buying an actual UL TL-15 safe of some size and putting a gunvault inside it, but that takes up a lot of space, and would weigh half a ton. There has to be a better solution.

I'd also like to have it tied into my alarm system and notifications -- if someone attempts to enter the safe, I want a notification on my phone. I'd also like to be able to force slow-path-only remotely. (I'd also like to have lighting, cameras, etc. controlled by alarm events, but that's a separate thing; I'd prefer NOT to have my bedroom recorded on video normally, but when the gun safe is opened, I'd like video logs to be streamed offsite in realtime.)

koolba• 10 years ago

Everybody[1] who's actually owned a gun (or plans to) hates smart guns.

[1]: Okay maybe not everybody but based on my anecdata it's everybody.

chillacy2• 10 years ago

That's the conclusion I came to when looking at the market for smart guns (I was interested in smart attachments for guns, think Fitbit for your gun). Smart guns drum up a bunch of press and buzz from people who will never buy them. It's a failure to understand the target market, who hates the concept for reasons mentioned elsewhere in this comment section.

Animats2• 10 years ago

The vertical forward handgrip claim is a bit much. While not too useful for aimed fire, as the author points out, it makes un-aimed "spray and pray" shooting easier. So does a barrel shroud. Neither feature is needed on a hunting rifle.

hga52• 10 years ago

Neither feature is needed on a hunting rifle.

Which the 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with. I'm told that many prefer it for vertical pistol grip rifles and carbines in close quarters combat, the combination is more ergonomic (I'm too used to the classic horizontal grip, and that's what my Scout rifle has, so I'm very unlikely to even try it).

Barrel shrouds are to keep yourself from getting burned if you have to fire a lot in a firefight, which again hits on the self-defense and offence purposes behind the 2nd Amendment.

fiatmoney3• 10 years ago

You don't know what you're talking about and I'm guessing you may have never actually shot a semi automatic rifle before.

This is a rifle with no scary barrel shroud, pistol grip, or vertical foregrip. If you google "bump fire" you might notice it is pretty easy to rapid fire just about anything as long as it's semi automatic and you don't much care if you hit anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hlzuAzvuJQ

In fact I find pistol grips and vertical foregrips plenty ergonomic for aimed fire, especially because I have a bit of carpal tunnel going on and cocking my wrist is somewhat painful. That's why every olympic target rifle (eg the Anschutz) uses some version of a vertical grip.

Animats2• 10 years ago

The US Army once taught me to use an M-16.

angersock2• 10 years ago

How does a barrel shroud make shooting easier?

All it does is keep you from burning your hands accidentally.

exabrial• 10 years ago

Smart guns aren't going to hinder anyone but responsible people.

We need a few things:

1) Funding alternatives to incarceration. People that go to jail tend to have a frequent flyer card.

2) Law enforcement sharing of critical data on offenders.

3) Funding treatment and therapy programs for drug abusers (ABUSERS, key word. I know this isn't a popular opinion on HN, but ABUSE and USE are two different things)

4) Finally, we need to wake up and realize there ARE bad people in the world, and unless you live in a small community, you can't have 100% safety. You can react by protecting yourself (yes, carry concealed), or if you're not comfortable with that, take a professional classes on how to survive extreme situations. Your safety at the end of the day is your responsibility ultimately.

larrywright• 10 years ago

I've always thought that the arguments from the anti-gun crowd defied all logic. If access to guns was the root of the problem, then gun violence should be going down, rather than up. Far fewer people own guns now than did, say 150 or 200 years ago (when it was probably close to 100%). Solving the problem by focusing on guns is trying to treat the symptom rather than the disease.

hga52• 10 years ago

I don't think you're right about how pervasive gun ownership was, due to changes in costs and wealth, and the ability to maintain guns in the days of corrosive black gunpowder and corrosive percussion caps and primers (the WWII M1 Carbine was the first US weapon system to use non-corrosive primers). And of course blacks were largely disarmed post-Reconstruction, next up were post-Civil War immigrants starting around the last turn of the century, etc. See also Chicago post-McDonald and the nationwide sweep of shall issue laws has radically increased the utility of owning a handgun, now 43 states and ~72-3% of the population.

8note6• 10 years ago

what's your evidence that gun violence is going up?

nxzero• 10 years ago

Interesting to me how many people feel so strongly about a topic, often to such a degree that they openly void having an understanding of views counter to their own and unable to express the reasoning behind their own beliefs in any meaningful way.

To me, this is the real issue, not that there's a topic people disagree on.

_______

Re: SmartGuns — People kill people, and if someone wants to harm someone, they will. To me, a more natural solution would be to have areas, much like schools, that're gun free, and others that are not. Clearly this won't fit the issues, but it might end the debates.

fhrjfjc• 10 years ago

I don't want backdoors in my guns just like I don't want backdoors in my encryption. It's really that simple.

Also reminder that Marx was an advocate of widespread gun ownership by the working class, much for the same reasons that the founding fathers of the USA were. Solving the underlying economic issues causing suicide and violence would make far more sense than covering up the symptoms. At the end of the day it's all about poverty.

467568985476• 10 years ago

I think that Marx comparison is pretty wrong. Marx expected a global workers' revolution that would result in a classless society. He was an advocate of armed revolution against the bourgeoisie. As far as I can tell, anything he wrote about gun ownership was in the context of this armed revolution.

The second amendment reads, in full, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The notion of protecting a state lead by a capitalist, slave owning class (think about what "people" means in this context) is completely contradictory to Marx.

Turing_Machine6• 10 years ago

Marxists have enslaved far more people that were ever enslaved by the "capitalist, slave-owning class" in the early United States.

vaadu• 10 years ago

This article is an ignorant POS.

The NRA hates smartguns for at least 3 reasons. First is the government is trying to force an unreliable and complex feature onto a product that needs to work every time. Second is the government has no plans to use it themselves, which speaks volumes about what their LEOs and the US military thinks of the reliability this technology. Last is the government is trying to solve a people problem with technology. BTW, these people problems are the result of Democrat's policies in gun-free cities such as Chicago, St Louis, Oakland and Baltimore.

schismsubv19• 10 years ago

While I agree with (and just stopped writing a long response about) the unreliable and complex feature argument - consider adding the necessary components to a semiautomatic handgun - I wouldn't call the article ignorant. There are many reasons the NRA and gun owners in general dislike "smart" guns, some of which include the soft, social reasoning the article outlines.

Hard technical arguments of feasibility and reliability tend to have little effect on those that espouse this form of gun control. They'd typically prefer the guns not be there in the first place, and don't particularly care how feasible or reliable the result is. Social arguments, however, tend to affect them more, or at least can put the argument in a place they find harder to dismiss. We need both parts to make the strongest argument.

jonstokes2• 10 years ago

Author here. I covered all three points you raised on my previous piece for TC this topic, so I didn't see the need to repeat myself here. That piece is linked in the opener of this article.

zardgiv2• 10 years ago

Please elaborate on what these "people problems" are. I'm interested in what you think is common amongst the cities you've cited.

ams6110• 10 years ago

They are run by Democrats and have been for a long time.

pazimzadeh• 10 years ago

Can you elaborate on why "Democrat's policies in gun-free cities" has led to "people problems?"

minimax2• 10 years ago

BTW, these people problems are the result of Democrat's policies in gun-free cities such as Chicago, St Louis, Oakland and Baltimore.

I don't know about the other three cities, but you can concealed carry in Chicago and that has been the case for almost three years now.

cloakandswagger7• 10 years ago

Have you tried obtaining a CCW in Chicago? In order to get one you have to:

-Take a 16 hour course. There are only a handful of companies that can offer the course and they're fully booked year-round

-Pay $150, one of the highest CCW permit fees in the nation

-Hope that you aren't one of the 800 applicants/year that are inexplicably denied (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-07-04/news/ct-concea...)

So yes, you can technically get a CCW in Illinois. It's also obvious that the state has thrown as many roadblocks as they legally could in the way, ironically bolstering the NRA's argument that any "common sense" requirements around gun ownership will be used as de facto restrictions

fouric• 10 years ago

"...trying to force an unreliable and complex feature onto a product that needs to work every time."

This. This is my biggest problem with smart-gun tech. We still haven't managed to figure out how to write software for hundred-million-dollar space projects that doesn't crash (the Japanese Hitomi satellite[2] being the latest of many); how on Earth are we going to implement smart gun technology correctly?

(actually, I would argue that we still can't write durable software in general, and as such we should avoid integrating it into important things such as guns and cars until we can improve our development skills)

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2086422-japanese-satell...

tootie3• 10 years ago

The plan is not to ban non-smart guns next week. Obama is calling for a push to improve the technology until it becomes reliable. Despite the Hitomi failure, we have sent a few hundred things into space pretty successfully. Half the systems in your car are under computer control. Opposing technology that could save thousands of lives a year because it doesn't work perfectly yet is bullshit.

8note6• 10 years ago

higher up in this thread, it is argued that the primary purpose of a gun is either punching holes in a piece of paper or a "tin can" or busting clay birds.

those don't seem like times when it is critical to work every time.

hga52• 10 years ago

No, the primary use of guns, and purpose of most guns in Americans' hands, although that's rapidly changing.

And you have clearly never been in a marksmanship competition.

venomsnake• 10 years ago

Reasons against smart guns - smart appliances don't work well, never have, never will. I prefer things simple, mechanical and working instead of praying that some Dilbert style company developed an usable software.

I live in a country that has very restrictive gun ownership regime - and yet every person knows instinctively about the gun safety rules:

1. Always assume loaded, unless proven otherwise 2. Don't point it at something you don't want to kill.

I am sure that people will appreciate when their gun starts firmware update or resets during a boar charging at you situation.

appleflaxen• 10 years ago

Washington regulates a million things over which is has no particular expertise. Including, but not limited, to medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, food production, law, agriculture, investment banks, the oil and gas industry, and on and on.

The fact that the government is bad at regulating these things doesn't mean that any step they take will be bad. The details matter, and it doesn't mean you should terminate any regulatory effort before it is defined.

In many (maybe all) of these areas, some regulation is needed.

cloakandswagger7• 10 years ago

Most of those areas are regulated by boards and committees of dentists, pharmacists, food specialists, etc.

For whatever reason, gun control is the one area where politicians refuse to consult specialists, thus resulting in bills as ridiculous as the AWB.

atemerev2• 10 years ago

I wouldn't say "hate", as it is too strong a word. But smart guns have the same problem as self-driving cars: they take control from you and transfer it to unknown actors (a random computer programmer? Clueless legislators? Various three-letter government agencies?)

Conversely, anti-gun folks and self-driving car proponents consider guns and cars too dangerous to be left in hands of _those people_. Those a better left in hands of experts, they say.

yorwba• 10 years ago

Conversely, anti-gun folks and self-driving car proponents consider guns and cars too dangerous to be left in hands of _those people_. Those a better left in hands of experts, they say.

That sums up my position nicely. I would not trust myself with either of these things.

hga52• 10 years ago

Are you willing to trust other people like myself with them?

GunboatDiplomat• 10 years ago

Well, that's your self-confidence problem. It's not my problem, so don't try to impose it upon me.

TeMPOraL3• 10 years ago

Those a better left in hands of experts, they say.

Not sure about guns, but your average driver is definitely not an expert in operating their car. Hell, the widespread rejection of the opinion of experts is a part of the driving culture (speeding, ignoring traffic laws). When it comes to cars, I'm totally willing to trust that (not so) "random programmer" over an average person.

burfog2• 10 years ago

Speeding is not rejection of the opinion of experts.

Speed limits are normally set low to appease the locals, who get to vote and who care most about one particular place, rather than those passing through.

It's a NIMBY problem. Most of us want to go places quickly, but don't want fast/dense traffic through our own neighborhood.

We also don't get bothered when the local cops earn a living from ticketing people from out of town. Those out-of-town people of course don't get a say in local policy, just as we don't get a say in the fact that we get ticketed in the other towns.

crikli3• 10 years ago

I'm an engineer, gun owner, and former NRA member[1].

I hate the idea of smart guns, but politics are a distant secondary concern.

Firearms fail all the time, even the simple reliable ones. Bad primers, failure to eject, failure to cycle, stovepipes, etc. It takes education and then repeated training to know how to deal with failures. In a pressure situation you revert to your lowest level of training; muscle memory will give you the best chance to respond appropriately.

Just dealing with mechanical failures quickly and correctly takes very intentional practice.

The last thing I want to have is another thing that can fail in a pressure situation that can't be resolved via trained response. E.g., for a bad primer or failure to eject I can do what's called a tap/rack/bang drill. But there's nothing I can do to train for some type of software failure or battery being dead or some other type of non-mechanical failure that bricks my firearm.

[1]Former because the NRA"s lobbing efforts and powers are ridiculously overstated. Their entire entire existence as near as I can tell is to sell their member's names to third parties. I've never received as much crap snail mail and email as I did during the year I belonged to the NRA.

Vexs3• 10 years ago

See, I actually like the idea of smart guns. The only thing it really does (or should do) is prevent you from getting shot with your own gun. If someone steals your gun out of your house, they could remove the smart part. If you're thinking about logging gun usage, you could probably edit the logs or corrupt them beyond usability.

I think you could make the system work. It's not complicated, maybe just an RFID reader and a solenoid. The issue is that if politics try and stick a bunch of extra crap onto it. All that extra stuff is what can cause failures, and cause an otherwise good idea to become vilified.

67726e• 10 years ago

Where do I keep that RFID? An implant, a ring? What if it gets damaged in a scuffle and I'm SOL when I try to shoot?

Technology fails.

schismsubv19• 10 years ago

If it's about politics, a lot of that extra stuff will be to make it non-bypassable. That said, just how many people are getting shot with their own gun as a component of overall firearm murders?

Don't forget the power supply, and don't undercalculate antenna design needs (it probably won't work incorporated into the handle of a pistol). The electrical draw will probably need to be pretty beefy in order to be as reliable as the rest of the gun's mechanisms, and what happens when the gun is being carried or stored in -20C temperatures? What about off-hand shooting when your normal shooting hand is unusable or it's dangerous to shoot from your normal side?

In order to be both universal and not introduce unreliability, the solenoid would likely have to be introduced as a secondary safety. How many firearm designs would even support a secondary safety?

drmilsurp• 10 years ago

They have a "do not promote" list that you must request to be added to which solves the spam/marketing mail problem. That you have to ask is problematic but there is a solution if this was the only problem.

hga52• 10 years ago

Eh, that Ackerman McQueen allows even that is a major thing.

(For those who claim the "gun companies" run the NRA, no, more than anyone else, it's run for the benefit of its PR firm (and of course the current entrenched executive leadership, who have made sure another Cincinnati revolt is impossible).)

crikli3• 10 years ago

It wasn't just that. Ultimately I decided that there were more effective 2A organizations that I preferred to support.

tootie3• 10 years ago

We're about 10-20 years from self-driving cars. Smart guns seem like a gimme.

cloakandswagger7• 10 years ago

Automated defense turrets for area denial perhaps, but 'dumb guns' will exist until a weapon superior to the gun is devised.

joesmo3• 10 years ago

Exactly! If the fingerprint scanner on the gun works like the one on my phone, many people will unnecessarily die. What do their families do then? Sue Congress?

Seriously, the idea of smart guns is really stupid. Can you build a system that's 100% reliable? No. Then people will die unnecessarily because of this legislation and, of course, no gun owner will want this optional piece of equipment with a nonzero failure rate. I'm glad no gun company wants to make this idiotic and dangerous technology.

chillacy2• 10 years ago

Another aspect I suspect is that gun owners already have the fundamental gun safety rules that are respected like gospel. All gun owners I've met are extremely serious about safety, and treat safety with great reverence.

I saw a reddit post of a guy who accidentally shot his foot: known as a Negligent Discharge. In the comments the general conclusion was not to blame the gun maker, but rather to blame the poster for failing to abide by the fundamental rules: 1. keep the gun pointed in a safe direction 2. keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot 3. keep the gun unloaded until ready to use 4. treat all guns as if they are loaded

I suspect that gun owners feel that smart guns also "cheapen" the safety ritual (which could be disastrous).

crikli3• 10 years ago

You're close on the four rules. :)

1. Every firearm is loaded. 2. Don't point it at anything you don't want to destroy. 3. Trigger finger stays indexed until sights are engaged with target. 4. Know your backstop.

I can't say as I've thought that these guns (I just cannot bring myself to use the adjective "smart" in reference to this idea) would cheapen these rules.

It's more that it's yet another idea proposed by people that don't have enough experience with firearms to present an educated opinion coming up with a scheme that to other ignorant parties thing sounds like, to quote amother commenter "a gimme."

anonbanker• 10 years ago

DC v. Heller means nothing will come from any of this.

hga52• 10 years ago

Not clear. Prior to Scalia's death, on the ground if you don't count Illinois, which was not appealed to the Supremes, and California and Hawaii, where it looks like the appeals court will overturn the current shall issue decision en banc, on the ground there's been no changes, because the Supremes have denied cert to every case appealed to them aside from the Massachusetts stun gun case just decided.

The bottom line is that Heller and McDonald mean we have a right to keep some types of arms, and bear them inside our homes, nothing more. And surely you've noticed how replacing Scalia is claimed by gun-grabbers as a necessary step towards reversing, de facto or de jure, both of those decisions, e.g. http://thehill.com/regulation/277248-chelsea-clinton-scotus-...

tomwilson• 10 years ago

These threads are always so weird to me - from a country where I have never known someone who owns a gun or ever seen one outside of police carrying them.

LyndsySimon5• 10 years ago

Growing up, I can't think of anyone I knew that didn't have guns, or who professed to believe they should be restricted further.

aaroninsf• 10 years ago

...somewhere a tiny yellow light blinks at 20 bpm in a the NRA chapter tasked with online argument response, and three pagers subsequently buzz...

Why the NRA hates smart guns

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