Smart guns are dumb

"Smart guns" (safe guns) prevent both intended and unintended use of a gun, resulting in virtually no interest.

"Smart guns" (safe guns) were a solution to a virtually imaginary problem; having your gun taken away and used against you. It does this by making a gun more expensive, less reliable (and more likely to get the user killed), and there are better solutions to the mostly non-existent problems. Gun illiterates think it's great, but informed gun owners see no value.

ℹ️ Info

~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2017-04-27

"Smart guns" (sometimes called safe guns) were an idea invented by gun controllers to have a wedge issue to divide the nation. But there's nothing smart about them. Anyone with a basic clue of them, would laugh openly, if they weren't so fucking dangerous. The whole issue is evidence of why we should tests to qualify people on topics, before allowing them to vote.

They sound good to the unaware, "we want to make guns safer" by duping them that gun safety is a real problem, and this would be the best solution to fix it, thus anyone that opposes this money wasting bad idea sounds unreasonable and extreme. But the basics are:

They do virtually nothing to improve the safety of guns (and quite the opposite for the user)
They solve non-problems, or problems that could be solved with much better solutions like gun accidents among kids, or cops having their guns turned against them
There are better/easier ways to fix the problem (like keeping the gun locked up, locking holsters, etc)
No professional would consider using them, thus civilians have even less interest
They have a horrible history behind them, which really infuriates the informed

So they're good politics, for dividing us, but the best thing you could say about them is "they're just a lot of really bad ideas, by the sincere but uninformed folks trying to cure problems they know nothing about". The less kind, and more likely explanation, is that they're a trojan horse meant to divide us for political gain, and undermine gun rights by fraudulent gun-hating extremists. Below is everything you need to know about the "smart gun" debate.

Reasonable Gun Laws

Left	Right
"Smart guns" (sometimes called safe guns) are guns that are designed to only be usable by the operator, to cure a problem that virtually doesn't exist outside of movies; having your gun taken away and used against you, or accidents. In ratios of usage to accidents, guns are much safer than cars or bathtubs.	The technology isn't there yet and probably won't be in my lifetime. A gun's prime value is instant reliability when you need it: a "Smart Gun" design undermines that and would let you die while waiting for your gun to "activate". They are advocated by those who don't understand guns, or to have another wedge issue that divides us between the gun controllers and the informed.

Smart gun[edit source]

Main article: Smart gun

A smartgun was originally the military working on the idea of allowing guns to calculate range, windage, or to select ammo to the task, or to control smart rounds (ammo) that could fragment and hit targets behind walls. That common sense term isn't used much, and we're discussing Smart guns (or safe guns), two words. This is technology to prevent accidents, suicides, or having cops guns turned on them; making guns more "safe". This is like making hammers that won't smash thumbs... or drive nails. Nobody has commercially produced one, because they are a solution looking for a problem, and gun advocates blocked them because New Jersey has a law that said once one is available, all guns will require those features.

🗒️ Note:
21 foot rule - This is the first-mover advantage: a rule that is a widely accepted truth (and trained for) that if you're within 21 feet away, a knife beats a gun (almost always). At that range, it takes less than 1.5 seconds to cut and kill an officer. As a Martial Arts instructor I trained cops and civilians, and the civilians could win most of the time, even when the cop was prepared for the attack. This is why people get shot carrying knives or clubs; cops know what progressives choose not to, their lives are at risk. Slowing that down a fraction of a second will result in more deaths or increase the threat range.

So how does it work?[edit | edit source]

The short answer, is it doesn't. But here are the ideas offered:

(A) biometrics (or password/identifier) -- where a fingerprint, palm print, or other personal identifier is used to authorize the gun to fire
(B) RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)-- some short range proximity device (embedded in a ring, bracelet or watch) that would enable the gun to fire (thus if it is taken out of proximity (say 10+ inches), it can't be used or used against the owner)

Thus both claim they can only be fired by the owner and no-one else, and thus they're "safer". Each technology has it's own mess of problems.

Biometrics[edit | edit source]

They're unreliable, with both false positives (allowing people that shouldn't to be able to fire the gun) and false negatives (not allowing the right person to fire it).
There's reliability issues with dirt (fouling), batteries dying, simplicity (added steps/training in combat situations)
There's problems in off-hand firing, firing with injuries, and versatility
Most of all, they have a lag before use, which means causes deaths

The 21 foot rule is scary enough for cops as it is, but imagine you have to train them to swipe a finger across a gun before drawing (listening for a beep/acknowledgment), and then maybe doing it again if it didn't work, in a combat situation? Even 1 extra second means their threat radius is now anyone within 36' can take them out before they can draw their weapon (assuming 100% reliability of the biometric system): if it takes two swipes to work, that's now 60 feet.

If you tried to deploy these, all cops would "prime" the weapon (meaning pre-scan/unlock them, and pre-draw them) in situations they could predict. Which still leads to more officer deaths in spontaneous events they failed to predict. But even in cases of priming they're defeating their own safety mechanism: they can now be fired by the other person, since they're already unlocked. And cops pre-drawing and pre-unlocking guns, is very unnecessarily intimidating (escalation). It's a crime for civilians to pre-draw a weapon without their being an active threat, so you'd have to change laws/policies to allow cops to do this, just to be safe; which would increase accidents and escalation. Which is why no cops would use these things -- and if cops, military and professionals won't use them, then civilians will have no interest in it either.

After millions of dollars in research, biometrics was dropped, and RFID is the only semi-practical system we're practically discussing for the next couple decades.}}

RFID (Radio Frequency ID systems)[edit | edit source]

This idea is that you have a ring or bracelet (watch), that has to be within a few inches of the device for it to work. Except think about it. Most shootings with a cops gun are when both are wrestling with the gun and at very close range. So if these kinds of shootings were a real problem, 9 out of 10 would still be a problem with this system, because the cops hand is still likely to be too close (and thus the gun is "hot"). There's no practical safety increase, in most situations.

The other side is cops and civilians train shooting off hand (with your other hand) in case you're injured. But if one hand is injured and by your side, and it has the watch or ring, you can't shoot offhand. These are rare cases, but more common than cops getting shot with their own gun. So you end up with a case, where you're protecting against a more rare incident, by making things worse in a less rare case.

But for the sake of argument, let's pretend that it did work perfectly. It would take motivated thugs a couple hours max to figure out that a jammer to defeat this: thus giving criminals a free ride. (Some already did with prototypes, just to prove they could). They walk up a cop with a jammer on, he doesn't know it, and when he draws his gun, you stab/club or shoot the shit out of him while he's looking at his gun wondering why it isn't working.

The only reason this tech is the slightest bit effective is called "security through obscurity": no one knows it exists, so isn't adapting to it. Once it beyond popular, so will defeating it: and they're easily defeatable.

Congratulations, gun-controllers just made the cops job MORE dangerous by increasing their vulnerability, and allowing remote and covert deactivation of their guns. Which makes cops MORE twitchy and shooty. No cop or military person is going to adopt these technologies, and intelligent ones will quit if you try to force them to. Thus no intelligent civilian is going to want to adopt them either. Why should anyone be forced to endanger their lives with such bad ideas?

What about thefts, suicides and accidents?[edit | edit source]

Theft: locksmith will explain that all a lock can do is delay entry. No lock can stop someone motivated. I picked locks as a kid. Won't work

Defeat: Guns aren't very complex mechanically (that's why they're reliable). If you could get these 100% implemented (implausible), there would be a great black market fixing/cracking guns (so they can be used).

Suicides: an even worse argument. The owner (most likely suicide) can still use it. Others could defeat it if determined, especially RFID. And gun control has never impacted suicide rates. Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, Denmark (Happiest place on earth), Belgium, Iceland, etc., with their strict gun control, have higher rates than the U.S. At best, you could get people to use more dangerous choices like jumping off buildings, or in front of trains/busses (with higher efficacy rates) and off overpasses.

Accidents: virtually a non-problem. You could commit many kinds of accidents even with a smart gun. We're talking about ≈500 deaths per year (overreported, as many list suicide as "accident" to avoid the stigma or for insurance benefits). Of the 20 per year that are kids, nationally, many would defeat the mechanisms. Bring back gun safety to schools, and you could save more, but the anti-gun left is against teaching life skills. To give you scale: dogs kill 30 people, bees get 60, peanuts get around 100 people, 3,500 drownings per year, texting is about 6,000, 33,000 die to auto accidents, and 39,000 due to poisonings! Auto-erotic asphyxiation regularly kills about 1,000 people, so hanging yourself while masturbating is a more serious threat to human life (and your teenagers) than gun accidents. And the solution is better served with a gun lock/safe. This is not a valid argument for driving up the cost and down the reliability.

History (omitted context)[edit | edit source]

🗒️ Note:
How many cops were shot with their own guns per year? The gun controllers use the fraud 33 cops shot with their own guns, then in the fine print, "per decade". So the real answer is about 3 a year. To give this scale: 50 cop are killed every year in traffic accidents. 247 people a year win over $1M the lottery in the United States. 15 cops were killed in ambush attacks after Obama/Holder/Jackson sensationalized Ferguson, that year alone. Go through a list of fallen cops and try to find one that was shot with their own weapon. This is an extremely rare problem, that can better be fixed by training and having backup officers than by politicizing their weapons.

The efforts started in the 80's with the Brady Bill. After Reagan shooting, gun controllers were looking for ways to keep adding restrictions on gun ownership, and they figured out that "smart guns" would be a way to do this. And they pushed for an assessment on the technology (from 1994-2004) that resulted in a report, that concluded they needed at least another $30M and decade before this stuff could be brought to market. Even then, it admitted that it wouldn't be at all effective in stopping owner instigated shootings (accidents or suicides) or illicit markets -- the only thing they could hope to address was the 3 cases per year where an officer gets shot by their own gun (assuming you could get officers to adopt the things, and accept the hundreds more deaths caused by the failure of the technology) ^[1]

It was not the industry and customers that were demanding it, or this would have happened decades ago.

In 2000, since Bill Clinton had no more political capital left, he and Andrew Cuomo (a known gun-hater) proposed legislation that would completely regulate the industry on "gun safety" and design standards (locking devices and magazine sizes), and limits on the sales and distribution of firearms -- all controlled by an unconstitutional five-member oversight commission to study the topic and conclude what they wanted to hear. The recommended these guns as a solution to drive up prices and harass law abiding gun owners and end-run the 2A. ^[2]

Smith & Wesson voluntarily jumped on board to see if politics could help get the government "off their back". And of course gun controller let slip their true agenda, when in New Jersey they passed a law that said as soon as "smart guns" were available, all other guns would be outlawed for sale (called "the mandate"). Gun buyers were so mad at S&W for betraying them, that their sales fell in 2000, by 40%, and didn't recover for 5 years (until after being acquired by another company). Factories closed, employees were laid off, and after that, no big U.S. gunmaker ever went near a smart gun. (It's been done by smaller companies getting government subsidies for a gun that nobody wants to buy). ^[3]

This tech was made available in the real world with a gun called the Armatix iP1 (among others). The gun didn't sell, and in fact, consumers were so mad at the New Jersey ban, that they boycotted stores that carried it. And they were attacking Colt or Smith & Wesson for even looking into developing them. So no one carried it. The spin-off company that created the first ones went bankrupt within a year.

Even if you could prove that safe guns could save lives, the gun owners and advocates don't want them, because they don't trust the gun controllers who want to push them on them.

After 30,000 gun laws, and 90,000 lies that went into passing them, the gun advocates don't trust anything the gun-controllers offer and will actively resist and fight, for good reasons.

It was shown that magazine limits make no difference, so gun controllers push them.
The assault weapons ban they got through in the early 90's did absolutely nothing to decrease shootings or mass shootings (and might have made things worse).
Less than 0.7% of guns used by criminals are gotten through, "gun show loopholes" or "internet loopholes" that the leftists prattle on about.

The gun advocates know that the goal is not to save lives from crazies, but to eliminate tools from law abiding citizens. So even trying, is worse than a waste of time, gun sales go up every time the President talks about "improving gun safety", and will, until Gun Controllers first learn about guns, gun safety and what might actually work. But if they did that, they often switch sides in the argument -- so that can't happen.

Thus, ideas like "safe guns" are popularized in movies, and parroted by propagandists in the media, despite their proven ineffectiveness -- and that's self defeating since it makes the informed dig in and resist even harder. (It proves everything they suspect about the disingenuousness of the other side).

Conclusion[edit | edit source]

Smart guns aren't a good idea in any dimension: they require expensive and fragile additions to a gun, that do nothing to make it a more effective tool. They aren't something consumers actually want, the problems they promise to address aren't real problems (in any scale), and they're pushed by groups that do not want to increase gun adoption rates (so we know they're insincere to begin with). They don't help with gun safety, suicides, or accidents (over much easier and more effective methods). And those who are the biggest advocates, despise guns and would be happier with a gun ban and confiscation: thus gun-owners not only don't trust them, but actively distrust anything they propose.

Think about it, what do you think is more likely (a) that gun controllers want to make guns safer so their adoption of them goes up (b) that they're using tech as an excuse to drive up the cost (and thus down the availability) of guns, and as an excuse to register and ban millions of "non-safe" guns (force replacement), and to try to stress the difference between the two (imply that regular guns are not safe)? If you buy (a) and not (b) then I have a bridge to sell you. No gun advocate, or person that's looked at the issue buys the sincerity of the gun-controllers based on the facts and history. Thus the louder the gun-controllers scream for smart guns, the more harm they do to the adoption of the technology: for the same reason NAMBLA would not make good spokespeople for child advocacy.

For now, and the foreseeable future, no professional would use one of these safe gun systems. Billions could be poured into R&D and it wouldn't change that. Obama and other advocates could lead by example by demanding all their body guards only use these systems for self-defense. But there's a reason they don't: their body guards would quit in mass, as would most cops if they were forced to use these things. "Smarts" in a gun, makes it more reliable as a club or brass knuckles than as a gun.

I liken these ideas to regulations mandating people buy armored trucks that get 9 MPG, and can only go 45 MPH -- think of the safety. They're bulletproof, near crash proof, and people would drive so much less that they'd be much safer, right? But there's a reason people don't want them, and would fight a regulation requiring them, and it's the same reason gun advocates don't want smart guns: it's not really better in 99% of the cases you want a gun for.

With there being no rational argument that this is a big public safety issue for civilians or cops (and they are a solution created by gun-haters, to make gun advocates hate their guns as much as they do), you need to ask why this idea is pushed so hard by gun-hating Democrats? The answer is because they get to waste money, and polarize all the red-staters against them, and then use that reaction (to their bad policies) for fundraising and as proof of the extremism of the other side. So the politicians love it, and the gullible don't know better. Anyone that's read about the topic knows, the true agenda is to drive up the price (from $500 to $1,800) and thus reduce availability of guns for defense, and to use "safety" as a canard to require mass replacement and registration, in order to restrict availability. Gun rights folks understand this, and gun-controllers come in the willfully or cluelessly ignorant of the context behind this. But if you hate a tool (guns), then reason isn't going to persuade you -- and if they could learn (were teachable), they wouldn't be gun-controllers in the first place.

💭 What's Reasonable?
What is reasonable when it comes to gun laws? I explain what it takes to be compliant with a few gun laws so that readers can decide how reasonable these laws are. Now I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV, so don't take this as legal advice. But these are just a small sampling of the 20,000: local, state and national gun control laws that every owner must know and comply with, under the legal concept of Ignorantia juris non excusat (Ignorance of the law is no excuse). The penalty for infraction is often a felony conviction, ruination and loss of gun rights by hyper-aggressive DA's who hate guns or want to get elected to higher office on the fraud that they're helping public safety. Or worse, the laws aren't enforced and teach both sides contempt for them. If any of these laws seem silly, annoying, or ineffective, you will begin to understand why gun-advocates mock and resist “reasonable gun control” and the legislators who create them.