how about you explain how it will work? All the ones out there aren’t going to just up and disappear at the stroke of a pen, and unless you have some guarantee that you can take them away from the bad guys as rapidly as the law-abiding, I’m not really listening.
And if you wonder why people might have a problem with your proposal, I would suggest that people don’t like the idea of becoming felons through no action of their own.
shock resistance is a big one. anyone who has touched off a round from a 12-gauge knows how brutal the recoil impulse is. Shock (acceleration) and vibration are very harmful to electronics.
An excellent summary. Anther issue is that (in my experience) biometric sensors require you position your finger “just so” in order to work. What happens if your shooting grip on that gun puts your finger in a suboptimal position on the biometric sense? I can see that happening easily if the shooter’s fingers are a bit longer or shorter than what the gun was designed for. In an emergency the shooter doesn’t have time to fine-tune his grip, so that sensor better be sitting in EXACTLY the spot his fingertip goes to naturally (a fit which would be hard to achieve in a mass-produced item).
Well, of course I’m limiting the discussion of insurance to legal weapons. Try getting car insurance for a stolen car.
EDIT: Oh, I understand what you mean, you’re referring to the statistic, not the cost of the insurance per se. But it remains true that, in a competitive market, the insurance company will only consider the risk history of other legally-owned firearms when insuring your legally-owned firearm.
Well, I retract my statement. In the insurance market proposed, where the owner’s insurance would pay out if the gun were ever used illegally, the insurance rates for guns that could easily be converted to full-auto would theoretically be slightly higher.
In practice, I think the numbers still work out to essentially zero, but in theory the correlation is there and owners of such guns would pay for it. But it would be the owners of easiest-to-convert semi-auto guns that would pay, not the owners of legal full-auto guns, based on the existing risk history.
The license funded training facility is a great idea, perhaps we can include professional trainers (police or ex-military - certainly not mothers) as a part of that training rather than for-profit entities. Publicly funded facilities should be training only, not for recreational shooting else the owners of current ranges will object.
I would also offer rebates on the licensing if you could prove that the firearm in question was used for match shooting, skeet, trap or hunting (but only for game that required a tag or stamp (i.e. hunting rebates for big game, water fowl - not for varmints).
The liability insurance coverage will never be perfect (after all, we have uninsured motorist issues now), but requiring it legally is fine. I like the idea above about preferred rates based on type and storage. If not required, lack of liability insurance could be made self-correcting. Get sued and have to pay without insurance would change a lot of minds - also, report it stolen with no insurance - big fine.
Here is a current article about safe gun technology - 1% failure rate.
That is a great and eyeopening article. I seriously can’t understand why gun users wouldn’t want some consumer protection oversight on their tools. It sounds like many of the problems could be solved by using technology like this, and mandating that guns need to be built as safe to their users as any other equipment.
“We Have the Technology To Make Safer Guns
Too bad gunmakers don’t care.”
Oh, they are not promoting any kind of agenda whatsoever. Certainly there is no chance they are glossing over any problems. And 1% is pretty bad in any case.
This will not even solve the problem This Just In claims to be living in fear of.
1% is still a fairly high failure rate (at least if you’re talking about a weapon for defensive use - I wouldn’t carry a pistol that failed to fire once out of every hundred rounds), but it certainly sounds like the technology’s on the verge of becoming practical, which is great.
Well, most gun users aren’t worried about their weapon being snatched from their hands and used against them. It’s just not a problem that’s relevant to target shooting or hunting. And preventing children or other household visitors from picking up the weapon and firing it can be accomplished more simply by keeping the gun locked up in an appropriate safe. But people who carry for defensive reasons, like the police, should welcome this advance provided it is truly reliable enough (and a 1% failure rate isn’t quite there yet).
Did you even read the article. The consumer oversight is about protecting the gun users and those around them from malfunctioning weapons.
Eh, the university professor who designed it claims the prototypes have a 1% failure rate in the lab. I’d like to see someone in field conditions run a combat course and determine the failure rate before I believed any of the data.
I’d also like to know how tamperproof it is. Preventing someone from picking it up and using it immediately is one thing (and certainly a laudable and useful goal), but if I’ve got a few hours and a toolbox, can I remove the biometric device and make the gun completely usable by anyone? That makes it useless for the stolen gun used later in a crime scenario.
There’s also no mention of the cost, which is worrisome in an article so clearly in favor of it. A new handgun runs what, $300 to about $1000 these days? Does this device increase that by $50, or $150, or $5000?
Did you? That is not the topic of the article at all.
You’ve said this twice now in response to my quote that I fear my 2 or 5 year child could be a victim to guns. In light of recent events, my fears are reasonable and justified and I don’t appreciate what is starting to be a condescending tone regarding this. You say it is so incredibly rare that any person would be exposed to this danger - yet there I was a week ago with my kids and family in the same food court a mass shooter came shooting through a hour after I’d left. Like I explained in my previous post - you don’t have to actually be shot to be impacted financially or emotionally. There were 10,000 people fleeing or hiding in panic in that mall, and it is going to have a large financial impact on many others.
Well I read past the headline.
Yes, I did read the article, in its entirety. The problem is, most guns accidents aren’t malfunctions. The gun did precisely what it was supposed to do - go off when the trigger was pulled. Most gun accidents are a result of poor safety practices on the part of the user, such as that father whose toddler son died - he clearly didn’t know how to unload a semiautomatic pistol. That’s a HUGE user error, not a small mistake. (In car terms, he did the equivalent of leaving his car in neutral with the parking break off while on a steep hill.) Dad didn’t need a biometric gun, Dad needed to have no firearms until he learned both the essential rules of gun safety and how to properly unload a pistol.
When it comes to firearms, the most important safety feature is the one installed between the user’s ears. And the more safety features you try to build into a weapon, the more potential points of failure you’re introducing, and the more likely it is that the gun will fail at a critical moment. For a defensive gun, the #1 most important feature is that it MUST always fire when the trigger is pulled.
Damn, okay, I’m truly sorry. I read your post where you said that on my iPhone and somehow missed the critical sentence where you mentioned you had actually been at that mall.
I hope you will eventually realize that the risk is no greater now than it ever was, and that you are statistically in essentially no danger whatsoever from this sort of thing, but I certainly cannot blame you for being scared and disturbed about it now. I’m sure I would feel the same way.
I will also point out that that shooter was reportedly stopped by a private citizen carrying a concealed handgun, a former security guard.
It could be argued that 1% is statistically insignificant when combined with the number of times shots would be fired in a personal defense situation (police standards would be different) - and balanced against the decreased risk of having the weapon taken from you and used against you - or accidental use or discharge as mentioned in the article.
Are there any figures on mis-fire or jam rates in ‘dumb’ weapons?
I had been at the mall - but left about an hour before the shooter arrived. However what really cuts even deeper is hearing about the 20 children being shot in their classroom. How does any parent not register fear at that thought.
Talk to me about the statistics and logic all you want, but people and parents have emotions man. Now isn’t the best time to be salivating at how cool the AR-15 is, or stating how this only affects those that are actually shot.