Gun control idea. Would this work?

Factual Questions
1

Please bear with me while I try and explain myself, my reasoning is a little convoluted, still I think it’s a valid idea and am very interested in what you think of it. I have no science of physics background, forgive me.

Firstly, one of the problems I see with current gun detection devices is that they are really only metal detectors. So your keys, belt buckle, or that plate in your head, can set them off. Slow going at the airport, and not very cost effective for schools and such, requires attendents etc.

Next let me say that my Dad worked in a division of a company that made special finishes for cars. So I am aware that they add a marker to their paint colours, hardly a secret (just play along), which enable police, csi, etc, to identify exact models from two colours of red paint say.

And thirdly, when I go to my grocery store there is something in the cart that triggers the wheels to lock if I try and take it off the lot. And it works too!

My idea is sort of a combination of these three things;

Manufacturers of guns are forced to include in the alloy a ‘tell’, something easily detected and difficult to confuse with any other metal object. But it should be in the alloy not just a plug of something or a chip that could easily be disabled or removed. This should make detection much simpler in my opinion.

At airports and schools you set up an archway type of entry about 4 feet deep with a turnstile entry and a bullet proof glass exit door. Fence school yards so there is only one or two entries through just such a gateway. Enter with a gun, both gates lock, photo taken, alarm sounds. Do the same at the airport entry. NOT at each gate, just where you first enter the airport. No attendents required.

Granted there would be costs involved but I’m pretty sure you could sell a lot of chocolate bars in any community in this country this week with this as your objective.

It would be a great deterent at the very least. Isn’t that really why schools are being targeted in this way, easy access?

Granted there’s still a fair number of the old weapons out there but you got to start somewhere, right?

What do you see as being wrong with this good idea?

2

The alloys used to make guns have to be determined by other factors (e.g. “What kind of metal will contain frequent explosions without shattering?”) That pretty much insures that guns will be made of the same kind of metal as any other metal object that needs to be strong and durable (i.e. pretty much any other metal object, period).

3

You could probably do this with something like an RFID chip embedded in the gun, but as you said, there are thousands of guns out there without this proposed technology and so would render it largely ineffective.

4

So what happens in detecting the millions upon millions of guns that are already out there? They’re not wearing out very fast. My brother told me that he’s seen a sales rep take a good quality handgun out of the sandfilled tupperware container he was carrying, shake the parts, assemble the gun with no wiping, and fire it. Good guns aren’t wearing out like cars are.

As far as I can tell, the problem of people taking guns to school is so small that it does not merit the costs you’re talking about. That money is better spent on some other problem. I’m betting that more property and people would be saved by hiring more police than putting in new fences and a gun detector at schools. I know that there have been highly publicized incidents at schools, but statistically it almost never happens, especially in certain areas. There are entire towns that have never had a gun incident in school, in 100 years.

5

Also, airport security is looking for a lot more than guns–they want your water bottles and nail files too. Saftey first!

6

Probably feasible technically, politically a disaster. The gun lobby would shit all over it.

7

In fact, there are plenty of 100yo guns that are still pefectly shootable. So, no, your idea wouldn’t work.

8

Even if it did, it’s not a difficult task to manufacture a simple firearm (zip gun) and not beyond the capabilities of a good machinist to put together a functional repeating firearm. Manufacturing instructions and engineering drawings for the 1911 and Browning Hi-Power–two common and venerable firearms–are readily available. It’s also difficult to see how you would impose this requirement on firearms made in other countries. I’d estimate that a large number of quality handguns (Glock, SIG, Browning, CZ, Walther) in the US are of foreign manufacture.

There was some discussion a few years about about tagging firearm propellents the same way that commerical explosives are marked with inert additives to aid in forensics; the technical consensus seemed to be that this would offer little benefit for tracability given the large lot size of power manufacture. (An even crazier scheme had individual bullets being marked with serial numbers, which is just gaspingly detached from reality on a bucketful of levels.)

And, as others have pointed out, explosives and melee weapons aren’t addressed by your scheme, regardless of its feasibility.

Stranger

9

Do you have a specific alloy and detection method in mind? The only way I can think of is to use a radioactive material. Making all guns radioactive is a bit drastic.

There are X-ray machines that can identify specific material, but if you’re going to use X-rays, a backscatter X-ray imager is much safer (lower dosage) and probably more useful.

This is too easy to defeat. All it takes is a piece of aluminum foil to block the RF signal.

10

Plus, if you can damage or flash the RFID chip, you’re done. You can’t detect a chip by it’s lack of signal. Oh, you could check all guns on a systematic basis for a working chip. Now we’ve invented the gun police, and still haven’t solved how to regulate unregistered guns.

It’s just simply absolutely true that to an extent, if you outlaw guns, only the outlaws will have guns. Yes, I know the point about registered household guns being used in arguments, and I even have a horror story about that, but that’s not what the proposal was about. To me, this is another way to annoy the kind of people who follow rules, while doing precious little to thwart those who don’t.

11

Why? Suppose some sort of additive could be made to add in the gun manufacturing process that would more easily trip sensors at airports and government buildings and the like? If the gun otherwose works exactly as it did before how does this annoy the end user unless they are trying to smuggle a weapon in somplace they shouldn’t?

I suppose you could say it’d add more to the price of the gun but if it was minimal I think that is a very minor issue at best. The US mandated a third brake light in passenger vehicles. That added to the cost of the car but not a big deal in the scheme of things.

As for foreign manufacturers I do not see why they cannot be told if they want to sell their product in the US they need to abide by such a rule. Again, the third brake light was mandated and foreign car manufacturers added a third brake light.

I realize there would still be a lot of weapons out there without this but as mentioned you need to start somewhere. I doubt you could ever get rid of the metal detectors but over time old weapons would wash out of the system and new ones would replace them. Sure there will be some dude who inherited a gun and has it hermetically sealed away somewhere that could bring it out in 500 years but in a few decades I bet most guns available would be “tagged” in this manner.

Nah…there are radioactive consumer products all over the place. Jewelry, smoke detectors, cat litter (been known to trip radiation detectors) and so on ( cite ). Detectors these days seem to be remarkably sensitive so it would not take much to be detectable. Only problem would be sorting out all the other normally (and benignly) radioactive stuff from the thing you are looking for.

12

No matter what kind of “ID technology” is implemented into a gun, there *will * be a way to disable it, and there *will * be people who do it. I will be one of those people.

13

No, you don’t need to start somewhere. It’s not a problem, and even if it was it’d be too easily bypassed, giving those which such machines a false sense of security. In other words, you are suggesting the Gun companies spending millions and the various secuoty agencies and companies spending billions without anyone being any safer.

14

I’ll take that bet. Of all the guns I own, exactly three were made in the last 30 years, and only one has been retired due to age and that pistol is over 100 years old. If I had owned it before the last person I can nearly guarantee it would still be in servicible condition.

“New” guns actually make up a very tiny percentage of available guns in America.

15

In my experience, when people say “We need to start somewhere,” or “We need to do something about _____,” it generally results in some photo-op showpiece action that in fact does nothing but lavishs out taxpayers’ money and is abandoned after the next round of elections. Gun buy-back programs are a prime example.

Stranger

16

so this conversation shifts to debate. I’m expecting the formal shift to occur soon. However, as to the OP, clearly the objections mentioned here indicate that this would not solve much. However, I’m with **Whack a Mole ** that you need to start somewhere. Anything that limits the possibility of a gun being used in a crime is ok by me. Yep - no plan is perfect. But that doesn’t mean throw out all plans. I’m sorry to hear that there are plenty of 100 y.o. guns that fire just fine, but I figure if you were to ban guns now (by administrative fiat), in 150 years or so, there’d be fewer of them around. I think that would be good.
Ok, fire away.

17

Things like increased education oppertunites, better social and living conditions, widespread gainful employment and an answer on how to end the War on Drugs would be far more effective than some magic gun paint. People who believe that gun control limits violent crime must think that Ny-Quil cures the common cold.

Do you mean ban new guns, or take the existing ones?

18

Agree 100%. Easiest way to end the “War on Drugs”? Call it off. Use the money for “increaded educational opportunities, better social and living conditions, widespread gainful employment.”

Of course gun control would limit gun crime. How could it not? Fewer available guns = fewer gun crimes.

I’d ban all new ones, but I’d also like to collect as many of those in circulation as possible. The idea is to reduce the number of weapons in society so that in the long run there will be fewer weapon-involved crimes.

19

No, that logic is completely flawed. Gun control are laws that make more actions with guns illegal by definition. They do not instantly change availability of guns, ergo by definition they can only increase the number of gun crime, even if that crime is posession of unregistered firearm or somesuch. Now people who were breaking no law before are breaking the new gun control law you just created, so you’re creating more criminals. Banning guns is really stupid, imagine a world where all guns suddenly disappeared - your entire goverment would instantly be overrun by anybody who is capable of making a gun or a pipebomb duking it out for control while you watch in the sidelines without a reasonable ways of defeding yourself other than wittling a bow and arrow or making your own gun. Good luck.

The only gun problem I see in America is that it’s harder for me to get a legal gun than it is an illegal gun, sure, it’s a little bit pricier, but the service is THAT much better. :slight_smile: What’s the fixaction with guns anyway? They’re fairly simple tools that happen to be rather convinient for threatening, hurting or killing people. The set of all things that are convinient for threatening, hurting or killing people is always the same size as the set of all things that are not convinient for threatening, hurting or killing people - specifically infinite. Lately the anti-gun crowd is starting to sound more and more like Jack Valenti’s famous “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

:slight_smile:

20

Without verging into GD territory, I’ll just note that this logic has been applied in numerous locations (Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, San Francisco) without demonstration of the alleged correlative relationship. Conversely, many areas enjoy high rates of firearms ownership and liberal gun laws with low rates of gun-related crime. Clearly, there are other influences at work.

Stranger