I think it’s been repeatedly stated in the thread that an effective deterrent to the unapproved use of a firearm is a good idea (specifically to prevent mishaps resulting from a child’s use) and should not be burdensome to the purchaser of said firearm.
The issue we seem to be arguing around is whether these non-burdensome deterrents as they stand are effective. Right now the options that are provided without additional cost by many/all manufacturers are relatively easy to bypass. The ones that come up as inexpensive on Amazon for example are also rather unsecure. And the ones that most people would find certainly secure (when not compromised by their owners) are often a substantial percentage, if not several times the actual cost of the firearm which brings us to
But no one here has indicated that everyone should be provided a free gun. I do think that @Oredigger77 has a point that there shouldn’t be a requirement that effectively (if not explicitly) restricts gun owners to people who for example own a freestanding house where they can install a personal gun vault.
Such standards feeds back into a long history of parties (including the NRA) being for unlimited gun rights for their group, while restricting the ability of other parties to acquire or keep firearms.
That’s an interesting point. Why can’t guns come with built in safety features? Surely you could build a gun with a built in lock that must be turned with a key before the gun can be fired.
“Today on the LockPicking Lawyer, we unlock this 9mm Taurus G5C’s action in 30 seconds using waxed paper and the tweezers from a Swiss Army Knife …” But really, sure – it’s a valid question to raise (ISTM you’d wind up with something like a lo-tech version of the discussion about designing “smart guns” – i.e. that it’s another extra part to break or malfunction, and that it can then hinder fast access by the legit owner in an emergency, etc.)
The goal of this specific proposal isn’t to stop your gun from being stolen and used by hardened criminals, but rather by children. I do agree that you should go above and beyond that and put your gun in a safe anyways, though.
There is a large difference between requiring people to pay for safety training and safes to own a gun and paying for the gun. I can go buy a gun today for $100 on the other hand a safe (as opposed to a residential security container) that would actually be effective in preventing theft starts about $3,000. With safety training on top of that you would be raising the price of a gun out of the range of every person on minimum wage.
If your goal is to prevent children from using a gun and let’s define children as under 10 then the current POS locks that come with the gun are sufficient. On the other hand most “children” over 10 can pick those locks after about 15 minutes on youtube. I was breaking into houses and cars in Junior High, a bored older kid with time can break into most cheap residential storage containers.
Gun owners need to be aware of their personal situation and I’m not saying that leaving a gun laying around the house tucked into the couch is better than a biometric safe (not really a safe) but to make a legal requirement to increase the price of guns 30x is terrible.
At least when I did it drivers training was provided free by the school. I think gun safety should be taught in school along with how to hunt and shoot.
We already have another thread on the guns vs cars and I am very much in favor of regulating guns like cars.
Why should you be able to own a gun if you cannot take even the basic step of keeping it locked up? I’m supposed to trust someone that irresponsible with a tool capable of causing enormous death and destruction? No thanks.
Why are you defining “children” as under ten? Teenagers take guns to school and commit mass shootings. There is a legal definition of child - its someone under the age of 18.
Trying to get back to the OP in light of @Babale and @Dangerosa 's comments - do you feel there should be different requirements for securing a firearm in a household that has children and one that does not, whichever definition of child you chose to use?
No, the most onerous requirements should be applied even if you don’t have any children. It really isn’t much of a burden compared to the burden gun owners place on the rest of society by insisting they be allowed to own implements of mass death and destruction.
Otherwise we’ll still have lots of kids shooting themselves with grandpa’s or uncle’s gun.
So we come back to standards for what is sufficient security for a household. Which is fair, I’ve suggested several times that we could use some guidance on a federal level. But different people are going to have different suggestions of security. As I mentioned waaaay upthread, I have a household with no children, and have no visiting children or young adults in my household. I use
For a ready access safe, although I do have a larger one to secure long guns and ammunition. I have it mounted somewhere accessible, but moderately structural, although given time and effort, it could be forcibly removed. Would you feel something like this is sufficient, or would you care to share an example?
I’m assuming you read my post since you responded to part of it. Did you see the distinction between locks that are effective against different age ranges? A 17 year old with internet access and two parents that work can open any safe. If nothing else they can sit there and spin a combo dial until they luck into a solution. Safes are not designed to stop someone from opening them when that person has unlimited time. The $3,000 safe I linked to above is only good against hand tools for 15 minutes. Do you think a teenager who wants to shoot up his school can find 30 minutes alone during the day with hand tools?
Why don’t you actually put forward a definition of how you define “safe for children” and then we can talk about which part of the lower class or possibly middle class you are preventing from using their rights while preserving it for only the rich.
Again let’s define basic. Let’s say that someone take the lock that comes with their gun and properly secures their gun with it while storing their ammo in a different part of the house. what have they done wrong in your opinion? Are they at fault when their junior high kid search’s the house everyday after school and finds the ammo and the gun and then spends a week learning how to pick locks and then goes to school and shoots an asshole bully?
no one but the gun’s owner or an authorized user should be able to access the gun. I think your safe accomplishes that.
no one but the gun’s owner or an authorized user should be able to fire the gun. A lock on the gun itself, either built into the gun or locked on, or a biometric scanner accomplishes that.
If I were writing legislation for minimum standards that anyone who owns a gun must follow, those two would be the minimum requirements.
Sorry for the delay in replying, I was hunting down an old thread for you, regarding point # 2.
It’s my post in a thread specifically about digital/biometric safeties and similar options on firearms. I’d suggest looking into the whole thread, but I’ll copy-paste a couple of paragraphs about the current issues regarding the implementation of such things.
Are costs prohibitive? Yes, but that’s a so far . The iP1 mentioned in @Strassia’s post (great info BTW) is no longer for sale, but when it was available, ran @ $1600 -1800 (!!!) for the paired gun and watch, and was only .22 LR. Which is over 4x the cost of a normal, well made .22 Semi-auto. Prices for the next generations have not been released, and at least one is planned in the common 9mm, but prices will have to come down a lot to be seen as not burdensome.
On a note as to if it actually works… kinda/sorta. One, this is a RFID style device, so it pairs over short range to keep the pistol activated. According to the articles, people were able use a jammer to prevent it’s operation with parts costing around $20. My research into the biometric options have come up with zero prototypes, but at least one aftermarket option that was a $400 add-on and only worked on 1911 frames. Mechanically, the only test I found mentioning the iP1 found it to have substantial Failures to Fire (which were likely mechanical and could be smoothed out if it had ever made it to major production) and slowness in pairing.
So it’s an area that could absolutely use more research, both in reducing costs (which is/was burdensome as it stands) and increasing reliability. It is possibly (probably even) a good long-term fix, but isn’t nearly there yet sadly. And since there was only a single example I found of any sort of aftermarket biometric option for existing firearms, it doesn’t address the tens of millions of pre-existing firearms that would need to be bought back by the government or otherwise addressed to make sure the change was nationwide.
It could be done (please read the thread) but I don’t think it will be done due to the financial and political costs involved. If the technology matured (which is a hope), I could definitely see myself arguing for legislation that all future sales of new guns have the tech, but still don’t think we could get a consensus on applying this fix to existing weapons.
We’re getting a bit afield of the OP at this point but assuming your laws were perfectly instituted do you think they would effect the gun death rate much? It’s a shame we don’t have statistics but from what I can tell we might see a 2% reduction in your perfect world.
My post included two options for this second criteria. Biometric or other high tech devices are great and we should look into them more because, for example, police and military could make use of guns that only authorized users can fire. But the other option was much simpler - a physical lock that prevents the gun from firing until removed unlocked with a physical key. That’s not prohibitive in cost.