To expand on my original headline : several recent shootings happened because during an alleged altercation, the victim allegedly made a grab for the gun of the other party. It sure would be convenient if a scuffle or wrestling match doesn’t have to be a lethal encounter simply due to the possibility of one party taking the firearm of the other.
How might a firearm that could only be fired by the owner function? I’m welcome to any ideas that might work in this thread, but here’s a concept I feel has a chance of meeting the design requirements :
Handgun contains a servo motor to unlock the firing mechanism. It is powered by a long life, disposable lithium ion battery. A physical switch built somewhere into the firearm’s grip sends power to a relay that powers up the electronics. There is 0 passive power draw when the switch has not been depressed, and the battery is of the type that has a shelf life of ~10 years. (so the battery lifespan depends only on how often the mechanism is activated)
There might be two batteries used sequentially so that the user is prompted to replace the first battery while the gun is using the second one.
The only method of authentication I can think of that is likely to work immediately under field conditions and not allow unauthorized use are encrypted, implantable RFID tags. This sitehas a few for sale, although I am uncertainly if the tags offered are secured against cloning. Regardless, encrypted tags that use asymmetric key encryption so that the handgun/tag pairing cannot easily be spoofed by even a hacker with specialized equipment is essential for this application.
Sorry, got called away.
I don’t know if it’s possible for long term reliability but so far, it seems to be poor implementation that has failed the tested guns.
Define your terms. How reliable is “reliable”, and how secure is “secure”? It’s certainly impossible to make a 100% reliable smart gun, because it’s impossible to make a 100% reliable dumb gun. It’s also not possible to make a smart gun that’s as reliable as a dumb gun, because it’s one more thing that can go wrong. What one would want is a smart gun whose reliability is only a negligible amount less than a corresponding dumb gun… but what amount is negligible?
Similarly, one must ask how secure one wants the thing to be. One sometimes reads SF stories with smart guns, where a villain cuts off the hand of the legitimate user and wraps it around the trigger, in order to use the gun. That’s going to be awfully hard to secure against, so I assume we aren’t going to worry about that case. But what cases are we worried about?
Lithium Ion batteries aren’t disposable, unless you like throwing away money. Lithium batteries are.
For what it’s worth, it’s not possible to design a system with 0 energy loss, so the batteries would still drain down even if the gun wasn’t used. Also, you need to define reliable. Many gun supporters would say that 99.9% effectiveness isn’t good enough, because that 1 time in 1000 you need it to work could be when your life is in danger.
And if you’re making that argument, then you should be prepared to show that all guns currently on the market are more than 99.9% reliable. It probably wouldn’t be all that hard to make a high-quality smart gun which is more reliable than some of the low-quality dumb guns currently out there.
Chronos is right. A reasonable reliability goal would be to reduce the probability of failure of the unlocking system to equal the probability of anything else going wrong.
Ideally, the probability that the unlocking system fails needs to be less than 1/10 the probability of anything else failing (averaged over the life of a firearm in field conditions) for any given round fired.
I see the problem - that glock is a lot simpler and continues to fire even after experiencing considerable mechanical wear.
As far as standards of reliability and security go, it seems like if the failure rate of whatever security technology was lower than the rate of people who get shot by their own guns after a physical scuffle, that should be considered a success.
Not that potential gun owners would necessarily see it that way. I would guess that, like most people think of themselves as above-average drivers, most gun owners consider themselves less likely to lose their gun to an attacker than average.
If such a technology currently existed and was reliable enough for defensive use it would be universally adopted by law enforcement agencies, which are highly concerned about firearm retention.
There are a number of ways such a technology could be developed and implemented, albeit not without adding significant cost and requiring the user to wear or implant some kind of authentication device, which is probably beyond the interest or means of a private citizen to employ for casual defensive use. I would eschew the use of radio frequency authentication due to the potential for interference, but a system which uses some means of passive authentication could be developed using IR, microwave, or magnetic signals.
A gun which fired 300,000 rounds without failure is impressive, but it does not imply that the failure rate for that model of gun is only 1 in 300,000. It could be that most Glocks are that good, but that some percentage of them are manufactured slightly defectively, and will fail on the first shot, or on the tenth, or on the hundredth. Or it could be that such a defective gun would have a constant 1/10 chance of failure on every shot, so firing it some number of times during quality control won’t guarantee that it’s good. This is why we have warranties, because some percentage of any manufactured device will have manufacturing defects which will cause it to fail relatively quickly.
A point that seems to be missed is that a failure to feed malfunction, as well as most mechanical malfunctions on a standard firearm are easily and quickly fixed using immediate action techniques. This kind of failure does not directly compare to a failure of a smart gun system. Would a failure of the electronics or software or other smart components be immediately fixable in the middle of the fight?
So a failure rate of 1 in 100 for a standard firearm may be more acceptable than a 1 in 1000 failure of the smart gun if it takes a split second and no skill to remedy the standard firearm’s failure, but 3 months and tech support to fix the latter.
If a smart gun fails, it’s going to be in the mechanical portion of the system, and will be about as easy to fix as a mechanical failure in a dumb gun. Blue screens of death only happen with complicated, multi-use systems like home computers-- A single-purpose electronic system can be made simple enough to essentially never fail.
Any authentication system sufficiently complex to not be easily bypassed by trivial methods will have some degree of complexity built into it, e.g. it will have to verify that the input signal or code is correct, that the weapon system is in the appropriate state (ARM or SAFE), that the mechanism that provides for control is functioning correctly, and any other internal diagnostics that are deemed necessary (e.g. battery power status, circuit integrity, et cetera). And unless the weapon is electrically initiated the safing system will have to have some electromechanical mechanism in order to physically stop the weapon from firing, e.g. a firing pin or sear detent that is retracted into the ARM state. While this is not complex compared to, say, an aircraft engine flight controller, it is more complex than a simple switch. Also note that this would be a human-machine interface (HMI). As anyone who has designed HMI interfaces is well aware, human beings are the least reliable and most variable part of any system, and thus the interface requires a lot more engineering than you might expect in order to make it robust and reliable.
This isn’t something that could just be added on to an existing weapon system; it would need to be designed in from the outset in order to make a workable system, and would have to be subject to extensive development testing in order to assure reliability.
