No that is not what you are reading
Thats not the same as what you said. This could be 5, 10, 15 years aways.
Where is the monopoly?
Is there any onus on the manufacturers to acually develop such a a system? If the law is dependent on the manuf. developing said system, they can just drag their feet, and expose this law for the soccer-mom pandering that it is.
Not so much a monopoly, as that any manufacturer that could not develop and deploy an equal-or-better smartgun system within those 3 years (either due to not having their own R&D lab or being behind on developing their own system) would be forced by law to license the “leader’s” technology and pay them royalties (which would be for as long as the patent lasts and they use the system, not just 3 years) if they want to stay in business in NJ . Unless you forced the “leader” to open-source the technology (In which case why bother).
Sounds like sending the non-essential worker to hunt the problem bear.
My country has 1/10 your population, but last year well under 1000 murders, probably only half or less were firearm related - and yet we have more guns per capita than USA.
Methinks maybe a (cultural) violence problem, not a gun problem, is on your hands. Do what you will with your guns, Homeboyz™ or whatever will buy knives. Or baseballs bats. Or loaves of french bread (very crusty, hurts the noggin).
And that is the truth of it. 
Truer words were never spoken.
But it doesn’t always work. Remember California’s law that X% of all new cars sold in the state had to be Zero Emission Vehicles? A law which they’ve had to continually rewrite and revise since the automakers not only had trouble building cars that met the original definition of the law, but also in getting folks to buy them?
Sooner or later the blackmarket is going to come up with a “skeleton key” for these things, and then we’ll be back where we started. Except, of course, that law abiding folks won’t have 'em.
Gadarene
It is fascinating to me that you speak of technology-forcing environmental law. (And since you’ve taken the topic there, we might as well discuss it.) Wouldn’t a single law prohibiting general coercion (such as pollution) be equally effective? If not, why not?
Well, I’ll concede that a 90% reduction in auto emissions seems, on its face, to be a dramatic improvement. At the same time, I’m still skeptical. Why not mandate a cure for cancer within 5 years?
In any event, I basically still stand behind my original thought - which is that there doesn’t seem to be much point in passing the NJ law now.
I’d like to verify the ease of launching a bullet. Back in the day, when I was young and stupid, I used to make ‘boom sticks’. Shotgun shell, a nail, and a drill with a corer bit were used in some way on a baseball bat. Used it mostly to swing at watermellons and watch them vaporize. Stupid, dangerous, but functional. Once.
How nice to see the CAA and its Amendments brought up.
There are some things that environmental lawyers seem to not understand about the real world and technology forcing legislation.
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Often, no cost-benefit analysis given as a rationale - the largest problem of “BACT”. Is it technologically feasible to reduce ALL power plant NOx emissions by 99.99%? Yeah, maybe. How much does it cost to do that? Oh, well, that doesn’t matter… OK - so what about the guns? What if the technology costs $20,000 per gun - does that satisfy the provisions of the law? If so, that’s a good way to enact a gun ban…only those who can plop down the dough will be able to afford one. What if it’s only an extra $100? Is that too much, too little, or a wash?
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Often, oversight and decision on when a technology is “feasible” lies in the hands on a single, non-elected, political individual in a highly politicized office (such as oh, I don’t know, the EPA?). And we know that both the Left and the Right never politicize the gun control issue at all…what’s to keep a political person (in the case of NJ, it is the State Attorney General who gets that power) from saying “OK - it exists now. What? It doesn’t work? Gee, too bad…” or “Nope, it doesn’t exist, and it probably won’t, as long as I’m in office…”?
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Typically ZERO liability protection given to innovators who honestly attempt to meet the provisions of the “technology forcing” legislation. Good-faith efforts and honest engineering analysis are no defense for unintended side-effects of implementing mandated technologies - hence, manufacturers being sued over installing airbags which were mandated to be installed. Or power plants with dry stacks being targeted for complaints over opacity in their emissions (which, ironically, the cause of the opacity in this case is nearly 100% harmless steam) by implementing a wet scrubber to meet CAAA 1990. And what do you think will happen the very first time that a gun doesn’t fire when it ought to, fires when it ought not to, or just malfunctions and breaks? Or the batteries run out? Given the average public and the penchant for frivilous lawsuits over anything and everything, I can just see the dollar signs in the eyes now.
Oh, and removing lead really had nothing to do with technology forcing. It was a simple mandate to remove lead. While many automobiles relied upon the lead as the “cushion” for their exhaust and intake valves, the technology was in-use and employed long before the lead-reducing mandates came into play.
That having been said, technology forcing legislation can be put to good use, and can result in successes. But there needs to be a cost-benefit done - even if it doesn’t change the outcome, but at least so people know what they are getting into - bi-partisan or(if possible) apolitical oversight and a decision on when the goals are met, and serious liability protections for innovators who try to meet the demands of the legislation (nope, you can bet that will never happen… :rolleyes: ).
Oh - the article on CNN says that (of course, big surprise here) police will not be subject to the same restrictions on their weapons:
Why not? Why make all of the law-abiding gun owners of NJ the Guinea Pigs? If so many cops are being shot with their own weapons, why don’t they implement this first, so we can have “professionals” verifying the safety and effectiveness of this new technology? What could possibly be the reason for not making police subject to the same restrictions?
Could it be that there is not enough faith that the technology will actually work as intended, even after it’s been forced on the public?
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/12/24/smart.guns.ap/index.html
Don’t forget the brand new black market for regular guns.
We need to require all of the police and all of our armed forces to carry only these types of guns for at least a 10 year period for this issue to be properly discussed. It is an easy matter to require police and army to carry only these types of guns. Regular citizens will not do so, unless it has been totally proven to be workable.
The FIRST dudes that should be required to meet this technology s/b the police. Fact is, a fairly large % of police gun deaths are from their own fire-arm.
Someday, effective “smart guns” will be available at a reasonable price, and that will be a “GOOD THING”. But that time is not now, nor even 3 years from now.
Everyone’s made good points, and I’ll defer to Anthracite’s real-world expertise (certainly there are different sorts of technology-forcing regulations, none of which are perfect), although we might disagree about some of the particulars.
But Libertarian:
I’ve addressed this precise question at length in the thread to which you’re no longer responding (and I did so, I might add, before you posted that you’d no longer be responding, so I’m sure you saw it). You can’t set environmental standards by calling pollution coercion. This says nothing about how many parts per billion of arsenic in the water, for example, is coercive.
And I’d rather continue this conversation on the thread where my original post is located–or, failing that, start a new thread specifically about environmental standards and libertarianism, so we don’t prolong the hijack here. If you’ll do the honor of responding to my last post on the subject in the Lighthouse thread in a new OP, I’ll be happy to participate.
Just something I read a while back I wish to add (paraphrazed)
A gun that doesn’t fire in a self defense situation is not a smart gun, It is the dumbest gun in the world.
Very silly law. Of course, the NJ legislature has forgotten about things called patents. A gun company with ‘smart gun’ tech will have a patent on that tech and then the other gun companies will have 3 years to reverse engineer it or come up with a ‘smart tech’ of their own?
That’s silly beyond belief!
The technology could be 5, 10, 15 years away, but for at least a brief period of time, that company that first has the technology would corner the marked, as the att’y general would mandate that others catch up. I’m not sure how patent law works, but doesn’t ISiddiqui’s comment present a problem?
And as far as making “boom sticks” or ‘launching bullets’, I’m not even going there. I was just commenting that to put a round accureately on target, you need a tube with some sort of rifling. . . I’m sure you guys knew what I meant at the time. 
Tripler
I’m still shaking my head at this article.
100% safe airplanes are too heavy to fly.
100% safe guns are unable to be fired.
100% safe automobiles can’t be driven.
100% safe buildings can not be built.
So it does come down to cost / benefit or acceptable risk management or popular conceptions of acceptable risk.
IMO, we need to remember the technology can not ever be 100% put back in the bottle.