If people assume their guns are safe when they aren’t personally handling them, they’ll treat them unsafely. Leave them lying around, etc. Human nature.
What makes guns safe is the attitude that one could kill you at any time unless you handle it very carefully Anything which degrades that could make them less safe.
And I’m waiting for the story about a guy who tried to prove that his gun couldn’t be fired by anyone else and winds up getting shot with it.
There are also so many guns in circulation withoutnthis tech that criminals will always be able to get them. This is a stupid gimmick.
I don’t view it as a stupid gimmick. Like a lot of new techologies, I might not be interested in it at this early phase, but I might be very interested to see what it’s like a few years down the road. If the cost wasn’t prohibitively high and it was reliable I’d be very interested.
lf accessibility is a concern, I think a “bedside handgun safe” is the better way to go. Here is a review of six of them. Each can be opened very quickly. Technologies include combination lock, fingerprint, and Bluetooth app.
No, that’s great, sure the tech can be hacked, but it might be beyond your average thug. But still, when the gun is stolen, the victim/owner would still likely look to buy another.
Colt actually ran into problems with gun owners when they made efforts to bring a smart gun to the market back in the late 1990s. This device was designed to only allow the firearm to work when an authorized user was wearing a special bracelet with an RFID in it. It didn’t help Colt’s cause when they invited a reporter and a pistol equipped with the device failed to fire during a demonstration. This killed any interest law enforcement agencies might have had in the device and a lot of gun owners were hostile to the idea for fear that states would pass laws making such devices mandatory on all new firearms.
I think this is an example of how a well intended law ended up hindering a smart gun being brought to the market.
A gun safe with a quick open lock is no good if the perp then grabs your gun away and shoots you, or your loved one, with it.
If there is no market, it’s partly because gun dealers will not sell these for fear of losing business from people who not only won’t buy a safer gun, but also won’t buy one from a store that sells them to others. This prevents gradual market development. Horrible situation.
Any magazine that published a positive review would lose a lot subscribers. I’d like for a non-profit — maybe Consumer Reports — to do a test. Or have they?
100 percent is not a realistic standard. Gun safes do not prevent 100 percent of children and teenagers from being able to find a gun in the house. Most are sensible enough not to use that knowledge.
There are two discussions to be had. What is the viability of smart gun technology? Is this particular gun the answer?
The Biofire has several things going against it in my opinion. The question as to the reliability of the biometrics has already been discussed. Another question is the reliability of the trigger. As far as I know it’s the first commercial handgun to have an electric trigger. Another new technology. Also the gun looks big and clunky. Not only is it awkwardly sized it’s heavy. It’s more than a pound heavier than a Glock 17. The Biofire weighs 1088 grams. The Glock is 625 grams. In a handgun that’s significant. And as has been mentioned it’s 3-4 times more expensive. The launch addition was $1800. The future price is $1400.
OK, then, let’s coat the outsides of all guns with ricin needles. Then they’d be REALLY safe.
And let’s not pretend that reliability is the issue. A gun that was completely incapable of firing under any circumstance would be more reliable than the guns we have now. Obviously people don’t actually want their guns to be reliable.
What is the market for these gadgets? People who are unable to keep control of their firearms? People with dementia or some other kind of severe neurological trauma? Tech-weens who just like to collect the latest gadgets?
Cannot think of one person who would buy or want such a thing.
A gun shooting when it’s important that it shouldn’t and a gun not shooting when it’s important that it should are both reliability failures. There are more cases of a gun firing when it’s important that it not do so, then there are of cases where it’s important that it should fire. Therefore, a gun that could never fire at all would be more reliable.
Well, people who like their guns to be as reliable as possible. But yeah, that’s a small segment of gun owners.
I have to nitpick your use of the word “reliable” here.
Guns are very reliable. They shoot when you pull the trigger, and they don’t shoot if you don’t pull the trigger. They very rarely fail, either way.
If a gun owner allows a child to pick up their gun and shoot someone with it, that’s not a question of reliability. That’s a problem of owner responsibility. The gun, unfortunately, will tend to be quite reliable. Sometimes, that’s the problem.
Reliability is when a semi-auto pistol fails to eject a round (stovepiping, for example), or when it fails to cycle properly due to slide damage or dirt and gunk from poor maintenance, or maybe failing to feed due to a weak magazine spring.
Modern weapons are also required to be “drop safe”, meaning that they won’t fire if you just drop it. Revolvers have a transfer bar that prevents the hammer from striking the round if you aren’t pulling the trigger at the time. There are a lot of different designs of drop safeties in semi-auto handguns. Sometimes drop safeties don’t work as they should. I am aware of pistols made by Sig-Sauer and Taurus that both had drop-safety issues in recent years. You could definitely call those failures a reliability issue. Taurus actually got sued for it. I’m not sure if Sig-Sauer got sued or if they just issued a recall on their own.
What you are referring to is safety, not reliability. Smart guns are trying to make the weapons more safe by preventing unauthorized use. That has nothing to do with reliability.
The only weapon I have that is a bit unreliable is a flintlock musket. If you don’t clean a black powder flintlock meticulously and keep the flint sharp, it becomes much more likely to just go click when you pull the trigger. I have never had any other weapon fail to fire when I pulled the trigger, and I have never had any other weapon fire when it shouldn’t.
I think you can look at the reliability of a system as well as the reliability of a mechanism.
For instance, a couple of decades age there was a problem with unexpected acceleration of automobiles, where the driver tried to slam on the brakes and the car surged forward. This was around the time when controls were being computerized, rather than being direct physical connections, and there was a lot of concern there was a problem with the brake controls.
A lot of research went into the problem. And no one could find an error in the brake mechanism that could cause acceleration. And it turned out that the one feature in common between all the models subject to this issue was that the brake pedal and the gas pedal felt similar.
So it was driver error.
Except it wasn’t, really. It was a systematic problem with the ergonomics of the cars.
Similarly, guns are mechanically incredibly reliable, and biometrics might make them marginally less mechanically reliable. But the goal is to make the system of using a gun for self defense more reliable. It could greatly reduce the risk of a cop being killed by his own weapon. It could significantly reduce the risk of a homeowner being killed by his own gun used by an intruder.
I dunno if it’s ready for prime time, and it would work to increase the systematic reliability. But i don’t think it’s wrong to refer to that as a reliability issue.
Wait, it’s fine for the safe you store your gun in to have fingerprint technology, but the gun itself can’t? In an emergency situation with your gun locked in the safe, how is that not the same thing?