I think everyone here is interested in making rational decisions. Maybe he, or I, or anyone else just isn’t interested in you making the rational decisions for us.
You’re declaring that you don’t care about numbers, facts, or reasoning. What’s good enough for cops is good enough for you, and nothing anyone could say will change your opinion. You’re not even attempting to address the widely available statistics that discredit your opinion. Who’s plugging one’s ears?
If your decisions are rational, you should be able to justify them. If the best justification for your decisions that you can come up with is “don’t tread on me,” there is a good chance that your decisions are not in fact rational.
And I meant what I said about debate being “trying to convince the other person that they are wrong.” Full disclosure, I’ve been looking at this an issue for a long time and my opinions have been pretty well set in stone. But I’ve changed my mind before and I’d be willing to do so again, if I were presented with compelling reason to do so. Blanket dismissals of my proposals and refusal to address my math and statistics don’t go very far in that regard.
Ok, I’ll try again. You have not given me a compelling reason to change my mind. I appreciate the effort, and you gave me something to think about. In the end, I do everything necessary to keep my guns out of the hands my kids or anyone else. While in use, I follow the rules of safety that have been beat into me since I was 5 years old. I know that there are plenty of other “responsible” gun owners who don’t. I cannot do anything about that.
I stated, if pressed, what it would take for me to implement the tech into new guns that I purchased. I know that if the police put the hours into testing that I cannot, and test in the harshest of environments that I cannot, and the technology still passes their tests. I would embrace it into my own new purchases.
That appears to not be a good enough reason for you, and that’s fine with me.
Brandishing is very relevant because you’re not taking it into account when deciding how often, overall, having a gun saves a life. By failing to count brandishing, you artificially deflate the utility of gun presence and inflate their so-called danger value, te number you’re using on the other side of the equation.
You’ve lost track of what thread you’re posting in. This isn’t a thread about confiscating guns or banning them. This is a thread about biometric safeties.
The question is, does mandating smart-gun technology increase or decrease risk to gun owners overall? A smart-gun and a dumb-gun are** identically** effective in situations where brandishing is sufficient for defense. If this was a discussion on removing gun-carry rights, you’d have a point, but for the purposes of this discussion we can entirely disregard brandishing when weighing the effectiveness of biometric safety. The only cases we need to care about are actual cases where the safety could prevent the gun firing–either accidentally into civilians or intentionally into assailants.
You are correct that the statistics suck, but I’m not so sure that a few hundred fatalities suggest what you think it does. Most DGU statistics are merely “brandishing”. Even in DGUs where the gun is fired (where the “smart gun” device would be a factor), I’m quite confident that most often the defender misses or only manages to wound the attacker. Killing someone with a handgun is, despite the movies, a fairly difficult thing to do.
See above re: brandishing.
As for the kill-rate, I’m quite certain it’s low. But the number of justified homicides was in the low hundreds; the kill rate would need to be 1% or 2% to get the number of shootings. I’ll freely admit to arguing largely from ignorance here, and I’ll defer to those with experience, but I’m certain that I, despite having fired a pistol 3 times in my life, have a better than 2% chance of killing someone I point a handgun at.
Note also that I was lowballing the estimate of the percentage of accidental shootings that could be prevent. My understanding is that it’s physically impossible for a child to fire the gun if he gets his hands on it, which suggests the percentage of incidents prevented could be much higher.
I haven’t lost track of anything.
You’re correct that biometric safeties are irrelevant when discussing only self-defense.
But you’re comparing that benefit to the risk of death – your own vs. others’. And if, in that calculation, you fail to capture brandishing incidents, your numbers are meaningless.
I still don’t follow. If guns with and without biometric safeties are literally exactly as effective in brandishing situations, why can’t I ignore those situations when evaluating the relative safety of smart-guns and dumb-guns? I’m making no claim as to the absolute number of cases a smart gun will save/kill someone, nor about the relative safety of owning a smart-gun to being unarmed.
Ok, then perhaps I have lost track. Could I ask you to restate the entirety of your argument?
The only difference between Smart-guns and dumb-guns are cases where the guns fire.
Accidental shootings kill ~1000 people a year (cite from wikipedia, so not 100% reliable, but we’ll run with that). Lowball the estimate at 25% of those cases being prevented by smart-gun tech, and we’re saving 250 lives every year.
The failure rate of biometric safeties is, apparently, 1% (this seems to neat and clean to me, but it’s been assumed correct in this thread). In order to offset that low estimate of lives saved, we would therefore need 25,000 incidents/year where FIRING a weapon made the difference between life and death.
As I was mentioning earlier, those statistics are hard if not impossible to come by. But again, the number of shooting deaths classified as self-defense is in the low hundreds; we’d have to assume 1% or 2% lethality in defensive shootings to get near the statistic we need, and I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption.
Therefore, universal adoption of biometric safeties (at least, on civilian weapons–police and military are a different story) would ultimately save more lives than it cost.
To the contrary, I think it’s quite reasonable. Many shots fired in self-defense never even hit the target; many that do are not lethal.
Given that it’s all guesswork, I won’t argue this point. But my high level claim is, several folks were claiming that biometric safeties were a bad idea because a 1% failure rate is somehow unacceptable. But because those folks completely failed to consider probability of the safety saving lives, their concerns were ill-conceived; and a strong case can be made that owning a weapon with such a safety increases the life expectancy of one and one’s family, “unacceptable” failure rate notwithstanding.
Deputy leaves gun in hospital bathroom
Cop’s gun stolen from Hoover bar bathroom used in shooting death only hours later
Police officer who left gun in courthouse bathroom suspended
More seriously–outside of the police shooting range, most cops don’t actually wind up firing their weapons with any regularity, if at all. (And I’m pretty sure the fatality rate of police officers on their last day on the job is no higher than on any other day.) But cops are more likely than ordinary folks to have to get up-close-and-personal with assorted miscreants–frisking them, cuffing them, possibly wrestling them into submission–giving said miscreants the opportunity to maybe snatch a police officer’s weapon and turn the gun on its erstwhile wielder. (Whereas your typical intruder-confronting homeowner, say, will be much more likely to just stand well back and yell commands until the professional miscreant-wrestlers-into-submission–i.e., cops–show up.) In fact, I think having their own weapons turned against them is a pretty significant issue with law enforcement officers, so they should have ample motivation to be early adopters of “smart gun” technology.
So, given the uncertainty surrounding all of these numbers, I don’t think it’s really that unreasonable to say “Yeah, I’ll definitely look into smart gun tech once it’s been widely adopted by police officers–they are the professionals, after all”.
Actually, it is, since 100% of cops killed in the line of duty are, by definition, killed on their last day on the job.
See, this is why you get utter complete dismissal from the gun advocates.
You are the one that wants a position changed, the onus is on YOU to provide such reasonable discussion as to change OUR collective minds.
Are you reading the same thread that I am?
Here is me providing reasonable basis for discussion. Here is me providing reasonable rebuttals to gun advocate’s posts. What part of those is unreasonable? I mean, I freely admit that these are back-of-an-envelop estimated calculations, I’d be happy to have a discussion on whether my estimates and assumptions are anything close to reality (I’m fairly confident in them, but hardly fanatical). However, when I try to have this discussion, I get responses like this and this and this, which don’t even address my points and basically amount to “I like my guns the way they are and I’m not going to be convinced otherwise.”
I think without substantially better data, it is all but impossible to determine the impact of smart gun technology on the rate of accidental gun deaths. The fuzzy numbers are what your entire argument is based upon. I would venture a guess that most of the accidental deaths are people pulling the trigger when the gun was not pointed in a safe direction, a number of them suicides where the family asked for and got a different cause for death, general misuse of unfamiliar weapons, and outright stupidity that usually started with “hey… watch this.”
Unless you can determine how many accidental deaths were the cause of the wrong person using someone’s guns and killing someone as a result, you do not have a compelling reason to change my mind. I keep my stuff locked up. Only I know the combination. I don’t need smart guns.
What about the chips in these smart guns that would enable the gun to be disabled when it comes within range of a sensor (schools, govt building, hosp) or whenever the govt feels like it…
If you can get this technology to a 1% failure rate (in the field), and it doesn’t fuck up my guns in any other way, I probably want the technology. I would think every cop would want the same technology.