They are being marketed as a safer alternative, to keep bad guys from using them, and not much is being said about, oh yeah, and we (whoever’s in power, or whoever has the tech to do so) can disable them whenever we want. I would consider that a major fuck up of my weapon.
Depending on your outlook, you might consider our current government officials trustworthy, but who’s to say what’s coming down the line.
“At the end of a century that has seen unspeakable horrors from the unbridled powers of governments, you would think that people would understand how important it is to keep federal powers from constantly expanding. Even in totalitarian countries, dictatorial powers did not suddenly appear overnight. The central government’s powers just kept steadily growing, using claims to be meeting some particular need or crisis – until, finally, freedom was all gone.”
(Sowell, Thomas, Ignorance of freedom, Jewish World Review (May 19, 2000)
I don’t think they are being marketed at all. The only ones I’ve been able to find that are commercially available are magnetic and seem to work the same way that Tot-Loks do to keep kids out of cabinets and drawers. It might be a bit more personalized than that but I’m not sure how much you can personalize a magnet.
I don’t think the government has the ability to fuck with the laws of electromagnetics yet.
Bumping this old thread because the DOJ has just released its baseline specifications for what law enforcement would require for pistols with smartgun technology. Many folks in this thread previously stated that when law enforcement adopts the tech they would be more inclined to do so.
Here are the requirements regarding the safety features:
Interesting to note is that the requirements state that if the security device malfunctions, it should default to allow the weapon to be fired. The security should also be easy for an operator to disengage upon malfunction. The ability to determine if the weapon is ready to fire should be covertly indicated, but not emit any audible sounds or visible signals. Not sure what is left - tactile? But the weapon also needs to be able to be used while wearing gloves. Hopefully the indication wont be by smell or taste. The batteries need to be removeable, and when they are removed since the default is to allow to fire then that doesn’t seem very effective.
Here is the baseline standard for reliability:
So failure rate of 1 in 2000 is the minimum standard, or 0.05%.
So as of today’s current technology - the acceptable baseline smart gun is magic.
I’d never buy such a weapon with a disabling chip in it. I suspect those “sensors” (transmitters really) would be hot commodities for home invasion crews and criminals of all sorts (how fantastic would it be if you could put a gizmo like a radar detectors in your car and know that the police wouldn’t be able to shoot you because it would disable all the guns in the area. ETA: Also consider the implications of terrorists getting their hands on them.
The “kill rate” is about 1 in 7 if you actually hit the guy. The chances of hitting the guy seem to be a bit better. Police officers hit their target about a fifth to a third of the time (soldiers fire about a quarter million bullets for each enemy combatant killed).
So a weapons discharge has maybe a 1 in 20 to 1 in 35 chance of killing someone.
There are about 60 accidental deaths per year of children under 14 that we can assume are unauthorized gun uses. the 15-19 group is looked at differently because the rate of “accidental” self inflicted fatal wound jumps at this age, and its not because these kids are more accident prone than 10 or 12 year olds.
The number of justifiable homicides is estimated to be about 500 per year (if the recent focus on cops shooting black men has done anything it has shown us that justifiable homicide numbers were far higher than we suspected based on FBI reported data.
There are some numbers for you. So can guess that weapons are discharged about 10000 to 20000 times in self defense every year.
If the gunsafe technology fails 1% of the time, you have 100-200 instances where someone needed to their gun to go bang and it didn’t. On the other hand we have at about 60 kids who dies form accidental discharge every year, perhaps some of them at the hands of the authorized user.
1% is starting to look like its too high. A 1 in 20,000 failure rate supported by the Department of Justice would make it a no brainer for me but the other parameters (like being easily disabled) probably make it less useful for your purposes.