Timex
4107
I was always taught that you never chamber a round until you are ready to use the firearm, but whatever. My point wasnt about relative safety of different firearms was that the vast majority of firearms have a safety. Even the block has an additional mechanism added to the trigger to serve this purpose.
These safeties, by their very nature, introduce a small additional chance of failure simply by virtue of adding another component that can malfunction.
But we accept them because the additional safety they provide us worth the trivial added chance of failure.
So smart guns just need to be viewed the same way, as a tradeoff. And they need to be measured accurately, not simply crap like, “the finger print reader on my phone sucks so I assume smart guns have a similar failure rate.”
ShivaX
4108
Well, to be fair, a mechanical safety is generally like one moving part that’s mechanical. So the odds of failure (especially in the direction of keeping it from firing) are about nil.
I get people being nervous about an electronic device on something that takes a fair amount of jostling. There are quite a few more points of failure and odds are you can’t solve them by just fiddling with the thing. Most mechanical safety failures are that the weapon fires when it shouldn’t. The only way it could really fail in the opposite direction is if it somehow broke or was rusted on or something equally unlikely. The ways an electronic safety could fail could be a software bug, battery dies or the same things that would cause a mechanical failure.
That said, I think it’s just nervousness with a new technology and the idea that groups like the NRA and their die-hard supporters are threatening people over it, is beyond silly.
olaf
4109
I don’t think you can compare a traditional (or even the kind of trigger safety on a Glock) manual safety with an electronic one, in terms of the impact on reliability. At least not now given current tech. Mechanical safeties are generally just a piece, or a few pieces, of metal. They can fail…but practically speaking they don’t.
The only reason smart gun tech isn’t reliable (if, in fact, it isn’t), is that it hasn’t been mandated yet. If it was, much like safety measures in every other mechanical device in our lives, you can be sure the gun manufacturers would work the kinks out really, really damn quick.
You mean like those airbags that have been mandated for 25 years and have been so safe and reliable that we are in the process of recalling 34 million of them right now?
Timex
4112
Well,one manufacturer screwed up with their product line, so we should probably just abandon the technology and not use airbags any more.
Come on, that’s silly.
It isn’t small, it’s infinitesimal. The safety in the Beretta Px4 I carry is a pretty common design as safety mechanisms go. The safety is a bar in front of the hammer. The firing pin is captive inside the bar. When the safety is engaged, the bar rotates so that the firing pin is out of the line of the hammer. When the safety is disengaged, the firing pin is beneath the hammer. Literally the only failure that could cause the safety to fail in a non-firing way is the levers jamming, which would take several years of accumulated cruft built up from shooting without cleaning.
Some other kinds of safety are a little more complicated, but the mechanical complexity is basically on this order. We’ve been doing safeties for a long time. We know what works and what doesn’t now. Comparing it to smart gun technology is either ignorant or disingenuous in the extreme.
Timex
4114
I wouldn’t say it’s literally infintesimal, as it’s a mechanical part that can seize. This would generally be due to poor maintenance, but it’s possible to happen due to some outside material. A common cause for a safety seizing is cold weather, where the metal will draw condensation and then freeze up. It happens to deer hunters out here if they aren’t used to the cold during a winter where it gets freezing early and let their rifles go from a warm house to very cold temperatures quickly.
It’s certainly simpler than an electronic safety, but the point isn’t that the two are the same.
The point is that it’s reasonable to accept such things because the safety they provide is worth it.
I think the biggest issue that folks have brought up in this thread is the nonsensical law that NJ made stating that 3 years after the first one is sold, that ONLY smart-guns can be sold at all. Frankly, that law should be repealed, as it makes no sense on any level. But beyond that, it’s also absurd to suggest that there is no way for smart-gun technology to operate with an extremely low failure rate, and the idea that it can never be viable if it creates any additional failure rate at all, is equally absurd.
There are many people who want firearms, but do not feel safe with traditional weapons. Things like young children can make owning firearms unsafe, or minimally require going to lengths to protect them that introduce much larger potential barriers to use in an emergency situation, like having to store the weapon in a gun safe.
Interestingly, some of the same folks who rail against the notion of smart guns use gun safes which use what is essentially identical technology for the locking mechanism, from biometric readers to RFID chips.
People who go around armed all the time are weird.
Did I say that?
First of all the Takata recall is just the latest, and biggest in long series of troubles of airbags. Airbags were responsible for killing 100 kids before they were redesigned for kids in front seats, and there has been numerous recalls and lawsuit associated with airbags over the years.
Wiki quotes the NTSB as showing the number of lives saved by airbags from 1990-2000 at 6,377 vs 175 people killed by them. Now ~600 lives saved a year isn’t a tiny number but it also isn’t huge. It should be balanced against the cost. Airbags add about 2% to the cost of a car or about $600/car and more for side airbags. With almost 8 million cars sold last years that work out almost $5 billion or around $8 million/life saved. The government places the value of human life for regulatory purposes at between $7-9 million. So airbags are right on the border of being cost effective.
What I didn’t realize until doing some research is that airbags add substantially to the cost of repairing a vehicle. It costs $700-$900 to reload an airbag and when the passenger bag deploys it generally breaks the windshield. This results in many cars being totaled when multiple airbags are deployed even when body damage is fairly modest. This drives up insurance costs.
Getting back to guns. Airbags are good things for people myself, who never got in the habit of automatically buckling up. But for most people who automatically wear their seatbelt, the safety benefits are pretty negligible. The journey from optional safety feature for high-end vehicles to a mandatory driver and front passenger airbags was pretty quick.
Best case smart guns would save tens of lives a year. The benefits for a person without kids in their house is negligible and the same is true for any parent who takes reasonable precautions to keep their guns from their kid. The example of the NJ law makes me somewhat sympathetic to the NRA actions. Adding additional expense and opportunity for failure to the 99.999986% of the guns that weren’t involved in some kid tragedy is classic government overreach.
Does the current tech help in the case of theft?
Well, there’s no current tech. There’s one $1800 .22-caliber handgun. But it’s a good question. I wonder if anyone has broken down the gun to see if the electronic safety is trivial to remove or whether it’s so integrated into the firing system that it would help with theft.
Timex
4119
In my opinion, the NJ law is really crazy stupid, because it’s causing folks to freak out and not allow the market to work out the kinks at all.
But frankly, NJ’s stupid. It’s their fault for making stupid laws. They can repeal it if they need to. Other places need to start selling these guns, and fuck the nutjobs who say they’re gonna burn down their stores for it.
feanan
4120
The police, military, and security details of our politicians should be the first ones to transition to smart gun technology.
Let them work out the kinks, and put their lives on the line doing so.
Timex
4121
But if I’m reading this correctly, this is only considering the costs of people who would have definitely died without the airbags. What about people who would have been seriously injured, but ended up not being? For instance, in 2001 I was in an accident where I was buckled, so I probably wouldn’t have died without the airbag. But with the airbag I suffered no injury at all. I’m not sure what my injuries would have been without the airbag, if any.
What I didn’t realize until doing some research is that airbags add substantially to the cost of repairing a vehicle. It costs $700-$900 to reload an airbag and when the passenger bag deploys it generally breaks the windshield. This results in many cars being totaled when multiple airbags are deployed even when body damage is fairly modest. This drives up insurance costs.
Yes, this is definitely the case. When the airbags deploy, it messes shit up. I saw this first hand.
Getting back to guns. Airbags are good things for people myself, who never got in the habit of automatically buckling up. But for most people who automatically wear their seatbelt, the safety benefits are pretty negligible.
Is this true? I’m asking this because I honestly don’t know. I know I definitely hit the airbag when I was in an accident, and I was buckled. I don’t really know what the impact would have been without the airbag, if any.
I gotta figure the potential for saving lives would be greater. For instance, a smart gun would have prevented Sandy Hook. And there are a decent number of innocent kids killed each year through accidental shootings. This site puts it at 67 per year between 2007 and 2011, but suggests that the data is actually undercounting the effect. And two thirds of the deaths were preventable by proper storage of the firearms, which definitely could be at least partially remedied by smart guns.
Ultimately, I think that people should have the OPTION to purchase smart guns. I think it’s absurd to mandate that all guns must be smart guns, because if nothing else I would expect the technology to add to the COST of the firearm. The libertarian in me rejects the notion that everyone must buy such a feature. But I also reject the notion that people who want this product cannot even be allowed to because of thuggery preventing people from selling them.
Please, I can only become so erect.
What a brilliant idea.
Yeah, exactly. Fair point that “current tech” is not really a very useful phrase. Sorry about that; I confess I don’t know much about this aspect of things.
I do know that for other types of products, getting the details right in a tamper-resistant way can be quite challenging. Curious what the manufactures consider the scope of problems they’re trying to solve.
Airbags add like a single digit increase to survivability when paired with seat belts, but roughly 75% decrease in fatalities when not wearing them. Think about it the function of both devices is to prevent your body especially your head from impacting on an object like the windshield or steering wheel at high speeds. From what I understand, there isn’t an agreed on way of figuring out serious injury reduction. But yes they do reduce some more serious injuries than just seat belts alone.
Would Smart Guns really have prevented Sandy Hook? For example a Smart gun using RFID device where you have to wear a watch to fire the gun. Where is the person going to store the watch? I bet most people are going to store to with or near the gun. I guess in some cases you’d have to type in PIN number. But presumably from a convenience option, you may only need to enter it once a month or less like my QT3 password.
It provides some safety from your gun being used by somebody who stole it. However, mom was a gun enthusiast and took Adam Lanza shooting often. It seems almost certain that you are going to tell your 18-year-old son what the PIN number is for your guns at the shooting range. So he kills mom, takes the wrist bands for the gun, keys in the PIN number, and nothing has changed.
Even if the number is 100 year and we could eliminated it completely, the cost we should be willing to spend shouldn’t exceed $1 billion/year and I don’t see us having any technology solution at anywhere near this cost.
I completely agree with you the NRA/gun lobby shouldn’t be preventing the development of this technology for people who want it. That said having thought about the airbag example, NJ law, and looked at the small number of victims, I partially understand NRA reacted the way they did.
Timex
4125
If you store the mechanism for unlocking a safe gun with or near the gun, then you are essentially eliminating the entire point.
For something with an RFID chip, you are supposed to always wear it. That’s how it works to identify the owner. You can’t leave it around for someone else to pick up.
That’s kind of the point of the technology.
I have the perfect career for you. You can be the guy that shouts at the countless people who fail to use this product as directed.
You get to call everyone crazy and stupid all day long – except now you get paid for it!!
