Smart gun or Smart scam?

That article claimed 42.8% of gun owners surveyed said they would buy one that prevents unauthorized use.

I was under the impression that no one was in favor of this technology. Was I wrong or is this piece flat out dis-honest?
 
I saw a .22 "Smart" gun in a gun store a year +/- ago. I believe it was ~ $1500, and about the size of a Ruger LCs9.
The guy said they weren't selling well and didn't always enable quickly.
DUH!

Obviously the poll didn't tell the polled people how much extra it was going to cost. More than buying the gun plus an Mac laptop.
 
Well, that's 42.8% of a sample of 3,949 people, or 1,690 responding to a internet survey. There is no way to know if these people own a single gun and shoot 100 rounds a year, or are cops, or are experienced competitive shooters who run 60,000 rounds a year, or collectors, or what. The only one I have ever seen, not in person, but online is the Armitex .22LR.

The .22 caliber handgun uses a radio frequency enabled stopwatch to fire the weapon. Owners enter a PIN into the stopwatch which then sends a signal to the gun allowing it to be fired. The gun also disables if it is more than ten inches from the watch.

How long does it take you to enter a pin # to your phone?
 
Like many things we now take for granted, it's getting off to a slow start and the technology has a long way to go.
But if it ever gets perfected, it would be welcome to a lot of gun owners.
It would definitely take a load of worry off over lost and stolen guns.
 
Internet surveys are notoriously unreliable. If not dishonest, at least so poorly controlled as to be useful only for lending a pseudo-scientific cachet to whatever opinion is being pushed by the user.

How many calls have we seen on this forum to load a CNN poll or similar? That's why internet polls are trash.

Don't get me wrong, I'll respond to the call and bias the poll, too, but only because the game needs to be played on all fronts.

As far as lost or stolen guns go, a replacement circuit board will be reverse-engineered and available on the stolen gun market about 2 days after the commercial models hit the shelves, to be followed by a genuine factory replacement in order to a.) allow for sales of smart guns, and b.) add a profit line to the balance sheet. Any claims made beyond immediate use by the owner are fiction.
 
Let's see a center fire smart gun go just 20,000 rounds..... and pass the California drop test, which even the Raven, Hi-Point and Keltec can do.
 
We should all know by now that social studies and statistics can be funny things. Polls and studies can be rigged to push particular outcomes. Whether it's counting suicides and accidents as "gun violence" or whatever anti-gun politicians have been citing on the campaign trail lately, it's worth explaining this point to friends and relatives. On this particular issue, I can tell you from personal experience and with no complicated metrics that 0% of gun owners that I know want anything to do with this "smart gun" technology.

BTW, it's also worth being weary of adjectives like "smart", "free", "safe", "affordable", etc. when placed in front of anything attached to government at any level. :rolleyes:
 
My own surveys show that 89.3% of polls prove whatever the person paying for the poll wants to prove, and that 58.5% of reported polls are, like mine, made up out of whole cloth.

Jim
 
A: No
Once we start talking about guns being smart implicitly we start acknowledging
that they can be or even do certain things.
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I respectively disagree. The implied meaning of "smart gun" is a gun that can only be fired by an authorized user. For better or worse, the phrase is already embedded in our lexicon:

https://www.nraila.org/issues/smart-gunspersonalized-firearms/

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltech...-obamas-action-create-a-market-for-smart-guns

http://fortune.com/2015/04/22/smart-guns-theyre-ready-are-we/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_gun
 
Build a "smart gun." Then lobby for laws that require "smart guns." If you own the patents, you get rich. No one doing this cares one iota about guns, or your rights- or whether the guns actually work.

Poll: Would you buy a gun that prevents unauthorized use? Yes or no.
Who wouldn't?-IF the technology worked reliably. It doesn't.
But the question doesn't address that, does it?
 
Build a "smart gun." Then lobby for laws that require "smart guns."
Click to expand...

Thanks for bringing this point up again. For anyone that's forgotten, Maryland and I think CA have laws on the books stating that ONLY smart guns are to be sold in those states three years (the Maryland law says three years) after the first smart gun goes on sale.

I don't know if this law has been repealed or changed. Certainly someone, somewhere is selling smart guns.
 
Every electronic device I have ever owned has worked perfectly - right up until the time it stopped working. When they stop working they seem to do so suddenly and without any advanced warning whatsoever.

Sure I'd be happy to trust my life to a weapon that required an electronic device to enable me to use it, that made the weapon three times as expensive -
NOT.
 
Bill DeShivs wrote:

Build a "smart gun." Then lobby for laws that require "smart guns." If you own the patents, you get rich. No one doing this cares one iota about guns, or your rights- or whether the guns actually work.
Click to expand...

Gold star but I should add that it isn't just the patent holder. Mandating products can make a lot of bank for parties in position to cash in. As a wise professor once told me, "when government can determine the fortunes of men, the men who can will always line up to use it". As a clever legislator once told me, "every bill is a jobs bill".

pblanc wrote:

Every electronic device I have ever owned has worked perfectly - right up until the time it stopped working. When they stop working they seem to do so suddenly and without any advanced warning whatsoever.
Click to expand...

There is an engineering philosophy that the more things that can go wrong in a device, the more likely it becomes that a thing will go wrong in that device. Inserting extraneous processes in a product designed to save your life in an emergency is a terrible idea. This technology is the Smith and Wesson lock on steroids.
 
Hmm. a smart gun, I would be happy to carry one around if it knew how to make a good cup of coffee or balance my check book. No, coffee? Then I will just have to stick with my Mr. Coffee machine and dumb CZ 75 P-01, but it can speak English, French, Italian and German, all the NATO languages as well as Czech.

Stay safe.
Jim
 
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