But then there was East Germany, home to Stasi ...
Basically, when Germans do something, right or wrong, they don't do it halfway...
The people running the DDR (east Germany) were determined that if they were going to be socialists, they were going to be better socialists than the Russians. I don't think they actually did it, but they tried real hard for a long time....
(what they called socialist, we would call communist)
As I see it, the real issue with "smart guns" is the misguided belief that a) they will work perfectly, and b) that somehow, we will all be better off if we had them.
I believe the underlying desire is a gun that will only fire in the hands of the authorized user. Because of their situation, I'd think the people most at risk from having their gun taken and used against them would be the police.
AFTER you can show me a decade of the police AND all the politician's bodyguards, all the wealthy folks private security guards, all using NOTHING BUT SMART GUNS, AND having a significantly less than 1% failure rate, THEN I might consider one.
Semi auto pistol technology has been on the market for over a century. It is completely mechanical (meaning no electronics) and, as a group, they don't work 100%! (nothing does, really). Semi autos do pretty well, and more than well enough for a lot of us, but only an idiot would claim they never have any problems.
But that's what we're being promised with Smart guns, "once it's reliable", and its only going to be a short time, before someone pronounces them "reliable". perhaps those same folks would be interested in purchasing some land on the coast of Kentucky.....