Unreliable Guns Aren't "Smart"

Oscar

New member
An excellent excerpt from the National Review. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but this doesn't exactly make our choice in November seen like much of a choice at all on RKBA issues.

Unreliable Guns Aren't "Smart"
If your life depended on it, would you want a gun that functioned as reliably as your computer?

By Dave Kopel
Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute.

Texas Governor George Bush has signed on to the idea of eventually forcing gun companies to make firearms with internal computers that prevent unauthorized persons from using the gun. While many firearms companies are spending lots of research money on prototypes, legally mandating that only such guns can be sold would be dangerous.

If your life depended on it, would you want a gun that functioned as reliably as your computer? What if the computer chip were subjected to frequent, extreme, repeated stress from gunpowder explosions two inches away from the chip?

After two decades of manufacturing computers for the consumer market, computer companies still can’t make models that never crash. Nor, so far, can gun companies.

For example, Steve Sliwa of Colt’s (a company which has received millions of dollars in federal corporate welfare for computer gun research) was showing off a new model to some Wall Street Journal reporters. The gun was supposed to be activated by a radio signal from a wristband. When Sliwa pulled the trigger, nothing happened. “For a while it worked fine,” he remarked. (P.M. Barrett, "Personal Weapon: How a Gun Company Tries to Propel Itself into the Computer Age," Wall Street Journal, May 12, 1999, A1, A8.)

Moreover, guns that run on radio signals and other electromagnetic communications can easily be disabled by countermeasures. If the criminal turns on a radio jammer, he may knock out every law-abiding citizen’s firearms, as well as police firearms.

Even if 100% reliable, computer guns may be so expensive as to make gun ownership impossible for some people. People who live in poor neighborhoods with little police protection, and who rely on a $75 pistol for defense, may not be able to defend themselves if the pistol costs $150 or $350 because of mandatory internal computers. Since many poor people have no small children in the home, there is no realistic safety benefit from the government forcing them to buy a gun with expensive technology. And there is great harm to public safety if guns are impossibly expensive for the poor.

But since the anti-gun groups oppose gun ownership for lawful defense, they don’t care.
 
That's the whole point of this ... if my computer crashes or fails to boot up or freezes, I don't end up dying as might be the case if I needed to fire in self defense and couldn't.
Share what you know, learn what you don't -- FUD
TFL-flame.gif
 
Any company that manufactures a smart gun
that does not fire when it should or is so complicated to opperate that the authorized used died while trying to activate his smart gun during an armed criminal invasion of his home, will be most very lible in court for
a defective product responsible for causing wrongfull death.

The lawyers should go after not only the firearm manufacturer, but also the chip or electronics maker, the battery company and the state and federal government if the sale of only smart guns are mandated by law.

If we make the anti civil firearms politicians responsable for the consequences of their ill concieved and not though out actions , they would be less eager to force their will upon us.

If they can do an environment impact study
on the consequences of a new highway, they can certainly do a uncessary and wrongfull death study on the consequences of infringing
gun control legislation and victim disarmament gun control laws and the cost in
lives, to law abiding gun owners, unable to defend themselves because of the anti civil firearms rights gun control laws.
 
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