http://www.usatoday.com/news/acovthu.htm
If safe sells, high-tech advances might create a boon for gunmakers
By Martin Kasindorf and Gary Fields, USA TODAY
Like today's parents, gun owners in the Old West didn't want their kids shooting off Daddy's
revolver by accident. Doting frontier parents helped make a 19th-century best seller out of a
hard-to-shoot Colt .32 that was nicknamed the "lemon squeezer."
Alarmed by a child's death in 1880, Colt's Manufacturing developed the safer shooting iron and
sold 400,000. On the handle was a "grip safety," a lever that had to be depressed forcefully before
the trigger could be pulled. "There was never a child below age 8 who was killed accidentally in
handling this gun," says Garen Wintemute , director of the University of California-Davis
Violence Prevention Research Project.
The old lemon squeezer revolvers are mostly found in museums these days. But with firearms
and youngsters linked in horrifying headlines, ideas for making handguns safer and less
accessible to children have returned to the fore of public concern. Gun-control activists and allies
in government are demanding devices to make guns childproof. Through litigation and state
lawmaking, gunmakers increasingly are being ordered to tame their lethal products.
Seven gunmakers fired back Wednesday. In a federal lawsuit filed in Atlanta, they said that
certain efforts by federal, state and local government officials to impose safety measures are a
conspiracy that violates constitutional guarantees of free trade.
It is expected, however, that no matter how much the manufacturers resent being told what to do,
nearly all will continue to voluntarily provide simple locking devices with the guns they ship to
retailers. Some of these guns are unlocked with keys, some with combinations. But police and the
gunmakers themselves say that smart kids over age 6 can beat the locks -- assuming that parents
are responsible enough to use them.
A few manufacturers, envisioning profits from an expanded family market, also are working
toward the ultimate safe weapon: a personalized "smart" gun that allows only an authorized user
to shoot it.
As with many issues involving guns, the futuristic cyber-gun is engendering controversy. The
National Rifle Association, like most segments of the gun industry, welcomes the technology but
opposes making it mandatory. Smart guns may be too costly for "law-abiding citizens who can
afford firearms," NRA spokesman Jim Manown says.
Even before Wednesday's lawsuit, some manufacturers were rebelling. At first, Colt took a
leading role in electronic smart-gun development, but then angry gun owners boycotted the
163-year-old company. Financially burned by the boycott, Colt suspended its research last year.
Gun control groups aren't unanimous in expecting benefits from smart guns. Josh Sugarmann ,
head of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, says the invention would boost gun sales,
inevitably causing more deaths.
"No one sees smart guns as the answer to all gun violence," Wintemute says. "They will do
nothing to prevent suicide or homicide by their owners. But they can't be picked up by an
assailant or a burglar and used in crime elsewhere."
The incentive to change
Firearms companies are being pushed into exploring next-generation technology employing
fingerprint scanning, voice recognition, radio waves or magnets to lock and unlock weapons.
Incentives are coming in a flurry:
As President Clinton looked on in Annapolis, Md., Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening signed
a state law April 11 requiring all handguns to be sold with separate, external trigger locks. Major
U.S. handgun manufacturers have been doing this, anyway. By 2003, internal locks that use
combinations or keys must be installed in weapons sold in Maryland.
Massachusetts has begun enforcing the nation's strictest handgun safety laws, regulations
issued under state consumer protection law. Among new requirements: indicators that show when
a bullet is in the firing chamber and heavier "trigger pulls " that are beyond the strength of
children under 6.
Clinton is pressing the House to go along with the Senate's action last year in passing a
national gun-control bill that includes a mandate for trigger locks on new handguns. The
president says "13 children die every day" from gunfire. He wants Congress to allocate $10
million for smart gun research.
But Clinton is overstating the problem of young children coming to grief while handling firearms,
says John Lott Jr., a senior research scholar at Yale Law School. Though public service TV ads
financed by the administration depict endangered kids under 10 years old, few children killed by
firearms are under 10, Lott says. In 1997, 54 children age 10 and under died of unintentional
firearm injuries, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control reports. These children
were 3% of the 1,543 U.S. residents of all ages who died from this cause.
Since October 1998, 31 cities and counties have brought suits against gunmakers, charging that
they aren't doing enough to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals. Smith &
Wesson, seller of about 25% of U.S. handguns, settled about half of the suits last month by
signing a sweeping "code" of manufacturing and distribution changes. Among its promises,
Smith & Wesson committed itself to produce a first-generation smart gun, using an internal
fingerprint scanner, within three years. Smith & Wesson was not a party to the manufacturers'
suit filed Wednesday.
Several states have mounted antitrust investigations into whether other gunmakers have
orchestrated economic reprisals against Smith & Wesson. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development, New York, Connecticut and several municipalities are
conducting a nationwide campaign to give government preference when ordering police weapons
to manufacturers that have signed the "code."
No other gunmaker has joined the Smith & Wesson settlement. The gun industry is whipsawed
between government demands for safer weapons and continuing boycott threats by gun-rights
advocates. One reason gunmaker Glock didn't sign the agreement was that it considers a
three-year smart gun development schedule unrealistic, Glock general counsel Paul Jannuzzo
says.
Independent inventors of safety devices chafe at the gun industry's caution. "The industry has not
been kind," says Kenneth Pugh, president of Fulton Arms. The Houston company is alleging in a
federal lawsuit that the makers of Mossberg shotguns have failed to honor a 1997 agreement
licensing the patented Fulton technology.
In Fulton's concept, the shooter wears a magnetic ring that frees the firing mechanism. "The gun
industry is in the business of killing -- period," Pugh says. "They're not in the safety business."
(Mossberg Group president Jonathan Mossberg says Pugh's lawsuit is "without merit.")
When Saf-T-Lok, of Tequesta, Fla., came out with an improved, built-in mechanical combination
lock in 1997, the company thought manufacturers would buy the locks for factory installation. "It
never happened," company spokeswoman Jacquie Cofer says. Retail gun dealers also ignore the
product. The company has had success selling over the Internet and to police.
The locks' drawbacks
Gunmakers doubt that the mechanical safety devices presently available are effective. Many gun
owners like to keep their guns loaded, and most locks are designed so they can't be used on a
loaded gun. That's because the locks immobilize the trigger, so removing the trigger lock could
jostle the trigger and cause a loaded gun to fire accidentally.
Adults with children at home frequently fail to use locks, either because they forget or because
they want the gun instantly ready for home defense. In a nationwide University of California
survey published last month, 43% of gun owners living with children under 18 said they keep
guns without a trigger lock in an unlocked place.
Trigger locks already on the market can prevent practically all accidental firearm deaths involving
small children, the General Accounting Office of Congress concluded in a 1991 study. However,
the locks "could reliably be expected to deter only children under the age of 6," the GAO said.
"Put another five years on the kid, and they learn where Daddy's hacksaw is, and screwdriver and
crowbar," says Paul Bolton, a gun-crimes prevention program director for the International
Association of Chiefs of Police. For instance, the cable locks that Glock routinely supplies on all
its guns are "like a bicycle lock," Jannuzzo says. "I would think a 10-year-old could get a wire
cutter and cut it off."
Fiddling with locks also can lose gun owners valuable time in an emergency, as Glendening
inadvertently showed while demonstrating a Saf-T-Lok for reporters. After the governor pushed a
three-button combination that disconnected the pistol-locking magazine from the trigger, it took
him two minutes to remove the magazine so that the regular ammunition magazine could be
inserted.
The NRA, attempting to fend off Maryland's new gun law, aired a TV spot ridiculing
Glendening's fumbling. Nobody had told Glendening that pushing a single button releases the
magazine, Cofer says.
An imminent advance in combination locks is an electromechanical push-button apparatus that
Swiss-owned SIG Arms is building into a $950 pistol for sale later this year. Once unlocked via
a four-digit keypad, the gun can be programmed to lock itself after an hour or eight hours. But it
can also be left unlocked all the time.
'Smart' technology
To find something better than today's locks, the gun industry is starting to sign contracts with
electronics engineers. Plagued with declining handgun sales, manufacturers have been influenced
by a recent Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health survey of people who say they're
unlikely to buy a standard gun. Nearly a third of respondents said they'd consider purchasing a
"smart" weapon for family protection.
Smith & Wesson has spent $5 million on smart guns since 1996, placing its hopes on the
"biometrics" of ATM-style digital fingerprint scanners. The user of Smith & Wesson's prototype
gun first has to enter a fingerprint into a desktop computer. The print is converted into a
mathematical equation -- computer language -- and downloaded into a miniature computer inside
the gun handle. To unlock the gun, the user places the same finger on the scanner on the firearm.
If the gun's computer recognizes the print, it unlocks.
Other companies are tinkering with voice-interpreting, radio and magnetics. Some concepts
require special wristbands. A pistol being developed by Smart:Links Corp. of Berkeley, Calif.,
won't work unless it's within range of a wristband holding a radio transmitter. Its coded signal
closes an electromagnetic circuit to unlock the trigger. The drawback: the owner can misplace the
wristband or leave it in a bedside drawer next to the gun.
Nearest to being ready for the market is a smart shotgun. Mossberg Group, of Daytona Beach,
Fla., expects its iGun , an electronically enhanced 12-gauge shotgun retailing for $1,000, to go on
sale as early as June. The user wears a finger ring, but it isn't the magnetic Fulton Arms ring. It
contains a computer chip that transmits a factory code by radio to a chip inside the gun, unlocking
the firing mechanism. A similar Mossberg shotgun model without the electronics sells for $300.
The idea of a smart gun originated with Stephen Teret , director of the Johns Hopkins University
Center for Gun Policy and Research. Lobbied by Teret, the federal government gave $650,000 to
Sandia National Laboratory in 1994 to look into smart-gun possibilities.
Sandia researcher Doug Weiss ranked radio-frequency technology as the most promising, but he
gave it a "B" grade. Fingerprint scanning also scored relatively high. But reading a fingerprint
takes time, and a scanner might not recognize a cut or bleeding finger, Weiss said. His
summation: "It may take a generation of smart-gun systems to come and go before a smart gun is
not only common but is favored over a non-smart gun."
Teret remains a believer that smart guns are achievable within a few years. "We live in a world
that's already filled with personalized devices," he says. "If my kid wants to call me, it's my cell
phone that rings and not yours. It's my garage door that opens. There's no reason we can't bring
firearms into the electronic age."
Even if gunmakers perfect a smart gun, the industry worries that customers will feel that "they no
longer need to observe the basic rules of firearms," says Kevin Foley, Smith & Wesson vice
president of engineering. "All technology has the possibility of failing. The bottom line is the
responsibility that individuals have to take."
The upcoming Mossberg ring-and-radio shotgun "does not replace education and the traditional
safety-handling of a firearm," Jonathan Mossberg says. While any unauthorized person finding
the ring can use the gun, "there's a reason there's a hole in the ring," Mossberg says. "You should
wear it."
If safe sells, high-tech advances might create a boon for gunmakers
By Martin Kasindorf and Gary Fields, USA TODAY
Like today's parents, gun owners in the Old West didn't want their kids shooting off Daddy's
revolver by accident. Doting frontier parents helped make a 19th-century best seller out of a
hard-to-shoot Colt .32 that was nicknamed the "lemon squeezer."
Alarmed by a child's death in 1880, Colt's Manufacturing developed the safer shooting iron and
sold 400,000. On the handle was a "grip safety," a lever that had to be depressed forcefully before
the trigger could be pulled. "There was never a child below age 8 who was killed accidentally in
handling this gun," says Garen Wintemute , director of the University of California-Davis
Violence Prevention Research Project.
The old lemon squeezer revolvers are mostly found in museums these days. But with firearms
and youngsters linked in horrifying headlines, ideas for making handguns safer and less
accessible to children have returned to the fore of public concern. Gun-control activists and allies
in government are demanding devices to make guns childproof. Through litigation and state
lawmaking, gunmakers increasingly are being ordered to tame their lethal products.
Seven gunmakers fired back Wednesday. In a federal lawsuit filed in Atlanta, they said that
certain efforts by federal, state and local government officials to impose safety measures are a
conspiracy that violates constitutional guarantees of free trade.
It is expected, however, that no matter how much the manufacturers resent being told what to do,
nearly all will continue to voluntarily provide simple locking devices with the guns they ship to
retailers. Some of these guns are unlocked with keys, some with combinations. But police and the
gunmakers themselves say that smart kids over age 6 can beat the locks -- assuming that parents
are responsible enough to use them.
A few manufacturers, envisioning profits from an expanded family market, also are working
toward the ultimate safe weapon: a personalized "smart" gun that allows only an authorized user
to shoot it.
As with many issues involving guns, the futuristic cyber-gun is engendering controversy. The
National Rifle Association, like most segments of the gun industry, welcomes the technology but
opposes making it mandatory. Smart guns may be too costly for "law-abiding citizens who can
afford firearms," NRA spokesman Jim Manown says.
Even before Wednesday's lawsuit, some manufacturers were rebelling. At first, Colt took a
leading role in electronic smart-gun development, but then angry gun owners boycotted the
163-year-old company. Financially burned by the boycott, Colt suspended its research last year.
Gun control groups aren't unanimous in expecting benefits from smart guns. Josh Sugarmann ,
head of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, says the invention would boost gun sales,
inevitably causing more deaths.
"No one sees smart guns as the answer to all gun violence," Wintemute says. "They will do
nothing to prevent suicide or homicide by their owners. But they can't be picked up by an
assailant or a burglar and used in crime elsewhere."
The incentive to change
Firearms companies are being pushed into exploring next-generation technology employing
fingerprint scanning, voice recognition, radio waves or magnets to lock and unlock weapons.
Incentives are coming in a flurry:
As President Clinton looked on in Annapolis, Md., Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening signed
a state law April 11 requiring all handguns to be sold with separate, external trigger locks. Major
U.S. handgun manufacturers have been doing this, anyway. By 2003, internal locks that use
combinations or keys must be installed in weapons sold in Maryland.
Massachusetts has begun enforcing the nation's strictest handgun safety laws, regulations
issued under state consumer protection law. Among new requirements: indicators that show when
a bullet is in the firing chamber and heavier "trigger pulls " that are beyond the strength of
children under 6.
Clinton is pressing the House to go along with the Senate's action last year in passing a
national gun-control bill that includes a mandate for trigger locks on new handguns. The
president says "13 children die every day" from gunfire. He wants Congress to allocate $10
million for smart gun research.
But Clinton is overstating the problem of young children coming to grief while handling firearms,
says John Lott Jr., a senior research scholar at Yale Law School. Though public service TV ads
financed by the administration depict endangered kids under 10 years old, few children killed by
firearms are under 10, Lott says. In 1997, 54 children age 10 and under died of unintentional
firearm injuries, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control reports. These children
were 3% of the 1,543 U.S. residents of all ages who died from this cause.
Since October 1998, 31 cities and counties have brought suits against gunmakers, charging that
they aren't doing enough to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals. Smith &
Wesson, seller of about 25% of U.S. handguns, settled about half of the suits last month by
signing a sweeping "code" of manufacturing and distribution changes. Among its promises,
Smith & Wesson committed itself to produce a first-generation smart gun, using an internal
fingerprint scanner, within three years. Smith & Wesson was not a party to the manufacturers'
suit filed Wednesday.
Several states have mounted antitrust investigations into whether other gunmakers have
orchestrated economic reprisals against Smith & Wesson. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development, New York, Connecticut and several municipalities are
conducting a nationwide campaign to give government preference when ordering police weapons
to manufacturers that have signed the "code."
No other gunmaker has joined the Smith & Wesson settlement. The gun industry is whipsawed
between government demands for safer weapons and continuing boycott threats by gun-rights
advocates. One reason gunmaker Glock didn't sign the agreement was that it considers a
three-year smart gun development schedule unrealistic, Glock general counsel Paul Jannuzzo
says.
Independent inventors of safety devices chafe at the gun industry's caution. "The industry has not
been kind," says Kenneth Pugh, president of Fulton Arms. The Houston company is alleging in a
federal lawsuit that the makers of Mossberg shotguns have failed to honor a 1997 agreement
licensing the patented Fulton technology.
In Fulton's concept, the shooter wears a magnetic ring that frees the firing mechanism. "The gun
industry is in the business of killing -- period," Pugh says. "They're not in the safety business."
(Mossberg Group president Jonathan Mossberg says Pugh's lawsuit is "without merit.")
When Saf-T-Lok, of Tequesta, Fla., came out with an improved, built-in mechanical combination
lock in 1997, the company thought manufacturers would buy the locks for factory installation. "It
never happened," company spokeswoman Jacquie Cofer says. Retail gun dealers also ignore the
product. The company has had success selling over the Internet and to police.
The locks' drawbacks
Gunmakers doubt that the mechanical safety devices presently available are effective. Many gun
owners like to keep their guns loaded, and most locks are designed so they can't be used on a
loaded gun. That's because the locks immobilize the trigger, so removing the trigger lock could
jostle the trigger and cause a loaded gun to fire accidentally.
Adults with children at home frequently fail to use locks, either because they forget or because
they want the gun instantly ready for home defense. In a nationwide University of California
survey published last month, 43% of gun owners living with children under 18 said they keep
guns without a trigger lock in an unlocked place.
Trigger locks already on the market can prevent practically all accidental firearm deaths involving
small children, the General Accounting Office of Congress concluded in a 1991 study. However,
the locks "could reliably be expected to deter only children under the age of 6," the GAO said.
"Put another five years on the kid, and they learn where Daddy's hacksaw is, and screwdriver and
crowbar," says Paul Bolton, a gun-crimes prevention program director for the International
Association of Chiefs of Police. For instance, the cable locks that Glock routinely supplies on all
its guns are "like a bicycle lock," Jannuzzo says. "I would think a 10-year-old could get a wire
cutter and cut it off."
Fiddling with locks also can lose gun owners valuable time in an emergency, as Glendening
inadvertently showed while demonstrating a Saf-T-Lok for reporters. After the governor pushed a
three-button combination that disconnected the pistol-locking magazine from the trigger, it took
him two minutes to remove the magazine so that the regular ammunition magazine could be
inserted.
The NRA, attempting to fend off Maryland's new gun law, aired a TV spot ridiculing
Glendening's fumbling. Nobody had told Glendening that pushing a single button releases the
magazine, Cofer says.
An imminent advance in combination locks is an electromechanical push-button apparatus that
Swiss-owned SIG Arms is building into a $950 pistol for sale later this year. Once unlocked via
a four-digit keypad, the gun can be programmed to lock itself after an hour or eight hours. But it
can also be left unlocked all the time.
'Smart' technology
To find something better than today's locks, the gun industry is starting to sign contracts with
electronics engineers. Plagued with declining handgun sales, manufacturers have been influenced
by a recent Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health survey of people who say they're
unlikely to buy a standard gun. Nearly a third of respondents said they'd consider purchasing a
"smart" weapon for family protection.
Smith & Wesson has spent $5 million on smart guns since 1996, placing its hopes on the
"biometrics" of ATM-style digital fingerprint scanners. The user of Smith & Wesson's prototype
gun first has to enter a fingerprint into a desktop computer. The print is converted into a
mathematical equation -- computer language -- and downloaded into a miniature computer inside
the gun handle. To unlock the gun, the user places the same finger on the scanner on the firearm.
If the gun's computer recognizes the print, it unlocks.
Other companies are tinkering with voice-interpreting, radio and magnetics. Some concepts
require special wristbands. A pistol being developed by Smart:Links Corp. of Berkeley, Calif.,
won't work unless it's within range of a wristband holding a radio transmitter. Its coded signal
closes an electromagnetic circuit to unlock the trigger. The drawback: the owner can misplace the
wristband or leave it in a bedside drawer next to the gun.
Nearest to being ready for the market is a smart shotgun. Mossberg Group, of Daytona Beach,
Fla., expects its iGun , an electronically enhanced 12-gauge shotgun retailing for $1,000, to go on
sale as early as June. The user wears a finger ring, but it isn't the magnetic Fulton Arms ring. It
contains a computer chip that transmits a factory code by radio to a chip inside the gun, unlocking
the firing mechanism. A similar Mossberg shotgun model without the electronics sells for $300.
The idea of a smart gun originated with Stephen Teret , director of the Johns Hopkins University
Center for Gun Policy and Research. Lobbied by Teret, the federal government gave $650,000 to
Sandia National Laboratory in 1994 to look into smart-gun possibilities.
Sandia researcher Doug Weiss ranked radio-frequency technology as the most promising, but he
gave it a "B" grade. Fingerprint scanning also scored relatively high. But reading a fingerprint
takes time, and a scanner might not recognize a cut or bleeding finger, Weiss said. His
summation: "It may take a generation of smart-gun systems to come and go before a smart gun is
not only common but is favored over a non-smart gun."
Teret remains a believer that smart guns are achievable within a few years. "We live in a world
that's already filled with personalized devices," he says. "If my kid wants to call me, it's my cell
phone that rings and not yours. It's my garage door that opens. There's no reason we can't bring
firearms into the electronic age."
Even if gunmakers perfect a smart gun, the industry worries that customers will feel that "they no
longer need to observe the basic rules of firearms," says Kevin Foley, Smith & Wesson vice
president of engineering. "All technology has the possibility of failing. The bottom line is the
responsibility that individuals have to take."
The upcoming Mossberg ring-and-radio shotgun "does not replace education and the traditional
safety-handling of a firearm," Jonathan Mossberg says. While any unauthorized person finding
the ring can use the gun, "there's a reason there's a hole in the ring," Mossberg says. "You should
wear it."