Thursday, January 13, 2022

Technical Gun Stuff

 1/11/22 U.S. News & World Report:

(Reuters) - Personalized smart guns, which can be fired only by verified users, may finally become available to U.S. consumers after two decades of questions about reliability and concerns they will usher in a new wave of government regulation.

Four-year-old LodeStar Works on Friday unveiled its 9mm smart handgun for shareholders and investors in Boise, Idaho. And a Kansas company, SmartGunz LLC, says law enforcement agents are beta testing its product, a similar but simpler model.

Both companies hope to have a product commercially available this year.

LodeStar co-founder Gareth Glaser said he was inspired after hearing one too many stories about children shot while playing with an unattended gun. Smart guns could stop such tragedies by using technology to authenticate a user's identity and disable the gun should anyone else try to fire it.

The objections to smart guns have been: too easy to jam electronically; expensive; likely to drive boutique gun makers out of business; tying the gun to one person makes it unusable by your spouse (unless operated by a ring sending unit); reliability.  The article does acknowledge the jamming problem which this gun has supposedly solved. Police are apparently starting to use it.  Where is not identified.

Of course, if police forces start using them, reliability must have been solved or officers would refuse to carry them or start dying from failures.  They also are not cheap:

Note above that police are testing "a similar but simpler model."

I will believe it when police start using the civilian version.

Also 1/12/22 Forbes:

Cody Wilson is hunkered down in a dimly lit warehouse behind the headquarters of Defense Distributed, the Austin, Texas company best known as the maker of the first 3D printed plastic gun. As a film crew shines a spotlight on him to record a demonstration of his new Zero Percenter desktop software, a vast library containing 11,000 books, films and 3-D printable gun blueprints appears from the blackness behind him. His new software is capable of turning a raw block of aluminum into the receiver for an AR-15 assault rifle in just three hours.

On the one hand, I understand the legitimate concerns about criminals bypassing background checks to make guns.  On the other hand, this may well force the state governments to focus on the root causes: insufficient mental treatment (both inpatient and outpatient) and the unwillingness to treat gateway felonies  (robbery, rape, gang-related crimes).  Murderers are not ordinary people.

2 comments:

  1. I would consider such, once the USSS Presidential Detail, the US Capitol Police, the FBI and the ATF switch to them.

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  2. "A similar but simpler model."
    What -- without the fancy electronics, only the grip safety actuator?
    If this were such a good idea, the police would get all the first production, as they are the ones most likely to have their guns taken and used against them (Case in point, my Uncle, SDPD in 1970).
    Otherwise, no thanks.

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