Recently, I discussed, with a person involved in the development of a smart gun technology, their value as a safety device but also as another eroding force against the rights of gun owners under the Second Amendment.
The 2nd Amendment comes into play the moment some politician incorporates such 'nanny state gun-safety' ideas in their rhetoric. It becomes a 'crack in the dam' of the 'Right to Keep and Bear Arms', beyond the powers of "The Little Dutch Boy" to save it, when any legislative or regulatory body decides to order such devices to be used on all guns - or in the alternative, to outlaw guns not so modified.
The merits of systems to disable or restrict gun functioning to only one authorized person or group is, in my opinion, a double edged sword in that it may disable weapons but may also hinder using the weapon when needed. And, depending on the system, it could be provisioned for government to disarm weapons over a wide area as well as tracking their location for confiscation.
Back in the 70's, I tried a ring/magnet combo similar to SmartLock. In a situation where a 'bad guy' takes a gun from a 'good guy', this safety feature obviously could result in a significant benefit to one over the other; however, the ring like most keys might be forgotten and not worn, lost, or itself pose a physical hazard.
The 2nd Amendment comes into play the moment some politician incorporates such 'nanny state gun-safety' ideas in their rhetoric. It becomes a 'crack in the dam' of the 'Right to Keep and Bear Arms', beyond the powers of "The Little Dutch Boy" to save it, when any legislative or regulatory body decides to order such devices to be used on all guns - or in the alternative, to outlaw guns not so modified.
The merits of systems to disable or restrict gun functioning to only one authorized person or group is, in my opinion, a double edged sword in that it may disable weapons but may also hinder using the weapon when needed. And, depending on the system, it could be provisioned for government to disarm weapons over a wide area as well as tracking their location for confiscation.
Back in the 70's, I tried a ring/magnet combo similar to SmartLock. In a situation where a 'bad guy' takes a gun from a 'good guy', this safety feature obviously could result in a significant benefit to one over the other; however, the ring like most keys might be forgotten and not worn, lost, or itself pose a physical hazard.
Some of these systems have merit, especially when young children, teens, and young adults could access a household's guns. Again, be cautioned that 'anti-gun' mandates to use these could become the norm, intruding in one's home and control over your private domain.
Unlike the fictional 'James Bond', I am glad that I did not have to carry such a modified weapon. -- rfh
Tech Company Demonstrates Remote Disabling of a "Smart Gun"
By
SAN JOSE, Calif. (TheBlaze/AP) — A high-tech startup is wading into the gun control debate with a wireless controller that would allow gun owners to know when their weapon is being moved – and disable it remotely. TheBlaze has covered the topic of such "smart guns" before and the concern by some in the industry
that the technology is not quite there yet to function as it claims.
that the technology is not quite there yet to function as it claims.
But this idea is something that Yardarm Technologies LLC would like to change.
News for Yardarm Technologies LLC
Washington Post- Yardarm Demonstrates the World's First Wireless Firearm Safety Technology for Connected Gun Owners
Albany Times Union - 21 hours agoYardarm Technologies, LLC, headquartered in Capitola, California was co-founded by industry veteran and CEO of the company, Robert Stewart ...
Yardarm Technologies, LLC 1500 41st Ave., Ste. 224. Capitola, CA 95010. phone: +1 (831) 475.1999. email: info@yardarmtech.net ...
(Photo: Shutterstock.com)
The technology, but not an actual gun, was demonstrated Tuesday at a wireless technology conference in Las Vegas and was shown to The Associated Press in advance. It comes at a time when lawmakers around the U.S. are considering contentious smart gun laws that would require new guns to include high-tech devices that limit who can fire them.
The new Yardarm Technologies system would trigger an alarm on an owner's cellphone if a gun is moved, and the owner could then hit a button to activate the safety and disable the weapon. New guns would come with a microchip on the body and antennas winding around the grip. It would add about $50 to the cost of a gun, and about $12 a year for the service.
"The idea is to connect gun owners more directly with their guns, no matter what the circumstance," said Yardarm CEO Robert Stewart.
(Image: Yardarm Technologies)
"Suppose you and your family are on vacation, and your firearm is back at home. Wouldn't you want to know in real time if an intruder or worse, a child is handling your gun?" Stewart explained further of the idea in a statement. "With Yardarm, you could immediately disable the firearm, notify local law enforcement and maintain location awareness. We want the gun owner to stay connected to their firearm, no matter what the circumstance."
The Yardarm system is one of several recently introduced high-tech offerings: the iGun only fires if it recognizes a ring on a finger, the Intelligun uses a fingerprint locking system and TriggerSmart uses radio frequency identification.
The first smart guns were proposed more than 20 years ago, but they failed to take off for several reasons: questionable technology, added costs and concerns from some gun rights about limitations on Second Amendment rights.
Recent high-profile shootings, combined with new technologies, have revived interest. Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit created by Newtown, Conn., community members, is offering venture capital for new gun safety technologies, and President Barack Obama included smart guns as part of his plan to reduce gun violence.
Stewart said his company has addressed privacy concerns about its system, which would not only include live tracking but also a history of where a gun has been. Yardarm has an exclusive telephony network to avoid hackers and spotty wireless systems, and gun owners could "self-destruct" the technology on the guns themselves if they wish, he said.
National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said his organization is concerned about added costs and the reliability of smart guns in general.
"We believe that the technology does not exist today where a so-called smart gun can operate with 100 percent or close to it reliability," he said, "and a firearm that does not function when it is required to is not a smart gun."
The added costs are "a luxury tax on self-defense," Arulanandam said.
At this point, there are no guns that can be wirelessly tracked or disabled, but there are systems that can locate and disable stolen cars. In 2011, one such company, OnStar LLC, came under fire for continuing to track customers' locations even after they discontinued their service. The company reversed the policy after a barrage of privacy complaints.
Last week, lawmakers in California and Massachusetts considered proposals to require gun makers to add high tech safety devices that allow only their owners to fire them. New Jersey has adopted a similar law.
Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the nonprofit Violence Policy Center, said his organization has no position on smart guns. However, he said he does oppose federal tax dollars for their research because they wouldn't impact the 310 million firearms already circulating in the U.S. today.
Donald Sebastian, a senior vice president at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is developing a smart gun aftermarket conversion that would work on semi-automatic weapons, and he said the public may be ready for widespread adoption of smart guns.
"It's been a long, tough battle to get any acceptance of technologies in weapons, but today there's just more general acceptance of electronics in our lives, more than even five years ago," he said. "Also, frankly, this whole stream of mass killings is really making people recognize the need for something to change."
Featured image via Shutterstock.com.
'Smart Guns' Being Developed That Only Shoot in the Hands of Authorized Users — But Is the Tech Up to Snuff?
Last week at a meeting regarding gun safety, Vice President Joe Biden expressed an interest in technology that would prevent firearms from being shot by anyone who wasn't the gun purchaser. Or to give a popularized example, think of the gun 007 was given in the latest James Bond movie "Skyfall" coded to his palm print so only he could fire it.
James Bond in the latest movie "Skyfall" received a gun coded to his palm.
(Image: James Bond Skyfall)
TheBlaze decided to take a look at just what is out there in the way of such technology. The short answer is, there's not much.
Take TriggerSmart, which is a system that uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) to childproof guns. TriggerSmart's technology — which had a patent granted in the U.S. last year and has an international patent pending — has the vision to create "smart guns" where only an authorized user could fire the weapon. The technology also seeks to allow remote disabling, called Wide Area Control, of firearms in certain areas, such as airports and schools.
The Irish inventor of the TriggerSmart concept Robert McNamara explained to Reuters in December "we have a technology that could have helped prevent [the Sandy Hook] massacre." McNamara was recently on Fox News explaining how it works:
TriggerSmart also posted this video on YouTube to show it off:
Published on Youtube, May 9, 2012 by Robert McNamara at: http://youtu.be/EcIpmAaFjGE
The problem is that it seems the technology might not be good enough to entice anyone to buy it yet. Reuters has more on that front:
The New Jersey Institute of Technology has spent millions of dollars in federal and state grants to achieve what Senior Vice President of Research and Development Donald H. Sebastian says is a working prototype of a grip-recognizing gun with a success rate of 99 percent or better.[...]But gun advocates and some in law enforcement officials say the institute's success rate is not good enough."One failure, one time on the range and I would have no interest in ever carrying that gun again," said Mitch Barker, executive director of Washington state's Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. He said guns occasionally jam or misfire for other reasons, but officers are trained to handle such malfunctions.McNamara's TriggerSmart technology though, RFID Journal founding editor Mark Roberti told Reuters, is "very reliable." Roberti pointed out what the technology would need to ensure is that the gun would activate quick enough for the user. It is this problem that Roberti expressed comes up with using biometric data, like in the James Bond gun.
"The problem with fingerprint, palm print and other biometric approaches to preventing guns from being fired by those not authorized to do so is that it takes time to analyze biometric data," Roberti wrote in a blog post.
The research conducted by NJIT for more than a decade uses biometrics called Dynamic Grip Recognition. Here's more from NJIT about how the technology, which is still in development, works:
"This is about who you are and how you do something, said Sebastian. This biometric is the foundation of Dynamic Grip Recognition. The technology measures not only the size, strength and structure of a person's hand, but also the reflexive way in which the person acts. For smart gun, the observed actions are how the person squeezes something to produce a unique and measurable pattern. Embedded sensors in the experimental gun then can read and record the size and force of the users' hand during the first second when the trigger is squeezed.
Russia is also working on an electronic chip that will be programmed with a gun owner's biometric data and would prevent the weapon from firing in the hands of unauthorized users.
The user wears a ring with a special system that triggers power to the iGun system when the ring comes in close range to the normal ring-finger placement on the firearm's stock. When the iGun senses that the ring is near enough, it compares a unique code (billions of combinations) from the ring to the gun to see if there is a match. If the code matches and certain other conditions are met, an electric current from the battery bank actuates a mechanism to unblock the trigger. At all times, the gun's traditional manual safety is still available for use. If the manual safety is "off", the gun may be fired.
ITC goes on to say in a position statement though that it doesn't want "to see our technology or anyone else's mandated by law. Personalized firearm ownership should be a choice based on one's own careful consideration of available options and the proper weighing of risks versus benefits of such technology."
But some legislation will mandate it. A law passed in New Jersey in 2002 will require all handguns sold in the state to have such "smart" or "personalized" capabilities once the technology is widespread enough. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence explains more about what New Jersey's legislation entails:
Twenty-three months after the Attorney General finds that smart handguns are available for retail sale, the Attorney General and the Superintendent of State Police must begin the process of promulgating a list of such handguns that may be sold in New Jersey. This process must be completed within six months.Six months after the initial list of handguns is approved, it will be unlawful for any licensed manufacturer, wholesaler, or retail firearms dealer to transport into New Jersey, sell, expose for sale, possess with the intent of selling, assign, or otherwise transfer a handgun unless it is a personalized handgun (excluding antique handguns and handguns used by law enforcement or military officers).
McNamara with TriggerSmart told Reuters that gun manufacturers seem reluctant to jump on board his idea so far.
"The attitude is, 'We understand this technology is coming down the track and we'll deal with it when we have to,'" he said. "They're concerned about the liability aspect. When you put it in one gun you'll have to put it in every gun."
Featured image via Shutterstock.com.
– Related:
- 'Smart Guns' Being Developed that Shoot Only in the Hands of Authorized Users — But Is the Tech Up to Snuff?
- Guess How Demand Is Going for that Rifle With the Tech That Makes It Difficult to Miss a Shot
- The Firearm Statistics That Gun Control Advocates Don't Want You to See
- The Awesome Adapter for Your 12-Gauge Shotgun that Turns It Into an 'Ultimate Survival Rifle'
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