Personal biometric guns?

[GreenStormCloud]

Last edited Wed May 29, 2013, 07:18 AM - Edit history (1)

I brought this over from the other gun forum. http://www.democraticunderground.com/12623107

It is about an article in The Boston Globe http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/05/17/could-smart-guns-deter-trigger-happy/sHUrBJQ4vmZYfHFKbDlHBM/story.html touting smart gun technology. And specifically about an organization, http://www.fundsafeguns.com , that is soliciting donations to develop such technology.

I am skeptical about an organization that solicits donations for a technology that they will be able to patent and license and make loads of money from, if developed. The normal path for that would be to seek speculative investors. If they develop such a technology a small investment could pay off really big. Donations carry no responsibility of the organization to the donor.

But in general I think a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of such a technology would be beneficial.

At $150.00 per gun, I don't think many people will be retro-fitting it to many guns, but I don't think it would add that much to the price as original equipment.

I don't think fingerprinting technology will ever be accepted. What if I happen to have dirty hands, or am wearing gloves? What if the sensor has gotten something on it?

I am assuming that a particular gun could be programmed to accept multiple users.

I think that criminals will have an easy time removing, or deactivating, such a device. At some point it has to have a single, mechanical go/no-go part that moves between go or no-go. A criminal could simply permanently set the part to "go".

Another company is trying to develop a system that measures your individual pressure pattern as you fire the gun. I fear that my pressure patterns, under the stress of defending myself (possibly while wounded and firing with the off-hand) would be different from my pressure patterns on the range.

Of course, there is the problem of a dead battery, but it would be my responsibility to make sure I had good batteries in the gun.

I simply can't see such a device passing the test of reliability under all conditions that gun owners want their guns to pass. There is a reason the M1911 design has endured for over a hundred years. It has established a reputation for the most extreme reliability under the most adverse conditions, from the tropics to the arctic, with minimal maintenance.

Any personal biometric device will need the same kind of reliability.

[gejohnston]

1. the next logical step in firearms development

perhaps? Powering it may actually be the easy part. Now getting the thing to identify who is and who isn't it's proper owner is something else.

I'm skeptical of these guys too, it looks about as legit as a pyramid "business opportunity".

[krispos42]

2. Remington used to make a rifle...

...that has its ammunition ignited by an electrical spark instead of a firing pin. The lockup time was incredibly small.

Anyway, they used regular rifle ammuntion with special primers sensitive to electrical rather than mechanical shock. So you could get your .223 Rem or .308 Win or 7mm-'08 whatever you wanted, and even hand-load them, as long as you used the electric primers instead of the mechanical ones.


If they replaced the mechanical firing mechanism (hammer, seer, striker, firing pin, etc.) with an electric one, and if the ammunition used primers that were electrically-sensitive rather than (or as well as) mechanically-sensitive, then the idea could work.


So the trigger would really be an electrical switch, and when you pressed it it would give little high-voltage zap to the primer and set the gun off. If the biometrics didn't match, the system would simply not make a spark.

Now, probably, such a stolen gun could have the factory PCB replaced by one that makes a spark without needing biometric information, and it probably wouldn't even be hard or expensive, but it would keep your gun from being used on you in defensive gun use, and the gun would be useless until it had had its innards replaced by some amateur gunsmith.


Really, the only way I could see such smart-guns working would be if each gun had an RFID reader built into such an ignition system, and everybody that could use the gun had either some kind of RFID bracelet or ring or whatever on hand. Or maybe an RFID chip permanently implanted in each hand someplace.

Then I could "teach" each smartgun to only go off when the chips in MY hands was in very close proximity.

I could program the gun for myself and my loved ones, so that only a few people would be able to shoot the gun.

It wouldn't stop intra-family homicides, but it might save a few dozen intra-family accidents a year. And of course it would prevent that gun from being used in a spontaneous spree shooting or a suicide by an unauthorized person.


However, my idea is pretty intrusive... you have to put one of those microchips that they use on dogs and cats in each of your palms, and that's a medical procedure. And of course, it's basically a tag that you're a gun owner.


I certainly don't want to trust a fingerprint or palmprint reader. Sweat, dirt, blood, awkward holding positions, etc. can screw up a reading. Not to mention... it's cold out and I'm wearing gloves!

[clffrdjk]

3. Interesting but

$150 is their sunshine and roses price while it may be the price for an add-on if they end up making a deal with a manufacturer no way will they come anywhere close to that in a retrofit kit. Hell it's $50 just to get a gunsmith to slide in new sights now you are talking major surgery the labor alone will be more than $150. Toss in the variability of the guns themselves and your talking about re-engineering the internals of every gun you hope to retrofit.

Electronic ignition is a cool idea but the ATF might pose some rather large hurdles in the way. That thing about being easy to convert into a machine gun, they take that rather seriously.

Finally you have the issue of trust, I would want to see some serious testing done.

I was not joking in the other thread this will take Bloomberg levels of money to implement and if you want the people to trust it you will need a group like the NYPD to adopt it.

[Eleanors38]

4. Funny, I advised the OP in the BansAlot group to focus

attention onto the new "firearms" technologies rather than on banning conventional and aging firearms. Evidently he is taking my advice.

A few years ago one of the hook & bullet mags asked well-known gun-makers what the new frontier in guns was, and two of them, including Jarrett of the Jarrett gun company of S. Carolina, said cartridge/ electric ignition would be the new wave. Back to the future.