NRA's enemies list.

[GodvReligion]

The point is not to make a perfect system; such is obviously impossible.  The point is to make a system difficult enough to defeat that it isn't worth the effort.  Let's face it, gun-toting criminals -- the type who rob liquor stores and banks -- they're looking for the biggest, and easiest, return on a minimal investment.  

I'm not a big fan of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.  I figure that we're pretty capable technologically, and can make a system that's bitchy enough that it will eliminate most -- not all -- firearms violence in America.  I certainly think that with some R&D, a robust system can be put together.

Have you thought about a permalick feature like on some safes?  If anyone tampers with it it will peramntley lock the hammer and ruin the gun.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Oh, that reminds me of another set of people who could take apart a gun: gunsmiths. Again, guns will require maintenance because of the action and powder residue, and will occasionally need to be repaired or customized, which means that you'll have a whole class of people who will be able to open a gun without being their operator.

Gunsmiths are required to be licensed.

Have you thought about a permalick feature like on some safes?  If anyone tampers with it it will peramntley lock the hammer and ruin the gun.

This is exactly my point.

Like I said, I'm no technician, but I think something could be fashioned.   I think it should center on the firing pin or chamber.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Don't forget the possibility of jamming/igniting the "secure trigger" remotely.  Or if an EMP goes off.

Dude, if they want my (hypothetical) gun so bad they cook off a nuke, they can have it.  :)

[Hakurei Reimu]

If you're getting around the security by hacking the gun, that's what you're going to need. And how complicated do you imagine the firing to be? Remember, the more complicated the sequence, the more prone it is to failure.

The sequence has to be completed by the processor, those are highly unlikely to fail. They're very good at repeating sequences.

Again, how complicated do you imagining the firing to be? It takes only a spark to set a bullet flying down the barrel, after all. If you imagine a sequence of solenoid actions, that's going to drain a battery very quickly.

That's exactly what I mean.

I still don't see the problem? If you're an idiot, you deserve it. There's no way that the gun can accidentally trigger, and any object you leave lying around to be stolen is you being an idiot, not a problem with that object.

A very common idiocy, Plu. The probability that people are going to be leaving their guns out is going to increase, not decrease.

I thought taking a weapon apart is a regular part of gun maintenance.

Yeah, and if you can't follow basic steps when doing that maintenance, you shouldn't have a gun. I'd rather have someone forget to take basic steps and ruin his gun over someone forgetting basic steps and accidentally discharging the weapon, the way it happens with a regular gun if you're being a moron. At least you'll learn to RTFM without possibly accidentally shooting someone.
That's why guns come with instruction manuals. This one will just have "authorize disassembly by holding down button A until weapon beeps" as the first step.

"You can be safe a hundred times, but you can only die once," as the saying goes. You are going to forget those basic steps from time to time, period. People injure themselves all the time on their machines, even with manuals in easy reach, and even when they've thought to do that, they can still forget to do even basic steps like "holding down button A until weapon beeps" — you can forget that it's A that you need to hold down, or that you have to wait until the weapon beeps before releasing button A and move to the next step.

To say that everyone will, first time every time, be able to disassemble their gun for the required maintenance and never have a single incident, or even just a few incidents, flies right in the face of actual experience, where people with jobs are boggled by their computers not booting up because they haven't plugged the damn thing in, even when they boot up the damn thing every day. The people who would ruin their gun because they "can't follow basic steps when doing that maintenance" would include everyone, because everyone is going to make that kind of mistake eventually, and as such you have accidentely made a very good argument against gun ownership in general, being that everyone is too stupid to use a gun and all.

Such smart guns would have to be well and truly idiot proof, but of course we all know what happens when something becomes "idiot proof."

(I suppose if the manufactures would replace such a ruined gun for nominal fee or for free, but I don't know how expensive that could get.)

Secondly, you assume that with the gun open, a smart gun is going to fail by borking instead of discharging. Even in an electronic system, I don't see how you can say this. A firing capacitor that retains its charge can cause a mishap.

Also, all of the "problems" you keep mentioning apply equally or worse to standard class weapons, and every other object in existance. Nothing can be perfectly safe, but it's hard to claim that a smart gun can't be made substantially safer to operate and harder to crack than a regular gun.

I mean; computers can be hacked, and we have entire classes of people whose job it is to try and hack things, but we don't just say "sod it, we'll just publish everyone's bank account information online where everyone can see". Nothing is ever perfectly safe, but I'm not really hearing any arguments against smart guns.

I mean; even "they'd be more expensive" would be a better argument than "but someone could still take it apart if they'd invest 100 times more effort than they'd have to for a regular gun".

You have no basis of saying that hacking a gun would be "100 times more effort." The principle use of smart guns is to prevent accidental firings (firings where the finger is not on the trigger) and prevent getting shot by your own gun if a criminal rips it out of your hand. That makes smart guns safer than the alternative.

But you can still accidently shoot yourself in the foot with a smart gun, and you can still shoot someone you didn't mean to shoot with a smart gun, either in the heat of the moment or through misidentifying them. Prevent crime or massacres? No. Most criminals and mainaics would use their own gun, either fairly bought and/or hacked. Or imported illegally, in which case all bets are off.

And yes, having a class of people who can open a gun without the usual security means or biometrics is a serious problem, because what happens [s:3t0vegib]if[/s:3t0vegib] when the secrets of the trade get out on the internet? Let's say that a gunsmith will be able to disable the security of a smart gun by feeding in a certain sequence of numbers through a cable. That number is going to be standard for every gun of that model (otherwise, it would defeat the purpose), which means if you get that sequence, then some inexpensive computer parts give you the ability to hack every smart gun of that model in the world, and hacked guns of this model will appear on the black market. They'll be a fair target for stealing and fencing. Once that number gets out, the security of every gun of that model is comprimised.

So, no. Smart guns are not a panacea. They will not solve all the problems of guns, though they probably will curtail gun accidents and make gun crime harder. There's still a hairless ape pulling the trigger.

And no, your computer analogy is a red herring. The consequences of a hacked smart gun are a bit more serious than that of a hacked computer. Of course, everything is relative — if you hack NORAD computers you can cause the death of every living being on the earth, but to first approximation, nobody is going to die from a hacked bank account. Besides, computers have earned their keep, but the whole argument with guns is that it's not so clear-cut with guns that they have earned theirs. It's like the choice between low tar and unfiltered cigarettes: if your going to be stuck smoking a cig, then low tar is the way to go, but that doesn't mean smoking either is a good idea.

And yes, smart guns will be more expensive, but I thought that went without saying.

[Plu]

I'm having trouble understanding what your problem is. You seem to be comparing smart weapons to a hypothetical utopia where guns do not exist, and are basing your arguments on that? That seems rather pointless when the idea is to compare them to the current situation, where all of your arguments apply just as well or worse for the current situation.

You have no basis of saying that hacking a gun would be "100 times more effort."

It is by default. It literally takes 0 effort to hack a regular gun. 100 times is even an understatement. But seems besides the point.

[Hakurei Reimu]

Gunsmiths are required to be licensed.

Disabling a gun's security only requires the KNOWLEDGE of a gunsmith, not the LICENSE of a gunsmith. And not even the complete knowledge of a gunsmith, just a subset of it.

Like I said, I'm no technician, but I think something could be fashioned.   I think it should center on the firing pin or chamber.

The choices for permalicks in a gun are limited, owing to the fact that it has to fit into a portable, rugged, aimable package. The devil is in the details. While it's fine to hold hope that some technical breakthrough will be able to solve some problem, it's still technology, which will have imperfections, compromises and failure modes. Technology has to earn its keep, and there's no guarantee that smart guns will do so.

An interlock can really only defeat casual means to get around them. A determined individual can do so with enough effort, and most means of defeating interlocks are pretty simple and just need a bit of planning.

Once again, correct, except I don't think defeating them has to be so easy as you think.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to defeat most "professional" commercial security. Especially if it's commercial, as they'll be standardized and as such all have the same vulnerabilities. I do not hold much hope that a smart gun's security will be as secure as claimed, given the very poor track record commercial security has been traditionally.

Here's another idea:  what if opening up the gun to disable the solenoid activated a "kill" file in the OS, so that no electrical impulse would be sent to the firing pin?

The electrical impulse can be delivered by a dumb circuit just as easily as by the factory issue IC OS. It is also rare that an electronic device cannot be restored to factory settings by some means, and once that happens, the gun is the criminal's as if they bought it themselves.

The first thing a criminal is going to do is NOT going to be getting out his Phillips-head. Prior to hacking the gun, he's to go online and figure out the specific weaknesses in his particular model, and there are always weaknesses.

Well, that was just a little stab at levity, y'know?  A little creative flourish.

The point is not to make a perfect system; such is obviously impossible.  The point is to make a system difficult enough to defeat that it isn't worth the effort.  Let's face it, gun-toting criminals -- the type who rob liquor stores and banks -- they're looking for the biggest, and easiest, return on a minimal investment.

And a gun is such a huge advantage in that regard that they'll likely own one outright or go get one through hacking one themselves, through the black market of hacked smart guns, or foreign non-smart guns.

I'm not a big fan of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.  I figure that we're pretty capable technologically, and can make a system that's bitchy enough that it will eliminate most -- not all -- firearms violence in America.  I certainly think that with some R&D, a robust system can be put together.

A commercial smart gun is going to be a compromise between the security you desire and the user friendliness that the typical owner expects. These are conflicting goals. To be worth while, a smart gun has to be easy to use and maintain as a regular, non-smart gun, or gun owners are going to be up in arms, if you'll forgive the phrase. The gun has to be able to perform its security checks as fast as a typical user can whip it out and pull the trigger, as easy to maintain as a regular gun —including not bork out because you miss a step in opening the gun— and not eat its battery so fast that you don't find yourself with a dead battery when you need it most.

For the purpose of making killing people dead easy, dumb guns are the pinacle of elegance. They're about as simple as you can get for their intended task. A smart gun adds interlocks and complications that will make it more expensive than the corresponding regular gun. A dumb gun —once unloaded— is something you can just take apart and clean; a smart gun would have at least one additional step that you skip at your financial (and perhaps bodily) peril. Even if a smart gun can be made extremely user-friendly, that will come at the cost of its security which will make it easier to hack, and the knowledge of how to hack one of these guns will be common once they've been floating around a while. Where there is a desire for hacked guns and gun hacking services, there will be a market even if that market is black. To make them as both user-friendly as safe as you desire would probably make them so expensive as to be practically banned.

So, no. Smart guns will not make gun crime impossible, because criminals will find their way around the security. The principle good of smart guns is to prevent misfirings (rather than bad targets) and being killed with one's own gun.

[Hakurei Reimu]

I'm having trouble understanding what your problem is. You seem to be comparing smart weapons to a hypothetical utopia where guns do not exist, and are basing your arguments on that?

No, I'm basing the argument against the position that smart guns will somehow make it difficult for your average criminal to use one. Yes, smart guns will easily defeat a casual criminal, but a determined criminal underground can easily flood the streets with hacked smart weapons indistinguishable from the dumb guns that the smart guns would replace. Because guns give you THAT much advantage.

[GodvReligion]

I'm having trouble understanding what your problem is. You seem to be comparing smart weapons to a hypothetical utopia where guns do not exist, and are basing your arguments on that?

No, I'm basing the argument against the position that smart guns will somehow make it difficult for your average criminal to use one. Yes, smart guns will easily defeat a casual criminal, but a determined criminal underground can easily flood the streets with hacked smart weapons indistinguishable from the dumb guns that the smart guns would replace. Because guns give you THAT much advantage.

You make a good point, smartguns would be like locking your door.  The casual criminal comes up and tries to find an easy path in, but leaves when he can't find one whereas serial burglar will break in and empty your home.  Makes a lot of sense.

[Brian37]

Legalities be damned.

The bottom line is that sane people don 't mind others owning guns. But to ignore the amount of gun death is BAT FUCKING SHIT INSANE!

The only reason we have this problem is because of MONEY, and an industry that does not give one fuck about who they sell to or the amount they sell.

[GodvReligion]

Legalities be damned.

The bottom line is that sane people don 't mind others owning guns. But to ignore the amount of gun death is BAT FUCKING SHIT INSANE!

The only reason we have this problem is because of MONEY, and an industry that does not give one fuck about who they sell to or the amount they sell.

No sir, the reason we have this issue is because people who are willing to do the things that started the gun debate this time are more bat shit crazy than people that feel the gun death's mean nothing.

[Brian37]

What the fuck?

I want LESS gun death, not more.

Please tell me what your solution is.

[GodvReligion]

What the fuck?

I want LESS gun death, not more.

Please tell me what your solution is.

Where did you get that I want more gun death?  I don't think it's a money issue. i do think that the sales need to be more regulated and that anyone with serious mental disorders or violent tendencies don't need to be holding guns.  The issue I have with any ban is that it failed the first time.  If it had worked and we had this issue now, then I would be all for banning them.  There must be some sort of middle ground that we can all agree to here.  I'll have to think about it some more and see what's up.

[Brian37]

What the fuck?

I want LESS gun death, not more.

Please tell me what your solution is.

Where did you get that I want more gun death?  I don't think it's a money issue. i do think that the sales need to be more regulated and that anyone with serious mental disorders or violent tendencies don't need to be holding guns.  The issue I have with any ban is that it failed the first time.  If it had worked and we had this issue now, then I would be all for banning them.  There must be some sort of middle ground that we can all agree to here.  I'll have to think about it some more and see what's up.

I wasn't implying you want more gun death.

But it IS a money issue.

No matter what business you own, your objective is to make money and expand your market. Gun makers are no different. They are not about to vote for a stable society. More crime more fear, more fear more gun sales. They have the money to pump into the NRA to scare the shit out of the public.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Disabling a gun's security only requires the KNOWLEDGE of a gunsmith, not the LICENSE of a gunsmith. And not even the complete knowledge of a gunsmith, just a subset of it.

Your objection was that standard gun care involves turning guns over to gunsmiths, who must be licensed if they are operating a business.  

Additionally, without knowing what the security system is, it may well be that it can be limited (digitally) to licensed gunsmiths.

The choices for permalicks in a gun are limited, owing to the fact that it has to fit into a portable, rugged, aimable package. The devil is in the details. While it's fine to hold hope that some technical breakthrough will be able to solve some problem, it's still technology, which will have imperfections, compromises and failure modes. Technology has to earn its keep, and there's no guarantee that smart guns will do so.

Of course.  This is exactly why I'm arguing for research and development to bring this sort of thing to a usable state.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to defeat most "professional" commercial security. Especially if it's commercial, as they'll be standardized and as such all have the same vulnerabilities. I do not hold much hope that a smart gun's security will be as secure as claimed, given the very poor track record commercial security has been traditionally.

Perhaps, perhaps not.

The electrical impulse can be delivered by a dumb circuit just as easily as by the factory issue IC OS.

Not if the signal contains information.

 

It is also rare that an electronic device cannot be restored to factory settings by some means, and once that happens, the gun is the criminal's as if they bought it themselves.

Can that not be designed into the system?  Is that an technical  impossibility?  

And a gun is such a huge advantage in that regard that they'll likely own one outright or go get one through hacking one themselves, through the black market of hacked smart guns, or foreign non-smart guns.

So, if criminals are so desperate to get guns, do you think they'll be deterred by another law?  I don't.  Fact is, if someone has already decided to break the laws against robbery, rape, or murder, I don't think they'll be put off by a law forbidding the possession of a weapon.  Recent recidivism stats don't parse out how many recidivists went back in for a FiP charge, but in 1998 about one in three went back to prison for FiP[/urll]  (Forgive the lack of formatting, it's a gov't archive and not a current page).  Clearly, even after having done hard time, felons were not too worried about getting a gun.  Furthermore, according to the same report, about 70% of those guns were sourced outside licensed dealers -- either family members, or street dealers.

So, the answer of passing a law outlawing this or that type of gun will have the least impact on the demographic we most want to affect.

That is why I think we have to seek technological answers.

A commercial smart gun is going to be a compromise between the security you desire and the user friendliness that the typical owner expects. These are conflicting goals. To be worth while, a smart gun has to be easy to use and maintain as a regular, non-smart gun, or gun owners are going to be up in arms, if you'll forgive the phrase. The gun has to be able to perform its security checks as fast as a typical user can whip it out and pull the trigger, as easy to maintain as a regular gun —including not bork out because you miss a step in opening the gun— and not eat its battery so fast that you don't find yourself with a dead battery when you need it most.

Of course, and that's another reason the research needs to get done.  As far as battery strength goes, why cannot some of the kinetic energy that is produced by the act of firing be harnessed and routed back into a rechargeable battery?

For the purpose of making killing people dead easy, dumb guns are the pinacle of elegance. They're about as simple as you can get for their intended task. A smart gun adds interlocks and complications that will make it more expensive than the corresponding regular gun. A dumb gun —once unloaded— is something you can just take apart and clean; a smart gun would have at least one additional step that you skip at your financial (and perhaps bodily) peril. Even if a smart gun can be made extremely user-friendly, that will come at the cost of its security which will make it easier to hack, and the knowledge of how to hack one of these guns will be common once they've been floating around a while. Where there is a desire for hacked guns and gun hacking services, there will be a market even if that market is black. To make them as both user-friendly as safe as you desire would probably make them so expensive as to be practically banned.

Again, I think research will put paid to your pessimism.  Moore's law made computers cheaper and far more effective  than anyone dared envision when the IC was invented.  In 1903 we made the first powered flight, achieving 12 seconds of flight at a speed of seven miles an hour for a distance of 120 feet.  Sixty-three years later, we sent three men 240,000 miles to the moon at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour.

I do not mind the additional expenses imposed on gun owners for smart guns, myself.  I think society has a right to act for the safety of all its members while at the same time preserving the rights that are ensconced in our Constitution.  I understand that they aren't (and now it's my turn for the ghastly pun) a magic bullet that will solve firearms crime.  But they would certainly do much more than any more hypothetical laws, with the added benefit of doing no violence to the Constitution.

So, no. Smart guns will not make gun crime impossible, because criminals will find their way around the security. The principle good of smart guns is to prevent misfirings (rather than bad targets) and being killed with one's own gun.

I never did argue that they would render firearms crime "impossible".  Please don't impute arguments to me which I haven't made.

Thanks for the civil tone of discussion here, too.  I appreciate good, hard questions offered without drama.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Legalities be damned.

The bottom line is that sane people don 't mind others owning guns. But to ignore the amount of gun death is BAT FUCKING SHIT INSANE!

The only reason we have this problem is because of MONEY, and an industry that does not give one fuck about who they sell to or the amount they sell.

I absolutely agree.

I'm a member on a music forum which has an exceptionally large number of gun-owning conservative guys who'd probably drive you up the damned wall.  I've had this discussion with them too, and I find it startling that they find 9,000 gun murders per year acceptable, and reject even the principle of smart guns.  

But the fact of the matter is that they will either accept smart guns, or they will see the 2A eliminated entirely, eventually.  The tides of sentiment will naturally assure that mass murders stick in the memory while the good guy drawing on a mall-shooter gets buried in the mists of time.  

That alone assures that, unless action is taken to restrict unauthorized use, and taken to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally disturbed, then what they fear most -- the general outlawing of firearms for all but a few private citizens -- will happen.