6 ms·

How an Idea to Develop a Safer, Smart Gun Backfired

38 points by dpflan 11y ago

minikites 11y ago
The safest "gun" is not owning a gun. There's an abundance of studies showing that gun ownership tracks with an increase in home injury/death. The idea that having a gun protects you from home intrusion is a red herring because home intrusions almost never happen and the chance of an accident is possible every day there is a gun around. Private firearm ownership should be illegal.
- pmalynin 11y ago
  The safest way to ski is not to ski. The safest way to sky-dive is not to sky-dive. The safest way to have sex is not to have sex (I like the last one the most as it is touted by various groups). That logic is absolutely broken.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    To be fair, ski enthusiasts don't spend a lot of words on how skiing can enhance your personal safety.
  - otterley 11y ago
    What's broken about the logic? All of those things are logically consistent. If you mean that foregoing experiences for safety's sake isn't your cup of tea, that's one thing; but claiming it's logically broken is simply false.
    - pmalynin 11y ago
      It's not logically consistent. You're claiming that p implies not p
      - rwjwjuwjudf 11y ago
        Oh come on, the claim is that safe (p) <-> !p, which is a bit different. Attack the actual claim.
        woodman 11y ago
        @pmalynin, you forgot the safety variable. p | q | p ∧ q → ¬q --+---+----------- T | T | F You can't be safe and own a gun. T | F | T You can be safe and not own a gun. F | T | T You can be unsafe and own a gun. F | F | T You can be unsafe and not own a gun. @rwjwjuwjudf, logical implication is correct - logical equivalence leads to this trainwreck: p | q | p ∧ q ↔ ¬q --+---+----------- T | T | F You can't be safe and own a gun. T | F | F You can't be safe and not own a gun. F | T | T You can be unsafe and own a gun. F | F | F You can't be unsafe and not own a gun.
        rwjwjuwjudf 11y ago
        Nice analysis! I was thinking safety is a function equivalent to negation. But I agree if safety and gun ownership are separate variables. p | safe (p) | ¬p | safe (p) ↔ ¬p --+----------+----+-------------- T | F | F | Owning a gun is unsafely owning a gun. F | T | T | Not owning a gun is safely owning a gun. I think this is the original reason why it's confusing, because the sentence "not owning a gun is safely owning a gun" is highly unintuitive. There is a contradiction because safely owning it conflicts with not owning it. edit: I think we can legitimately fix the confusing sentence to read "not owning a gun is safely not owning a gun".
        woodman 11y ago
        Safety as a negation would be an xor operation, which leads to the wacky logic. Both of you are right though, I was probably far too generous in treating @minikites's use of the word "is" as a logical implication instead of the logical equivalence that you suggested. The resulting logic leads to conclusions that both support and refute the likely intent of the original statement. So either the logic is broken or the intent is :) If only @minikites had used the word "maybe" instead of "is"... the weaker position would have been supported with a logically consistent argument.
  - fugue12 11y ago
    No it's not, it is perfectly self-evident that you eliminate all risks involved in doing a thing by not doing it. I'll grant you that this is an boring and unhelpful way of minimising risk, but not an invalid one.
    - pmalynin 11y ago
      The constraint is to do the activity. One cannot do the activity by not doing it.
- strathmeyer 11y ago
  Home intrusions happen all the time around here not sure what part of the world you are fun. The safest car is not owning a car. The safest knife is not owning a knife. There's no such thing as gun control, you don't get to control guns. Just narcissistic ramblings.
  - minikites 11y ago
    Really? Where do you live that you are at high risk of home intrusion? Post the statistics for your ZIP code.
    - thescribe 11y ago
      For reference the DOJ says there were 259,000 home invasions in 2010.
    - heartbreak 11y ago
      In my ZIP we're averaging just over 1 home invasion per day for 2016. Three people have been shot and killed. In the next ZIP over a wealthy nationally-recognized clothing CEO fatally shot someone breaking into his home last month.
    - strathmeyer 11y ago
      Well, America.
  - ctdonath 11y ago
    Home intrusions when someone is home are far lower here than in "strong gun control" jurisdictions. News reports of "shot dead by homeowner" are considered stories with happy endings. Hard to have a discussion when data is spun & cherry picked, and cultural differences abound.
- c3534l 11y ago
  > There's an abundance of studies showing that gun ownership tracks with an increase in home injury/death. This isn't true. A classic example of confirmation bias. Obviously the pro-gun people say the exact opposite: that every gun study shows the opposite. http://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/ http://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/
  - franciscop 11y ago
    Gun ownership: 88.8% Is that right? If so, USA is in a much worse state than I thought so.
    - wl 11y ago
      Nope. 88.8 guns per 100 people, which is not the same as 88.8%. Most people who own guns in the US own several. The actual percentage of people who own guns is lower.
    - hga 11y ago
      That's an 2007 number. "Since Obama was elected" "100 million guns have been sold" (although the sales increases really started after 9/11), and more significantly, US production has doubled, and importation is similarly higher. I could run the numbers if anyone wanted, but it should be around 1 gun per US resident nowadays, although as others have noted, this is very unevenly distributed. ADDED: on the other hand, the claim all the new ones are being bought by existing gun owners is fatuous, a back of the envelope calculation I made would have us existing gun owners own an average of $100K worth each, and I doubt even my father, who was born in the early '30s, every had quite that much. Assume, given the unwillingness of many gun owners to answer the questions of nosy, anonymous people making telephone and other surveys, that at least half the nation's households have a gun. With then nationwide sweep of shall or better issue concealed carry laws, now all but 7 states, making gun ownership significantly more useful, which is particularly important to an aging population, I'd be surprised if the fraction wasn't higher. The number of permits issued has been astounding, 300,000 in Wisconsin since the law passed in 2011, 1 million in Texas, in these states generally 5-10% of the residents have one, and ~10 states don't require a permit or very soon won't (that number is changing very rapidly right now).
- SerLava 11y ago
  making them illegal wouldn't make them go away. They would just make criminals out of people who are trying not to die. They will always be readily available until the end of humanity. Illiterate Third world tribesmen create high tech automatic firearms in mud houses. Prisoners create low tech firearms in between anal cavity searches. Think about that. Gun control is possible with the extinction of the human race.
  - zyxley 11y ago
    > They will always be readily available until the end of humanity. The funny thing is, many non-US countries don't have "readily available" guns everywhere you go.
    - Animats 11y ago
      Japan, for one. At the end of WWII, the US Army of Occupation took away all the guns. The Government of Japan never removed restrictions on gun ownership. In 2013, 12 people in Japan were killed by guns.
      - hga 11y ago
        The laws keeping "civilians" from owning effective personal weapons go back to a minimum of 1588: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_hunt I don't think there's any removing of Japanese crime and crime control from the following 2.5 century Tokugawa military dictatorship, which had profound effects in creating modern Japanese society.
      - SerLava 11y ago
        Japan's not the best example to hold up as a success for gun control. The last 70 years have been nice. During the prior 400 years, the various Japanese governments used gun and sword confiscation to enable crimes ranging from brutal to genocidal.
    - SerLava 11y ago
      They don't have the demand. As I said, taking away guns from people who want guns will just cause them to build their own guns.
- woodman 11y ago
  > ...the chance of an accident... Private firearm ownership should be illegal. For their own good, right? The prisons are already full of people who violated laws enacted under that guise. Anti-2A people don't seem to be aware of the fact that pro-2A people aren't very excited at the prospect of others deciding what is in their best interest. If you are afraid of getting shot by a privately owned gun then base your argument on that, because a temperance movement mkII isn't going to fly.
  - minikites 11y ago
    Temperance movement? It's easy to brew your own beer and not that easy to machine the parts for your own gun.
    - woodman 11y ago
      Are you confusing the concepts of practicality and legality? Making your own gun is easy btw.
    - LyndsySimon 11y ago
      That's not even close to true. You can buy all the parts to make a working 12ga shotgun in two aisles of Home Depot, for about $30. Making beer or spirits at least generally requires you to leave the store.
ctdonath 11y ago
he explained that it was only supposed to fire if the shooter was wearing a special wristband with a little radio frequency transmitter inside. The CEO put on the wristband and went to pull the trigger. ... And it didn't shoot. Just silence. Those focused on ensuring guns aren't fired fail to grasp the paramount importance to buyers that guns fire with absolute reliability when they're supposed to. The understanding is that it will be used in a situation where failing to shoot will allow a bad person to destroy someone good, and failing to fire when needed is literally a terminal flaw. Alas, those pushing for "smart guns" are perceived as, if not actually, trying to disarm upstanding citizens. This is not a successful business plan.
- detaro 11y ago
  This reminds me of the discussion of nuclear safety in the book Command and Control, where the tension of securing trigger devices is quoted as "always/never": a weapon should always work properly if intentionally deployed, but never by accident or by misuse. Same issue, different scale. (The book is a great read and I recommend it, even if it makes you wonder how we got to 2016 as well off as we did. "Always" was always more important than "never") EDIT: article about the book, + quote: " In fact, it is easy to design weapons so that they can never fire by accident or unauthorized use. It is equally easy to design them so that they will always fire when the order is given. But it is extraordinarily difficult to meet both criteria at once—what is known as the “always/never” problem." from http://www.thenation.com/article/eric-schlosser-and-illusion-nuclear-weapons-safety/ http://www.thenation.com/article/eric-schlosser-and-illusion...
  - robert_tweed 11y ago
    > "Always" was always more important than "never" That's exactly the opposite of what you want from a nuclear trigger system. I mean if you actually need to launch, it's already past the point where it's going to do anything helpful. What you need is something that everyone in the world unquestioningly believes will always work, even if that isn't entirely true. OTOH, if it ever goes off by mistake, that not good. Not good at all.
pg_bot 11y ago
Gun control should not be a national issue, it should remain a local one. What works for the people of urban cities will not necessarily work for rural areas. Like it or not the second amendment exists and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. While I choose not to exert my right to bear arms I should not force other people to conform to my lifestyle.
- thescribe 11y ago
  This took me a super long time to learn. I'm fairly rural and to me gun control seems bizarre. It wasn't until I talked to someone from a very dense mega-city that I had an ah-ha moment.
- mmcconnell1618 11y ago
  My biggest issue with guns is that they let one person become judge, jury and executioner without due process. Yes, you can kill someone in many other ways but guns have a tendency to deliver multiple kills with incredible ease and detachment. I do understand that rural areas are going to need a level of protection from wild animals that might not be required in urban areas. My suggestion for how to solve gun violence is to put together an "Apollo moonshot" project to develop a non-lethal weapon as effective at stopping as a lethal one. Phasers on stun is my dream. Once you can stop a person without harming them you can then take a tobacco industry marketing campaign to make owning a lethal weapon unacceptable in civil society. Rifles and relevant lethal weapons should still be available outside of urban areas unless non-lethal alternatives would work.
  - deelowe 11y ago
    There's one giant issue with that. Most gun use isn't with intent to harm another individual.
    - hga 11y ago
      Most gun use, in the form of self-defense, call it ~2.5 million times a year (that figure is now getting very long in the tooth), doesn't even involve shooting the gun, most shots fired don't hit, and most hits don't result in death.
gnu8 11y ago
A truly safe gun must do two things: 1) always fire when the trigger is pulled, and 2) never fire when the trigger is not pulled. So called Smart Guns are deficient on point 1 and probably always will be. How often does an iPhone decline to unlock with a fingerprint and require a passcode? That would never be acceptable in a life or death situation that requires a gun.
- robert_tweed 11y ago
  Without wishing to comment on what is or isn't feasible now or in the future, I'd approach the technical requirements similarly to self-driving cars. They simply need to crash less often than a human driver. They don't need to be completely infallible, though for emotional reasons they need to crash significantly less often than humans. Similarly, a gun would need to have a failure rate somewhere in the order of 1% of the typical misfire rate. E.g., if a particular gun & ammunition pairing misfires 1 time out of 1,000 then the security system must fail no more than 1 in 100,000 times or thereabouts. At that point, any misfire due to the security system would be indistinguishable from a misfire that would have happened anyway. A 1% increase in misfires would not equate to a 1% increase in unintentional deaths, but a viable safety system would significantly decrease them. In fact, it might be possible to mathematically derive a much higher break-even point, but I daresay that would not work out well politically.
  - LyndsySimon 11y ago
    The failure rate of modern handguns is extremely low. I carry a 1911, which is a design more than a century old. I've fired that gun around 15,000 times without a single failure of any kind.
    - Turing_Machine 11y ago
      I carry a 1911, which is a design more than a century old. John Moses Browning was the Leonardo da Vinci of gun design. In addition to the M1911, several of his other designs are still in production, and indeed, in active duty use by various militaries.
jedmeyers 11y ago
Where did you find that on the page? It says there are 88.8 firearms per 100 people, it does not say 88 people out of 100 own guns. If you make such trivial mistakes when analyzing data how can you trust your own judgement on the important policy issues?
- vinay427 11y ago
  No need to respond so harshly; it's entirely plausible that English isn't his/her first language.
  - jedmeyers 11y ago
    I believe that people should not participate in a discussion on critical issues if unable to completely comprehend relevant information, for whatever reasons, be it lack of general knowledge, or poor language skills, or something else.
  - c3534l 11y ago
    Also, they asked if they were interpreting that correctly. If you're not American, you probably don't have an intuitive sense for how common guns are. Best I can find about 30% of households have a gun. There also seems to be a pretty wide disparity about where those households are. Mother Jones, so maybe not an ubiased source of information: http://www.motherjones.com/files/gun-ownership-map-updated.png http://www.motherjones.com/files/gun-ownership-map-updated.p...
- LukeB_UK 11y ago
  In the graphic it's worded as "88.8 per 100 people" which can easily be mistaken for 88.8% because it doesn't state that it's 88.8 firearms, not 88.8 people.
  - jedmeyers 11y ago
    "Gun ownership: 88.8 per 100 people" -> 88.8 guns owned per 100 people.
- 11y ago
zyxley 11y ago
Part of the reason people get so paranoid about the government pulling sudden mandates on guns in regards to one thing or another in the news is that, well, it's not paranoia. Federal, state, and city legislatures have pulled a lot of stupid moves in regards to gun regulation, like regulating aesthetic features instead of capability, creating gun owner lists that absolutely-definitely-won't-get-used-for-anything-nefarious (and then using them to confiscate guns without compensation and when the law changes), etc. I support gun control in general, but even on a purely financial level (e.g. "I paid $X for these guns and the government might suddenly destroy their value) there are plenty of reasons for people to argue against it.
- hga 11y ago
  And very specifically, if "smart" handgun technology is developed, sale of all others will become illegal in New Jersey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_... Of course "a seven-member commission [would] determine whether personalized handguns qualify for use by State and local law enforcement officers", all these sorts of laws have such exceptions. And such as been proposed in California and Maryland. It's not "paranoia" when they are explicitly "out to get you".
  - aftbit 11y ago
    Something similar has already happened with "microstamping", a neigh-mythical technology that would imprint the gun's serial number on all ejected casings. California has a roster of "safe" handguns which are all that may be sold by dealers in the state. However, they haven't allowed any manufacturer to add a new semiautomatic handgun without microstamping technology, which practically means that there are no new pistols being added to the list. Once the old ones fall off the list, that'll be it - it will be impossible to buy a semiautomatic handgun from a dealer in California.
- jevinskie 11y ago
  There are many jurisdictions with laws that say "after the first (sometimes clarified as commercially viable) smart gun comes to market, all guns sold must be smart guns within X years time". The idea that smart guns threaten gun rights is not imaginary in many places. Unfortunate, given that people should be free to choose whether they want a regular gun, smart gun, or no gun whatsoever.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
danielvf 11y ago
This article notes that Colt had fallen on "Hard Times". This is an understatement. In the mid eighties, Colt was doing great, making hundreds of thousands of rifle for the US military. Then a five year labor strike brought the end of all military contracts as Colt replacement workers were unable to make properly functioning guns. Colt decided to focus on the civilian market, and brought out a new high tech handgun that was so unreliable that it was eventually recalled. Then Colt's CEO said that he was in favor of a all gun purchasers having to register federally and purchase a federal permit and training. This did not go over well. (*understatement) His replacement, seeing that the military would not buy Colt guns and that civilians would not buy Colt guns, decided to focus on police sales. Unfortunately making a new smart gun required ability in the two things that Colt was not good at - making reliable guns and designing new guns. It was not just the disastrous demo that killed the smart gun - the prototype smart guns were not even able to be fired without permanent destroying the mechanism. Also, there was a delay from between when the gun was grabbed by the officer and when it could be fired. And of course, the fact that it didn't always unlock to fire even in the best possible circumstances. Interestingly enough, police handguns have moved even farther away from the smart pistol idea. Today it's a rare department now days that does not use Glocks or M&Ps, both of which are far simpler than the average police handgun of the nineties.
- hga 11y ago
  There's a bit more to it than that; whatever the reasons (I forget), Colt lost the M16 contract to FNH in 1988 (but continued to make them for civilians, and in many years/all recent years/decades? at a high level of quality), and but essentially got it back in 1994 when the Army switched to the M4 carbine (the Marines stuck with their long barrel and therefore more effective M16s). Now they've lost M4 manufacturing exclusivity and for a while all contracts, and only recently won one of the new M4 full auto only, no 3 round burst variation contracts, presumably because they're desperate enough to bid really, really low. On top of all the other problems, the company is now run by financial vultures who are bleeding it dry. And, yeah, their flirtation with gun control did not go over well, I would never buy one from them after that, although their relative lack of quality in the category I might have otherwise (M1911s, which they were the original manufacturers of back in 1911) is the biggest reason.
rbobby 11y ago
Back when seat belt laws where being introduced more than a few people complained that sometimes a person will die in a car accident because of the seat belt. Saner heads prevailed because the overall statistics showed much fewer deaths and injuries occur when using seat belts vs not using seat belts. To me insisting on a 0% failure rate for a smart gun is very reminiscent of the mandatory seat belt arguments. Sure... sometimes a gun will fail and the owner end up injured/dead and that's pretty awful. However, if the overall the number of deaths and injuries has been reduced then those tragedies will have been "worth it". It is irrational to insist on a 0% failure rate. It is also probably irrational to insist on the same failure rate as existing guns. The correct measure is the deaths/injury rate. Unfortunately the US doesn't seem to want to tackle the problem of gun deaths/injuries in any sort of scientific manner. There needs to be accurate and reliable data on gun ownership, gun usage (scared someone off), gun deaths, gun injuries. Solid data is the foundation of good policy... and preventing the gathering of good data is pretty telling. And far too many vested interests are more than willing to mislead people. Specifically, the NRA's constant "confiscate our guns" rhetoric i pretty unconscionable... but folks seem to blithely accept this sort of misrepresentation.
- ctdonath 11y ago
  Such calls for sensible data analysis followed immediately by wanton bashing of the NRA and gun owners is making it very difficult to have a sensible discussion on the subject in this country.
  - rbobby 11y ago
    I'm not sure I'd call what I said "wanton bashing". The NRA does attempt to mislead folks on a regular basis... this is well documented.
    - hga 11y ago
      [citation needed] As for your specific claim about confiscation, how about this tag I was reminded of on a blog that's in my early morning rotation: http://blog.joehuffman.org/category/gun-rights/no-one-wants-to-take-your-guns/ http://blog.joehuffman.org/category/gun-rights/no-one-wants-... Or Senator Diane Feinstein, who represents a lot of HN readers), telling "Mr. and Mrs. America turn 'em all in" in a 60 Minutes interview. And let me assure that, using registration lists, guns have been confiscated in the US, e.g. SKSs in California after the government decided they were "assault weapons" after all (OK, you were allowed to move them out of state, but...).

38 points by dpflan 11y ago

The safest "gun" is not owning a gun. There's an abundance of studies showing that gun ownership tracks with an increase in home injury/death. The idea that having a gun protects you from home intrusion is a red herring because home intrusions almost never happen and the chance of an accident is possible every day there is a gun around. Private firearm ownership should be illegal.

pmalynin 11y ago
The safest way to ski is not to ski. The safest way to sky-dive is not to sky-dive. The safest way to have sex is not to have sex (I like the last one the most as it is touted by various groups). That logic is absolutely broken.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  To be fair, ski enthusiasts don't spend a lot of words on how skiing can enhance your personal safety.
- otterley 11y ago
  What's broken about the logic? All of those things are logically consistent. If you mean that foregoing experiences for safety's sake isn't your cup of tea, that's one thing; but claiming it's logically broken is simply false.
  - pmalynin 11y ago
    It's not logically consistent. You're claiming that p implies not p
    - rwjwjuwjudf 11y ago
      Oh come on, the claim is that safe (p) <-> !p, which is a bit different. Attack the actual claim.
      - woodman 11y ago
        @pmalynin, you forgot the safety variable. p | q | p ∧ q → ¬q --+---+----------- T | T | F You can't be safe and own a gun. T | F | T You can be safe and not own a gun. F | T | T You can be unsafe and own a gun. F | F | T You can be unsafe and not own a gun. @rwjwjuwjudf, logical implication is correct - logical equivalence leads to this trainwreck: p | q | p ∧ q ↔ ¬q --+---+----------- T | T | F You can't be safe and own a gun. T | F | F You can't be safe and not own a gun. F | T | T You can be unsafe and own a gun. F | F | F You can't be unsafe and not own a gun.
        rwjwjuwjudf 11y ago
        Nice analysis! I was thinking safety is a function equivalent to negation. But I agree if safety and gun ownership are separate variables. p | safe (p) | ¬p | safe (p) ↔ ¬p --+----------+----+-------------- T | F | F | Owning a gun is unsafely owning a gun. F | T | T | Not owning a gun is safely owning a gun. I think this is the original reason why it's confusing, because the sentence "not owning a gun is safely owning a gun" is highly unintuitive. There is a contradiction because safely owning it conflicts with not owning it. edit: I think we can legitimately fix the confusing sentence to read "not owning a gun is safely not owning a gun".
        woodman 11y ago
        Safety as a negation would be an xor operation, which leads to the wacky logic. Both of you are right though, I was probably far too generous in treating @minikites's use of the word "is" as a logical implication instead of the logical equivalence that you suggested. The resulting logic leads to conclusions that both support and refute the likely intent of the original statement. So either the logic is broken or the intent is :) If only @minikites had used the word "maybe" instead of "is"... the weaker position would have been supported with a logically consistent argument.
- fugue12 11y ago
  No it's not, it is perfectly self-evident that you eliminate all risks involved in doing a thing by not doing it. I'll grant you that this is an boring and unhelpful way of minimising risk, but not an invalid one.
  - pmalynin 11y ago
    The constraint is to do the activity. One cannot do the activity by not doing it.
strathmeyer 11y ago
Home intrusions happen all the time around here not sure what part of the world you are fun. The safest car is not owning a car. The safest knife is not owning a knife. There's no such thing as gun control, you don't get to control guns. Just narcissistic ramblings.
- minikites 11y ago
  Really? Where do you live that you are at high risk of home intrusion? Post the statistics for your ZIP code.
  - thescribe 11y ago
    For reference the DOJ says there were 259,000 home invasions in 2010.
  - heartbreak 11y ago
    In my ZIP we're averaging just over 1 home invasion per day for 2016. Three people have been shot and killed. In the next ZIP over a wealthy nationally-recognized clothing CEO fatally shot someone breaking into his home last month.
  - strathmeyer 11y ago
    Well, America.
- ctdonath 11y ago
  Home intrusions when someone is home are far lower here than in "strong gun control" jurisdictions. News reports of "shot dead by homeowner" are considered stories with happy endings. Hard to have a discussion when data is spun & cherry picked, and cultural differences abound.
c3534l 11y ago
> There's an abundance of studies showing that gun ownership tracks with an increase in home injury/death. This isn't true. A classic example of confirmation bias. Obviously the pro-gun people say the exact opposite: that every gun study shows the opposite. http://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/ http://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/
- franciscop 11y ago
  Gun ownership: 88.8% Is that right? If so, USA is in a much worse state than I thought so.
  - wl 11y ago
    Nope. 88.8 guns per 100 people, which is not the same as 88.8%. Most people who own guns in the US own several. The actual percentage of people who own guns is lower.
  - hga 11y ago
    That's an 2007 number. "Since Obama was elected" "100 million guns have been sold" (although the sales increases really started after 9/11), and more significantly, US production has doubled, and importation is similarly higher. I could run the numbers if anyone wanted, but it should be around 1 gun per US resident nowadays, although as others have noted, this is very unevenly distributed. ADDED: on the other hand, the claim all the new ones are being bought by existing gun owners is fatuous, a back of the envelope calculation I made would have us existing gun owners own an average of $100K worth each, and I doubt even my father, who was born in the early '30s, every had quite that much. Assume, given the unwillingness of many gun owners to answer the questions of nosy, anonymous people making telephone and other surveys, that at least half the nation's households have a gun. With then nationwide sweep of shall or better issue concealed carry laws, now all but 7 states, making gun ownership significantly more useful, which is particularly important to an aging population, I'd be surprised if the fraction wasn't higher. The number of permits issued has been astounding, 300,000 in Wisconsin since the law passed in 2011, 1 million in Texas, in these states generally 5-10% of the residents have one, and ~10 states don't require a permit or very soon won't (that number is changing very rapidly right now).
SerLava 11y ago
making them illegal wouldn't make them go away. They would just make criminals out of people who are trying not to die. They will always be readily available until the end of humanity. Illiterate Third world tribesmen create high tech automatic firearms in mud houses. Prisoners create low tech firearms in between anal cavity searches. Think about that. Gun control is possible with the extinction of the human race.
- zyxley 11y ago
  > They will always be readily available until the end of humanity. The funny thing is, many non-US countries don't have "readily available" guns everywhere you go.
  - Animats 11y ago
    Japan, for one. At the end of WWII, the US Army of Occupation took away all the guns. The Government of Japan never removed restrictions on gun ownership. In 2013, 12 people in Japan were killed by guns.
    - hga 11y ago
      The laws keeping "civilians" from owning effective personal weapons go back to a minimum of 1588: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_hunt I don't think there's any removing of Japanese crime and crime control from the following 2.5 century Tokugawa military dictatorship, which had profound effects in creating modern Japanese society.
    - SerLava 11y ago
      Japan's not the best example to hold up as a success for gun control. The last 70 years have been nice. During the prior 400 years, the various Japanese governments used gun and sword confiscation to enable crimes ranging from brutal to genocidal.
  - SerLava 11y ago
    They don't have the demand. As I said, taking away guns from people who want guns will just cause them to build their own guns.
woodman 11y ago
> ...the chance of an accident... Private firearm ownership should be illegal. For their own good, right? The prisons are already full of people who violated laws enacted under that guise. Anti-2A people don't seem to be aware of the fact that pro-2A people aren't very excited at the prospect of others deciding what is in their best interest. If you are afraid of getting shot by a privately owned gun then base your argument on that, because a temperance movement mkII isn't going to fly.
- minikites 11y ago
  Temperance movement? It's easy to brew your own beer and not that easy to machine the parts for your own gun.
  - woodman 11y ago
    Are you confusing the concepts of practicality and legality? Making your own gun is easy btw.
  - LyndsySimon 11y ago
    That's not even close to true. You can buy all the parts to make a working 12ga shotgun in two aisles of Home Depot, for about $30. Making beer or spirits at least generally requires you to leave the store.

ctdonath 11y ago

he explained that it was only supposed to fire if the shooter was wearing a special wristband with a little radio frequency transmitter inside. The CEO put on the wristband and went to pull the trigger. ... And it didn't shoot. Just silence. Those focused on ensuring guns aren't fired fail to grasp the paramount importance to buyers that guns fire with absolute reliability when they're supposed to. The understanding is that it will be used in a situation where failing to shoot will allow a bad person to destroy someone good, and failing to fire when needed is literally a terminal flaw. Alas, those pushing for "smart guns" are perceived as, if not actually, trying to disarm upstanding citizens. This is not a successful business plan.

detaro 11y ago
This reminds me of the discussion of nuclear safety in the book Command and Control, where the tension of securing trigger devices is quoted as "always/never": a weapon should always work properly if intentionally deployed, but never by accident or by misuse. Same issue, different scale. (The book is a great read and I recommend it, even if it makes you wonder how we got to 2016 as well off as we did. "Always" was always more important than "never") EDIT: article about the book, + quote: " In fact, it is easy to design weapons so that they can never fire by accident or unauthorized use. It is equally easy to design them so that they will always fire when the order is given. But it is extraordinarily difficult to meet both criteria at once—what is known as the “always/never” problem." from http://www.thenation.com/article/eric-schlosser-and-illusion-nuclear-weapons-safety/ http://www.thenation.com/article/eric-schlosser-and-illusion...
- robert_tweed 11y ago
  > "Always" was always more important than "never" That's exactly the opposite of what you want from a nuclear trigger system. I mean if you actually need to launch, it's already past the point where it's going to do anything helpful. What you need is something that everyone in the world unquestioningly believes will always work, even if that isn't entirely true. OTOH, if it ever goes off by mistake, that not good. Not good at all.

pg_bot 11y ago

Gun control should not be a national issue, it should remain a local one. What works for the people of urban cities will not necessarily work for rural areas. Like it or not the second amendment exists and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. While I choose not to exert my right to bear arms I should not force other people to conform to my lifestyle.

thescribe 11y ago
This took me a super long time to learn. I'm fairly rural and to me gun control seems bizarre. It wasn't until I talked to someone from a very dense mega-city that I had an ah-ha moment.
mmcconnell1618 11y ago
My biggest issue with guns is that they let one person become judge, jury and executioner without due process. Yes, you can kill someone in many other ways but guns have a tendency to deliver multiple kills with incredible ease and detachment. I do understand that rural areas are going to need a level of protection from wild animals that might not be required in urban areas. My suggestion for how to solve gun violence is to put together an "Apollo moonshot" project to develop a non-lethal weapon as effective at stopping as a lethal one. Phasers on stun is my dream. Once you can stop a person without harming them you can then take a tobacco industry marketing campaign to make owning a lethal weapon unacceptable in civil society. Rifles and relevant lethal weapons should still be available outside of urban areas unless non-lethal alternatives would work.
- deelowe 11y ago
  There's one giant issue with that. Most gun use isn't with intent to harm another individual.
  - hga 11y ago
    Most gun use, in the form of self-defense, call it ~2.5 million times a year (that figure is now getting very long in the tooth), doesn't even involve shooting the gun, most shots fired don't hit, and most hits don't result in death.

gnu8 11y ago

A truly safe gun must do two things: 1) always fire when the trigger is pulled, and 2) never fire when the trigger is not pulled. So called Smart Guns are deficient on point 1 and probably always will be. How often does an iPhone decline to unlock with a fingerprint and require a passcode? That would never be acceptable in a life or death situation that requires a gun.

robert_tweed 11y ago
Without wishing to comment on what is or isn't feasible now or in the future, I'd approach the technical requirements similarly to self-driving cars. They simply need to crash less often than a human driver. They don't need to be completely infallible, though for emotional reasons they need to crash significantly less often than humans. Similarly, a gun would need to have a failure rate somewhere in the order of 1% of the typical misfire rate. E.g., if a particular gun & ammunition pairing misfires 1 time out of 1,000 then the security system must fail no more than 1 in 100,000 times or thereabouts. At that point, any misfire due to the security system would be indistinguishable from a misfire that would have happened anyway. A 1% increase in misfires would not equate to a 1% increase in unintentional deaths, but a viable safety system would significantly decrease them. In fact, it might be possible to mathematically derive a much higher break-even point, but I daresay that would not work out well politically.
- LyndsySimon 11y ago
  The failure rate of modern handguns is extremely low. I carry a 1911, which is a design more than a century old. I've fired that gun around 15,000 times without a single failure of any kind.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    I carry a 1911, which is a design more than a century old. John Moses Browning was the Leonardo da Vinci of gun design. In addition to the M1911, several of his other designs are still in production, and indeed, in active duty use by various militaries.

jedmeyers 11y ago

Where did you find that on the page? It says there are 88.8 firearms per 100 people, it does not say 88 people out of 100 own guns. If you make such trivial mistakes when analyzing data how can you trust your own judgement on the important policy issues?

vinay427 11y ago
No need to respond so harshly; it's entirely plausible that English isn't his/her first language.
- jedmeyers 11y ago
  I believe that people should not participate in a discussion on critical issues if unable to completely comprehend relevant information, for whatever reasons, be it lack of general knowledge, or poor language skills, or something else.
- c3534l 11y ago
  Also, they asked if they were interpreting that correctly. If you're not American, you probably don't have an intuitive sense for how common guns are. Best I can find about 30% of households have a gun. There also seems to be a pretty wide disparity about where those households are. Mother Jones, so maybe not an ubiased source of information: http://www.motherjones.com/files/gun-ownership-map-updated.png http://www.motherjones.com/files/gun-ownership-map-updated.p...
LukeB_UK 11y ago
In the graphic it's worded as "88.8 per 100 people" which can easily be mistaken for 88.8% because it doesn't state that it's 88.8 firearms, not 88.8 people.
- jedmeyers 11y ago
  "Gun ownership: 88.8 per 100 people" -> 88.8 guns owned per 100 people.
11y ago

zyxley 11y ago

Part of the reason people get so paranoid about the government pulling sudden mandates on guns in regards to one thing or another in the news is that, well, it's not paranoia. Federal, state, and city legislatures have pulled a lot of stupid moves in regards to gun regulation, like regulating aesthetic features instead of capability, creating gun owner lists that absolutely-definitely-won't-get-used-for-anything-nefarious (and then using them to confiscate guns without compensation and when the law changes), etc. I support gun control in general, but even on a purely financial level (e.g. "I paid $X for these guns and the government might suddenly destroy their value) there are plenty of reasons for people to argue against it.

hga 11y ago
And very specifically, if "smart" handgun technology is developed, sale of all others will become illegal in New Jersey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_... Of course "a seven-member commission [would] determine whether personalized handguns qualify for use by State and local law enforcement officers", all these sorts of laws have such exceptions. And such as been proposed in California and Maryland. It's not "paranoia" when they are explicitly "out to get you".
- aftbit 11y ago
  Something similar has already happened with "microstamping", a neigh-mythical technology that would imprint the gun's serial number on all ejected casings. California has a roster of "safe" handguns which are all that may be sold by dealers in the state. However, they haven't allowed any manufacturer to add a new semiautomatic handgun without microstamping technology, which practically means that there are no new pistols being added to the list. Once the old ones fall off the list, that'll be it - it will be impossible to buy a semiautomatic handgun from a dealer in California.
jevinskie 11y ago
There are many jurisdictions with laws that say "after the first (sometimes clarified as commercially viable) smart gun comes to market, all guns sold must be smart guns within X years time". The idea that smart guns threaten gun rights is not imaginary in many places. Unfortunate, given that people should be free to choose whether they want a regular gun, smart gun, or no gun whatsoever.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

danielvf 11y ago

This article notes that Colt had fallen on "Hard Times". This is an understatement. In the mid eighties, Colt was doing great, making hundreds of thousands of rifle for the US military. Then a five year labor strike brought the end of all military contracts as Colt replacement workers were unable to make properly functioning guns. Colt decided to focus on the civilian market, and brought out a new high tech handgun that was so unreliable that it was eventually recalled. Then Colt's CEO said that he was in favor of a all gun purchasers having to register federally and purchase a federal permit and training. This did not go over well. (*understatement) His replacement, seeing that the military would not buy Colt guns and that civilians would not buy Colt guns, decided to focus on police sales. Unfortunately making a new smart gun required ability in the two things that Colt was not good at - making reliable guns and designing new guns. It was not just the disastrous demo that killed the smart gun - the prototype smart guns were not even able to be fired without permanent destroying the mechanism. Also, there was a delay from between when the gun was grabbed by the officer and when it could be fired. And of course, the fact that it didn't always unlock to fire even in the best possible circumstances. Interestingly enough, police handguns have moved even farther away from the smart pistol idea. Today it's a rare department now days that does not use Glocks or M&Ps, both of which are far simpler than the average police handgun of the nineties.

hga 11y ago
There's a bit more to it than that; whatever the reasons (I forget), Colt lost the M16 contract to FNH in 1988 (but continued to make them for civilians, and in many years/all recent years/decades? at a high level of quality), and but essentially got it back in 1994 when the Army switched to the M4 carbine (the Marines stuck with their long barrel and therefore more effective M16s). Now they've lost M4 manufacturing exclusivity and for a while all contracts, and only recently won one of the new M4 full auto only, no 3 round burst variation contracts, presumably because they're desperate enough to bid really, really low. On top of all the other problems, the company is now run by financial vultures who are bleeding it dry. And, yeah, their flirtation with gun control did not go over well, I would never buy one from them after that, although their relative lack of quality in the category I might have otherwise (M1911s, which they were the original manufacturers of back in 1911) is the biggest reason.

rbobby 11y ago

Back when seat belt laws where being introduced more than a few people complained that sometimes a person will die in a car accident because of the seat belt. Saner heads prevailed because the overall statistics showed much fewer deaths and injuries occur when using seat belts vs not using seat belts. To me insisting on a 0% failure rate for a smart gun is very reminiscent of the mandatory seat belt arguments. Sure... sometimes a gun will fail and the owner end up injured/dead and that's pretty awful. However, if the overall the number of deaths and injuries has been reduced then those tragedies will have been "worth it". It is irrational to insist on a 0% failure rate. It is also probably irrational to insist on the same failure rate as existing guns. The correct measure is the deaths/injury rate. Unfortunately the US doesn't seem to want to tackle the problem of gun deaths/injuries in any sort of scientific manner. There needs to be accurate and reliable data on gun ownership, gun usage (scared someone off), gun deaths, gun injuries. Solid data is the foundation of good policy... and preventing the gathering of good data is pretty telling. And far too many vested interests are more than willing to mislead people. Specifically, the NRA's constant "confiscate our guns" rhetoric i pretty unconscionable... but folks seem to blithely accept this sort of misrepresentation.

ctdonath 11y ago
Such calls for sensible data analysis followed immediately by wanton bashing of the NRA and gun owners is making it very difficult to have a sensible discussion on the subject in this country.
- rbobby 11y ago
  I'm not sure I'd call what I said "wanton bashing". The NRA does attempt to mislead folks on a regular basis... this is well documented.
  - hga 11y ago
    [citation needed] As for your specific claim about confiscation, how about this tag I was reminded of on a blog that's in my early morning rotation: http://blog.joehuffman.org/category/gun-rights/no-one-wants-to-take-your-guns/ http://blog.joehuffman.org/category/gun-rights/no-one-wants-... Or Senator Diane Feinstein, who represents a lot of HN readers), telling "Mr. and Mrs. America turn 'em all in" in a 60 Minutes interview. And let me assure that, using registration lists, guns have been confiscated in the US, e.g. SKSs in California after the government decided they were "assault weapons" after all (OK, you were allowed to move them out of state, but...).