5 ms·

Why can't the manufacturers market "smart guns" outside the US? Surely, the NRA's grip isn't world-spanning.

rhinoceraptor 11mo ago
I would imagine that any manufacturer being seen doing so, would face US consumer boycotts.
aloha2436 11mo ago
The US is the largest market for firearms, so the NRA can use the threat of boycotting a manufacturer within the states to prevent the technology gaining traction elsewhere.
- Antibabelic 11mo ago
  Aren't there manufacturers that only really target local markets that could profit from this technology, e.g. in China, ex-USSR or South America?
  - xixixao 11mo ago
    I could not locate credible evidence of a major firearm manufacturer that completely refrains from selling into the U.S. civilian market. (ChatGPT) Glock, Koch, Taurus, even Czech Zbrojovka all sell to US. Kalashnikov can’t atm, but also probably doesn’t share the safety concern.
  - anonymous908213 11mo ago
    To profit, they would first have to sell the goods. Who is actually in the market for a smart gun? Consumers aren't, surely. There is virtually no upside to your gun tracking you, at your own expense of buying a more complex piece of tech to boot. So that leaves something like (apparently) New Jersey where the government would compel purchases of smart guns because they were interested in the tracking. But eg. China simply don't allow citizens to purchase guns period. There may be some application to applying it to state-owned firearms to track military and police usage, but deploying that at Chinese scale would be an extremely expensive endeavour for what appears to be a solution in search of a problem. Not to mention the biometric lock concept, if implemented, is introducing an entire new axis of unreliability to a life-or-death tool.
    - pabs3 11mo ago
      Gun owners in the US probably wouldn't want their gun to be used against them in a home invasion, or by their child at a school. Seems like that could be a large-ish market. Especially if you can lobby regulators in favor of making it a requirement for all or some people.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - avidiax 11mo ago
        You are right that gun owners wouldn't want those things, but they are unlikely to want a smart gun as a solution to those things. They want the gun to be available to them, and not be under duress to use a fingerprint reader or pin pad or RFID ring to do it. Responsible gun owners keep guns out of children's hands by locking them up or supervising them, and irresponsible ones aren't going to want to pay extra for smart features. I think there's a very narrow range of smart features, something like a gun that is unlocked when removed from a holster, but locks up if it is dropped or grabbed, that might be interesting. That makes having the gun taken from an officer less of a threat, which might have an institutional appeal. Give it a 10-hour maintenance mode so that it can be used as a "nightstand gun" while automatically being locked if left idle for longer, and it would basically meet the needs of police both on and off-duty.
      - derbOac 11mo ago
        In my personal experience gun owners want mechanical foolproofness too. They want something that's not going to lock up or fail or discharge at the wrong time. Smart features just add a layer of complexity with fail possibilities to address a problem that many of them would prefer to be addressed differently anyway.
    - skissane 11mo ago
      I think a country like Australia could be a good starting point for smart guns. Yes, not a very big market-around 8% of US population, with significantly lower rates of gun ownership-but culturally more open to gun control, with a much weaker gun rights lobby, and a marked political tendency towards surveillance and “nanny state” regulation
xixixao 11mo ago
I see at least two problems with smart guns though: 1. Temper resistance is not temper impossibility 2. If a tag allows tracking, bad actors might track good actors?
skinkestek 11mo ago
Because it’s just a bad idea. Most of the world doesn’t need that whole setup because: - Our cultural baseline around firearms is completely different. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic have plenty of guns at home - and historically, a lot of them were actual assault rifles, not “looks-spicy” semiautos. - We treat guns like weapons. They live in safes, not nightstands, and kids get taught safety early, the same way you’d teach them not to put a fork in a power supply.
- atemerev 11mo ago
  The Swiss do have a lot of guns at home. However, you cannot carry (or even transport guns that are not discharged). Just take them at a shooting range - a popular pastime for Swiss people.
- throw-qqqqq 11mo ago
  > Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic have plenty of guns at home None of those countries are anywhere near US levels of gun ownership. See the table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... USA has 120 guns pr 100 citizens. Of the countries on your list, Finland is next with 32. Denmark has 10. > and historically, a lot of them were actual assault rifles Fully automatic weapons are not legal for civilians in Denmark at least. Many semiautos are also banned. Semiauto shotguns must be restricted to hold only two shells and you need a special license even for that. I don’t disagree with your general point, but you’re not making a good comparison IMO.
  - iviv 11mo ago
    > Fully automatic weapons are not legal for civilians in Denmark at least. Same in Finland.
tonyhart7 11mo ago
smart guns is future dystopian
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  regular guns is current dystopian
  - tonyhart7 11mo ago
    so knife is past dystopian????
    - sawjet 11mo ago
      Rock was the original topia
      - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
        2.5 million years ago, a friend of mine Made a tool from a stone and defended his tribe It's technology, sorry for the technical term It's a wheel then a fire and the rest is a blur Aesop Rock https://youtu.be/T7jH-5YQLcE https://youtu.be/T7jH-5YQLcE
  - baiac 11mo ago
    Regular guns in the hands of the people is the opposite of dystopian.
atemerev 11mo ago
There are barely any civilian gun markets outside the US. US is really really unique in their relationship to guns.
- setopt 11mo ago
  This. There’s many countries that allow civilians firearms (e.g. Canada and much of Europe), but generally for hunting purposes and thus more likely to be rifles and shotguns than concealable handguns.
numpad0 11mo ago
The tech just isn't there; hand-held guns don't benefit from a computerized firing system at all. So any smart feature on human sized guns and less will be totally removable addons, and that completely defeats its purpose. Many tanks and planes do have smart guns. Electronic firing control with additional software features that impede firing are beneficial and totally fine at that scale.
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  Seems it's coming though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMASH_Handheld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMASH_Handheld
  - numpad0 11mo ago
    That's just a scope. Comes right off and the gun reverts to a regular M4. Most(though not all) other smart gun attempts work in a similar fashion; the host gun works exactly as it were, except an extraneous metal bit inhibits firing. If the bit was removed or held down, it reverts to the original host gun and fires normally. As such, the extra bit is literally extraneous, irrelevant to the gun's working.
refurb 11mo ago
The correct answer is - all the designs so far aren’t great. The military would love a smart gun to cut down on accidental discharges. Cops would love it to stop weapons being used against cops. The issue is that it has to have a very high reliability (you don’t want it to fail to fire while a suspect is shooting at you). And not much point if it only works “sometimes” with unauthorized users.

I would imagine that any manufacturer being seen doing so, would face US consumer boycotts.

The US is the largest market for firearms, so the NRA can use the threat of boycotting a manufacturer within the states to prevent the technology gaining traction elsewhere.

Antibabelic 11mo ago
Aren't there manufacturers that only really target local markets that could profit from this technology, e.g. in China, ex-USSR or South America?
- xixixao 11mo ago
  I could not locate credible evidence of a major firearm manufacturer that completely refrains from selling into the U.S. civilian market. (ChatGPT) Glock, Koch, Taurus, even Czech Zbrojovka all sell to US. Kalashnikov can’t atm, but also probably doesn’t share the safety concern.
- anonymous908213 11mo ago
  To profit, they would first have to sell the goods. Who is actually in the market for a smart gun? Consumers aren't, surely. There is virtually no upside to your gun tracking you, at your own expense of buying a more complex piece of tech to boot. So that leaves something like (apparently) New Jersey where the government would compel purchases of smart guns because they were interested in the tracking. But eg. China simply don't allow citizens to purchase guns period. There may be some application to applying it to state-owned firearms to track military and police usage, but deploying that at Chinese scale would be an extremely expensive endeavour for what appears to be a solution in search of a problem. Not to mention the biometric lock concept, if implemented, is introducing an entire new axis of unreliability to a life-or-death tool.
  - pabs3 11mo ago
    Gun owners in the US probably wouldn't want their gun to be used against them in a home invasion, or by their child at a school. Seems like that could be a large-ish market. Especially if you can lobby regulators in favor of making it a requirement for all or some people.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - avidiax 11mo ago
      You are right that gun owners wouldn't want those things, but they are unlikely to want a smart gun as a solution to those things. They want the gun to be available to them, and not be under duress to use a fingerprint reader or pin pad or RFID ring to do it. Responsible gun owners keep guns out of children's hands by locking them up or supervising them, and irresponsible ones aren't going to want to pay extra for smart features. I think there's a very narrow range of smart features, something like a gun that is unlocked when removed from a holster, but locks up if it is dropped or grabbed, that might be interesting. That makes having the gun taken from an officer less of a threat, which might have an institutional appeal. Give it a 10-hour maintenance mode so that it can be used as a "nightstand gun" while automatically being locked if left idle for longer, and it would basically meet the needs of police both on and off-duty.
    - derbOac 11mo ago
      In my personal experience gun owners want mechanical foolproofness too. They want something that's not going to lock up or fail or discharge at the wrong time. Smart features just add a layer of complexity with fail possibilities to address a problem that many of them would prefer to be addressed differently anyway.
  - skissane 11mo ago
    I think a country like Australia could be a good starting point for smart guns. Yes, not a very big market-around 8% of US population, with significantly lower rates of gun ownership-but culturally more open to gun control, with a much weaker gun rights lobby, and a marked political tendency towards surveillance and “nanny state” regulation

xixixao 11mo ago

I see at least two problems with smart guns though: 1. Temper resistance is not temper impossibility 2. If a tag allows tracking, bad actors might track good actors?

skinkestek 11mo ago

Because it’s just a bad idea. Most of the world doesn’t need that whole setup because: - Our cultural baseline around firearms is completely different. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic have plenty of guns at home - and historically, a lot of them were actual assault rifles, not “looks-spicy” semiautos. - We treat guns like weapons. They live in safes, not nightstands, and kids get taught safety early, the same way you’d teach them not to put a fork in a power supply.

atemerev 11mo ago
The Swiss do have a lot of guns at home. However, you cannot carry (or even transport guns that are not discharged). Just take them at a shooting range - a popular pastime for Swiss people.
throw-qqqqq 11mo ago
> Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic have plenty of guns at home None of those countries are anywhere near US levels of gun ownership. See the table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... USA has 120 guns pr 100 citizens. Of the countries on your list, Finland is next with 32. Denmark has 10. > and historically, a lot of them were actual assault rifles Fully automatic weapons are not legal for civilians in Denmark at least. Many semiautos are also banned. Semiauto shotguns must be restricted to hold only two shells and you need a special license even for that. I don’t disagree with your general point, but you’re not making a good comparison IMO.
- iviv 11mo ago
  > Fully automatic weapons are not legal for civilians in Denmark at least. Same in Finland.

tonyhart7 11mo ago

smart guns is future dystopian

actionfromafar 11mo ago
regular guns is current dystopian
- tonyhart7 11mo ago
  so knife is past dystopian????
  - sawjet 11mo ago
    Rock was the original topia
    - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
      2.5 million years ago, a friend of mine Made a tool from a stone and defended his tribe It's technology, sorry for the technical term It's a wheel then a fire and the rest is a blur Aesop Rock https://youtu.be/T7jH-5YQLcE https://youtu.be/T7jH-5YQLcE
- baiac 11mo ago
  Regular guns in the hands of the people is the opposite of dystopian.

atemerev 11mo ago

There are barely any civilian gun markets outside the US. US is really really unique in their relationship to guns.

setopt 11mo ago
This. There’s many countries that allow civilians firearms (e.g. Canada and much of Europe), but generally for hunting purposes and thus more likely to be rifles and shotguns than concealable handguns.

numpad0 11mo ago

The tech just isn't there; hand-held guns don't benefit from a computerized firing system at all. So any smart feature on human sized guns and less will be totally removable addons, and that completely defeats its purpose. Many tanks and planes do have smart guns. Electronic firing control with additional software features that impede firing are beneficial and totally fine at that scale.

actionfromafar 11mo ago
Seems it's coming though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMASH_Handheld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMASH_Handheld
- numpad0 11mo ago
  That's just a scope. Comes right off and the gun reverts to a regular M4. Most(though not all) other smart gun attempts work in a similar fashion; the host gun works exactly as it were, except an extraneous metal bit inhibits firing. If the bit was removed or held down, it reverts to the original host gun and fires normally. As such, the extra bit is literally extraneous, irrelevant to the gun's working.

refurb 11mo ago

The correct answer is - all the designs so far aren’t great. The military would love a smart gun to cut down on accidental discharges. Cops would love it to stop weapons being used against cops. The issue is that it has to have a very high reliability (you don’t want it to fail to fire while a suspect is shooting at you). And not much point if it only works “sometimes” with unauthorized users.