The notion of "smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption" is a recipe for making guns - an inherently quite simple tool - into

The notion of "smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption" is a recipe for making guns - an inherently quite simple tool - into something vastly more complicated, expensive, and failure-prone. The NRA doesn't actually oppose the development of "safety features on firearms", but they do oppose the legal requirement that guns should all include features that don't yet exist and haven't been proven to work. Imagine that people were regularly being killed by hammers. Or better yet, baseball bats. Now somebody comes along and claims that if we spent an extra $500 per baseball bat to bolt some complicated new mechanism onto the side of the bat, that would prevent some deaths. Said mechanism hasn't been invented yet, hasn't been proven to work, hasn't been proven to prevent any deaths, and is guaranteed to inconvenience every normal law-abiding user of baseball bats - from now on people would have to spend extra money for a feature they don't want or need. Congress proposes legally mandating this mechanism. Shouldn't the bat-making equivalent of the NRA oppose it? Do you have an iPhone that unlocks via thumbprint? Have you noticed that the (otherwise quite impressive) sensor doesn't work when your hands are wet, or sticky, or greasy, or you're wearing gloves? If you thought you might need a gun for self defense, would you rather have one where pulling the trigger simply fires the gun, or one where you have to have clean bare hands to work and occasionally it stops working reliably and you need to spend a few minutes figuring out how to retrain it? As for that "public-health research that might show...", our public health organizations have already supported a large number of truly terrible politically-motivated studies on the subject. Do we really need to fund more people like Kellerman to give us more nonsense stats supporting positions they already had going in?