Good article, glad to see some knowledgable firearms writing in the general press.
This is how I've felt as a gun owner over the last two decades, translated into computing:
Imagine that someone in California hacked into a power station and caused a blackout. Police responded and found the hacker and their equipment. Shortly thereafter an "anti-hacking" bill appeared in the state legislature to prevent a repeat of such a disaster. The attacker used some strange system called Ubuntu which most computer users have little or no reason to have, so that was specifically outlawed in the state (while any other Linux distro is fine). They had a quad-core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and a USB 2.0 keyboard for "faster hacking"; the bill mandated a limit of 9 gigs, 2 cores, and PS/2 connectors only. The attacker also used something called the "TCP protocol" (misnomer intended); the bill also mandated that the protocol include a 4th and 5th step transmitting "I am not a hacker" and acknowledging "You will be prosecuted with a felony under California SB1137 for improper use of this TCP protocol".
The bill passes and no more hacks occur. Other states don't want to be seen as soft on crime, so they draft copycat bills and randomly ban openSUSE, Gentoo, and trackballs with more than 6 buttons. Within a few years computer enthusiast sites pop up detailing which states are safe to travel to with your laptop. 1 gig RAM chips get unexpectedly expensive as everyone wants to get up to that 9 gig limit in restricted states. California legislators visit university computer labs disapprovingly and talk about closing the "Linux loophole". Activist groups lobby Congress, maintaining that the Founding Fathers never could have conceived of computers as an evolution of the printing press and therefore the 1st Amendment did not apply to electronic devices or communications. Programmers everywhere grumble about coding for two different communication protocols depending on whether or not your users are in California (but it's such a big market you can't ignore it). Your mother wonders why you can't just get your work done on an 8 year old laptop running Windows 7, it's good enough for her web browsing!
The contractor maintaining the power plant control system again leaves the web admin panel open and unsecured after testing from home and forgetting to unflip a poorly labeled feature flag on the production server.
Computers have uses beyond hacking. Guns are for killing. Killing in self-defense, honing your killing skills as a sport/recreation activity, deterring bad behavior by threat of killing, killing things that are socially acceptable to kill (i.e. game animals), sure, but the theme is killing.
Lockpicks might be a better example. Many similar arguments apply: their use is to open doors without the correct keys, which only a few specialized professions should have a legitimate need to do. Yet on the other hand we ought to be able to tinker with our private property, evaluate its security (bad guys will get lockpicks anyway), let ourselves in if we get locked out, publish security research on "unpickable" locks and participate in locksport.
Or for a more direct computing analogy, Metasploit. It is unambiguously a hacking tool, but it remains legal because bad guys will always get hacking tools, and the good guys need to be able to evaluate their defenses.
Unfortunately that's not too far from what they've been trying to do with the Wassenaar Arrangement lately, with export restrictions on "intrusion software".
If the government really wanted to push "smart guns," they could do it easily. How? Well, the U.S government is the single biggest purchaser of guns & ammo in the world. If they required all of their guns to be smart guns, manufacturers would suddenly shift production to make smart guns and it would raise the cost of production (and thus the price) for traditional weapons. But as you and others in this thread have stated, this has a number of problems not only for the government but for users and their legal rights.
So, is it the Stockton schoolyard or 101 California Street shooting that you liken to a blackout? I guess its a pretty dramatic blackout since at least 5 people dies...
You also neglect the detail that the police response was of little consequence as the hacker had committed suicide before they police was at the scene.
I'm unsure what the web panel remark can mean concretely, exactly what did the children at Sandy Hook Elementary do to cause a "blackout"?
Ironically, you've just described the concealed-carry laws that are proliferating through the states right now, which are all based on hunches and gut feeling. As a gun owner over the last two decades, do you feel as uneasy about that proliferation?
This reminds me of the "cars can use kill people too!" disingenuous line of thought.
Cars can kill people, but they are primarily used for transportation.
Guns have no other purpose but to kill. You may use it for other stuff (sport, in general). But it was created to kill something. Any analogy where you take some other object that has the potential to be purposefully misused is pretty much invalid when you're talking about the other object's primary purpose.
I'm an engineer, gun owner, and former NRA member[1].
I hate the idea of smart guns, but politics are a distant secondary concern.
Firearms fail all the time, even the simple reliable ones. Bad primers, failure to eject, failure to cycle, stovepipes, etc. It takes education and then repeated training to know how to deal with failures. In a pressure situation you revert to your lowest level of training; muscle memory will give you the best chance to respond appropriately.
Just dealing with mechanical failures quickly and correctly takes very intentional practice.
The last thing I want to have is another thing that can fail in a pressure situation that can't be resolved via trained response. E.g., for a bad primer or failure to eject I can do what's called a tap/rack/bang drill. But there's nothing I can do to train for some type of software failure or battery being dead or some other type of non-mechanical failure that bricks my firearm.
[1]Former because the NRA"s lobbing efforts and powers are ridiculously overstated. Their entire entire existence as near as I can tell is to sell their member's names to third parties. I've never received as much crap snail mail and email as I did during the year I belonged to the NRA.
The NRA hates smartguns for at least 3 reasons. First is the government is trying to force an unreliable and complex feature onto a product that needs to work every time. Second is the government has no plans to use it themselves, which speaks volumes about what their LEOs and the US military thinks of the reliability this technology. Last is the government is trying to solve a people problem with technology. BTW, these people problems are the result of Democrat's policies in gun-free cities such as Chicago, St Louis, Oakland and Baltimore.
Author here. I covered all three points you raised on my previous piece for TC this topic, so I didn't see the need to repeat myself here. That piece is linked in the opener of this article.
"...trying to force an unreliable and complex feature onto a product that needs to work every time."
This. This is my biggest problem with smart-gun tech. We still haven't managed to figure out how to write software for hundred-million-dollar space projects that doesn't crash (the Japanese Hitomi satellite[2] being the latest of many); how on Earth are we going to implement smart gun technology correctly?
(actually, I would argue that we still can't write durable software in general, and as such we should avoid integrating it into important things such as guns and cars until we can improve our development skills)
While I agree with (and just stopped writing a long response about) the unreliable and complex feature argument - consider adding the necessary components to a semiautomatic handgun - I wouldn't call the article ignorant. There are many reasons the NRA and gun owners in general dislike "smart" guns, some of which include the soft, social reasoning the article outlines.
Hard technical arguments of feasibility and reliability tend to have little effect on those that espouse this form of gun control. They'd typically prefer the guns not be there in the first place, and don't particularly care how feasible or reliable the result is. Social arguments, however, tend to affect them more, or at least can put the argument in a place they find harder to dismiss. We need both parts to make the strongest argument.
higher up in this thread, it is argued that the primary purpose of a gun is either punching holes in a piece of paper or a "tin can" or busting clay birds.
those don't seem like times when it is critical to work every time.
The article makes it sound theoretical, but New Jersey already has the Childproof Handgun Law that makes it illegal to sell a non-smart gun "three years after it is determined that personalized handguns are available for retail purposes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_...
Smart guns aren't going to hinder anyone but responsible people.
We need a few things:
1) Funding alternatives to incarceration. People that go to jail tend to have a frequent flyer card.
2) Law enforcement sharing of critical data on offenders.
3) Funding treatment and therapy programs for drug abusers (ABUSERS, key word. I know this isn't a popular opinion on HN, but ABUSE and USE are two different things)
4) Finally, we need to wake up and realize there ARE bad people in the world, and unless you live in a small community, you can't have 100% safety. You can react by protecting yourself (yes, carry concealed), or if you're not comfortable with that, take a professional classes on how to survive extreme situations. Your safety at the end of the day is your responsibility ultimately.
Smart guns have an interesting history. In the 90's Colt developed a smart gun, but the results "backfired." Anti-gun groups were against it because of the idea that safer guns meant that the barrier to entry to ownership was lower (now that guns are "safer", why not have one?); people who depended upon guns for their livelihood were skeptical: when you need to use one there needs to be no questions that it will function (barring all the traditional issues of "dumb" gun); if successful, other manufacturings would have to follow suit and there could be legal actions against "dumb" gun manufacturing and ownershpi...etc.
I've linked some articles that touch upon this attempt by Colt.
Smart guns are to self-defense and the gun industry what the Clipper chip was to encryption and the communications industry, except the Clipper chip actually worked.
That's the conclusion I came to when looking at the market for smart guns (I was interested in smart attachments for guns, think Fitbit for your gun). Smart guns drum up a bunch of press and buzz from people who will never buy them. It's a failure to understand the target market, who hates the concept for reasons mentioned elsewhere in this comment section.
Washington regulates a million things over which is has no particular expertise. Including, but not limited, to medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, food production, law, agriculture, investment banks, the oil and gas industry, and on and on.
The fact that the government is bad at regulating these things doesn't mean that any step they take will be bad. The details matter, and it doesn't mean you should terminate any regulatory effort before it is defined.
In many (maybe all) of these areas, some regulation is needed.
If you commit a felony and are as a result never again allowed to purchase a firearm, your rights are being perpetually limited, and I and a lot of other people object to that, and it's arguably a violation of the 8th ammendment.
If background checks were more limited in the kind of background they checked for, say only restricting people who had injured someone using a firearm, then there might be fewer objections.
And felons who want to buy a gun for nefarious purposes are either smart enough to pay up and get an unregistered one on the black market (so you're not targeting them with background checks) or dumb enough to get one at a local gun store. But the dumb ones are still felons, which means they likely have criminal connections, and if they need a gun they probably can find another way to get one. So by stopping them from buying a firearm legally, they're more likely to end up with unregistered weapon, which makes the DoJ's job harder. I concede that a fair number of them might be inconvenienced enough to just not buy a gun, but then many of them will just go on to stab people instead of shooting them. The number of actual lives saved by background checks is probably much lower than people think.
Further, background checks are notoriously unreliable, turning up plenty of hard-to-resolve false-positives and dangerous false-negatives.
And then there's restrictions on mental health conditions. The problem with these is that people like guns, and if someone who likes guns thinks they might have a mental health disorder like bipolar or schizophrenia that would perclude them from owning one, they won't see a doctor. The result is that they won't get treatment and are more likely to hurt themselves, and indeed, others. Shootings and violent crime have been declining for decades, but the lives of the mentally ill have not been improving. I find the mental health problem much more important than the gun control issues to the proper functioning of our society, it's just that gun violence is more visible. This is a hard problem, and there will have to be compromises but it has to be part of the debate.
I don't know why the NRA opposes background checks, but there are good reasons to.
The argument I have heard is that a universal background checks system would require the government to keep a registry of gun owners to be at all useful. You have to be able to go back and prove whether a seller performed the proper background check before selling a gun to a particular person.
A possible alternative I thought and have always wondered why it doesn't get used would be some sort of private public key cryptography where the seller would get a signed certificate proving they ran a background check and it's result, but the government wouldn't store anything.
I think we all know why. In fact. This author implies it: the NRA actually represents the business interests of people who manufacture and sell firearms. They may mask these interests as a public service, defending your rights and hobbies and whatnot but it is always the case that they oppose anything that would reduce firearm sales and support anything that makes it easier for you to get a gun.
I wouldn't say "hate", as it is too strong a word. But smart guns have the same problem as self-driving cars: they take control from you and transfer it to unknown actors (a random computer programmer? Clueless legislators? Various three-letter government agencies?)
Conversely, anti-gun folks and self-driving car proponents consider guns and cars too dangerous to be left in hands of _those people_. Those a better left in hands of experts, they say.
> Those a better left in hands of experts, they say.
Not sure about guns, but your average driver is definitely not an expert in operating their car. Hell, the widespread rejection of the opinion of experts is a part of the driving culture (speeding, ignoring traffic laws). When it comes to cars, I'm totally willing to trust that (not so) "random programmer" over an average person.
> Conversely, anti-gun folks and self-driving car proponents consider guns and cars too dangerous to be left in hands of _those people_. Those a better left in hands of experts, they say.
That sums up my position nicely. I would not trust myself with either of these things.
I'd be a lot more interested in a smart gun SAFE than in smart guns.
What I want most, specifically, is a bedside pistol safe, the size of a "gun vault", which is actually secure, but still rapid-access.
(The problems with the "gun vault" style safes are numerous -- some of them can be simply dropped 6" and they pop open from inertia on the locking mechanism. Others can be defeated surreptitiously by peeling off a sticker and inserting a paperclip to hit the reset button inside. They're not suitable for leaving a loaded firearm inside when you have untrustworthy people about for extended periods. The only reasonable model right now is to take a carry gun and put it in the safe every night (which is great IFF you carry every day), or to transfer a weapon from a "real" safe to the bedside vault every night. The problem is at some point you might forget, and both false-positive and false-negative kind of suck there.)
The tradeoff I'm willing to make is spending $1k for this vs. $100, and accepting two distinct entry modes: an slow-path "unattended/unprimed" mode which uses a UL group II electronic lock for access, with timeout-access, and a fast-path "day gate" (which would actually be night gate...) which opens quickly using (ideally) a chording keyboard mechanism, or biometric, or something else.
What I absolutely want to defend against is surreptitious entry when unattended -- i.e. for someone with kids, capable of entering hundreds or thousands of combinations in a week, there should be very low risk of users brute forcing the combo or otherwise gaining access in a way which doesn't leave evidence/alarm. Ideally, tamper events would lock the safe down to full TL-15 mode; if your kids can defeat a TL-15 safe, particularly surreptitiously when it is monitored every day, they might deserve the firearm for their new life of crime.
I'd be willing to have no override capability on the fast-path -- if it misreads, or is at all suspicious, if fails back to the slow-path. The mechanism for enabling fast-path might be unrelated to the slow-path entry mechanism (i.e. you don't need to open the door); what I was thinking of was some kind of presence-detect using bluetooth watch (Apple Watch) challenge-response, or something like that.
I could accomplish this today by buying an actual UL TL-15 safe of some size and putting a gunvault inside it, but that takes up a lot of space, and would weigh half a ton. There has to be a better solution.
I'd also like to have it tied into my alarm system and notifications -- if someone attempts to enter the safe, I want a notification on my phone. I'd also like to be able to force slow-path-only remotely. (I'd also like to have lighting, cameras, etc. controlled by alarm events, but that's a separate thing; I'd prefer NOT to have my bedroom recorded on video normally, but when the gun safe is opened, I'd like video logs to be streamed offsite in realtime.)
These threads are always so weird to me - from a country where I have never known someone who owns a gun or ever seen one outside of police carrying them.
Interesting to me how many people feel so strongly about a topic, often to such a degree that they openly void having an understanding of views counter to their own and unable to express the reasoning behind their own beliefs in any meaningful way.
To me, this is the real issue, not that there's a topic people disagree on.
_______
Re: SmartGuns — People kill people, and if someone wants to harm someone, they will. To me, a more natural solution would be to have areas, much like schools, that're gun free, and others that are not. Clearly this won't fit the issues, but it might end the debates.
Not clear. Prior to Scalia's death, on the ground if you don't count Illinois, which was not appealed to the Supremes, and California and Hawaii, where it looks like the appeals court will overturn the current shall issue decision en banc, on the ground there's been no changes, because the Supremes have denied cert to every case appealed to them aside from the Massachusetts stun gun case just decided.
The bottom line is that Heller and McDonald mean we have a right to keep some types of arms, and bear them inside our homes, nothing more. And surely you've noticed how replacing Scalia is claimed by gun-grabbers as a necessary step towards reversing, de facto or de jure, both of those decisions, e.g. http://thehill.com/regulation/277248-chelsea-clinton-scotus-...
I don't want backdoors in my guns just like I don't want backdoors in my encryption. It's really that simple.
Also reminder that Marx was an advocate of widespread gun ownership by the working class, much for the same reasons that the founding fathers of the USA were. Solving the underlying economic issues causing suicide and violence would make far more sense than covering up the symptoms. At the end of the day it's all about poverty.
Reasons against smart guns - smart appliances don't work well, never have, never will. I prefer things simple, mechanical and working instead of praying that some Dilbert style company developed an usable software.
I live in a country that has very restrictive gun ownership regime - and yet every person knows instinctively about the gun safety rules:
1. Always assume loaded, unless proven otherwise
2. Don't point it at something you don't want to kill.
I am sure that people will appreciate when their gun starts firmware update or resets during a boar charging at you situation.
[+] [-] jboggan|10 years ago|reply
This is how I've felt as a gun owner over the last two decades, translated into computing:
Imagine that someone in California hacked into a power station and caused a blackout. Police responded and found the hacker and their equipment. Shortly thereafter an "anti-hacking" bill appeared in the state legislature to prevent a repeat of such a disaster. The attacker used some strange system called Ubuntu which most computer users have little or no reason to have, so that was specifically outlawed in the state (while any other Linux distro is fine). They had a quad-core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and a USB 2.0 keyboard for "faster hacking"; the bill mandated a limit of 9 gigs, 2 cores, and PS/2 connectors only. The attacker also used something called the "TCP protocol" (misnomer intended); the bill also mandated that the protocol include a 4th and 5th step transmitting "I am not a hacker" and acknowledging "You will be prosecuted with a felony under California SB1137 for improper use of this TCP protocol".
The bill passes and no more hacks occur. Other states don't want to be seen as soft on crime, so they draft copycat bills and randomly ban openSUSE, Gentoo, and trackballs with more than 6 buttons. Within a few years computer enthusiast sites pop up detailing which states are safe to travel to with your laptop. 1 gig RAM chips get unexpectedly expensive as everyone wants to get up to that 9 gig limit in restricted states. California legislators visit university computer labs disapprovingly and talk about closing the "Linux loophole". Activist groups lobby Congress, maintaining that the Founding Fathers never could have conceived of computers as an evolution of the printing press and therefore the 1st Amendment did not apply to electronic devices or communications. Programmers everywhere grumble about coding for two different communication protocols depending on whether or not your users are in California (but it's such a big market you can't ignore it). Your mother wonders why you can't just get your work done on an 8 year old laptop running Windows 7, it's good enough for her web browsing!
The contractor maintaining the power plant control system again leaves the web admin panel open and unsecured after testing from home and forgetting to unflip a poorly labeled feature flag on the production server.
[+] [-] superuser2|10 years ago|reply
Lockpicks might be a better example. Many similar arguments apply: their use is to open doors without the correct keys, which only a few specialized professions should have a legitimate need to do. Yet on the other hand we ought to be able to tinker with our private property, evaluate its security (bad guys will get lockpicks anyway), let ourselves in if we get locked out, publish security research on "unpickable" locks and participate in locksport.
Or for a more direct computing analogy, Metasploit. It is unambiguously a hacking tool, but it remains legal because bad guys will always get hacking tools, and the good guys need to be able to evaluate their defenses.
[+] [-] cvwright|10 years ago|reply
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/us-to-renegotiate...
[+] [-] sgnelson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vexs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muglug|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partiallypro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Frompo|10 years ago|reply
You also neglect the detail that the police response was of little consequence as the hacker had committed suicide before they police was at the scene.
I'm unsure what the web panel remark can mean concretely, exactly what did the children at Sandy Hook Elementary do to cause a "blackout"?
[+] [-] lousyanalogy|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] popmystack|10 years ago|reply
Cars can kill people, but they are primarily used for transportation.
Guns have no other purpose but to kill. You may use it for other stuff (sport, in general). But it was created to kill something. Any analogy where you take some other object that has the potential to be purposefully misused is pretty much invalid when you're talking about the other object's primary purpose.
[+] [-] crikli|10 years ago|reply
I hate the idea of smart guns, but politics are a distant secondary concern.
Firearms fail all the time, even the simple reliable ones. Bad primers, failure to eject, failure to cycle, stovepipes, etc. It takes education and then repeated training to know how to deal with failures. In a pressure situation you revert to your lowest level of training; muscle memory will give you the best chance to respond appropriately.
Just dealing with mechanical failures quickly and correctly takes very intentional practice.
The last thing I want to have is another thing that can fail in a pressure situation that can't be resolved via trained response. E.g., for a bad primer or failure to eject I can do what's called a tap/rack/bang drill. But there's nothing I can do to train for some type of software failure or battery being dead or some other type of non-mechanical failure that bricks my firearm.
[1]Former because the NRA"s lobbing efforts and powers are ridiculously overstated. Their entire entire existence as near as I can tell is to sell their member's names to third parties. I've never received as much crap snail mail and email as I did during the year I belonged to the NRA.
[+] [-] vaadu|10 years ago|reply
The NRA hates smartguns for at least 3 reasons. First is the government is trying to force an unreliable and complex feature onto a product that needs to work every time. Second is the government has no plans to use it themselves, which speaks volumes about what their LEOs and the US military thinks of the reliability this technology. Last is the government is trying to solve a people problem with technology. BTW, these people problems are the result of Democrat's policies in gun-free cities such as Chicago, St Louis, Oakland and Baltimore.
[+] [-] jonstokes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouric|10 years ago|reply
This. This is my biggest problem with smart-gun tech. We still haven't managed to figure out how to write software for hundred-million-dollar space projects that doesn't crash (the Japanese Hitomi satellite[2] being the latest of many); how on Earth are we going to implement smart gun technology correctly?
(actually, I would argue that we still can't write durable software in general, and as such we should avoid integrating it into important things such as guns and cars until we can improve our development skills)
[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2086422-japanese-satell...
[+] [-] schismsubv|10 years ago|reply
Hard technical arguments of feasibility and reliability tend to have little effect on those that espouse this form of gun control. They'd typically prefer the guns not be there in the first place, and don't particularly care how feasible or reliable the result is. Social arguments, however, tend to affect them more, or at least can put the argument in a place they find harder to dismiss. We need both parts to make the strongest argument.
[+] [-] minimax|10 years ago|reply
I don't know about the other three cities, but you can concealed carry in Chicago and that has been the case for almost three years now.
[+] [-] pazimzadeh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zardgiv|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8note|10 years ago|reply
those don't seem like times when it is critical to work every time.
[+] [-] hirundo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|10 years ago|reply
We need a few things:
1) Funding alternatives to incarceration. People that go to jail tend to have a frequent flyer card.
2) Law enforcement sharing of critical data on offenders.
3) Funding treatment and therapy programs for drug abusers (ABUSERS, key word. I know this isn't a popular opinion on HN, but ABUSE and USE are two different things)
4) Finally, we need to wake up and realize there ARE bad people in the world, and unless you live in a small community, you can't have 100% safety. You can react by protecting yourself (yes, carry concealed), or if you're not comfortable with that, take a professional classes on how to survive extreme situations. Your safety at the end of the day is your responsibility ultimately.
[+] [-] dpflan|10 years ago|reply
I've linked some articles that touch upon this attempt by Colt.
NRP Article: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/07/473416699/how-an-idea-to-devel...
Hacker News Discussion of Article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11462297
[+] [-] bdowling|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koolba|10 years ago|reply
[1]: Okay maybe not everybody but based on my anecdata it's everybody.
[+] [-] chillacy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] appleflaxen|10 years ago|reply
The fact that the government is bad at regulating these things doesn't mean that any step they take will be bad. The details matter, and it doesn't mean you should terminate any regulatory effort before it is defined.
In many (maybe all) of these areas, some regulation is needed.
[+] [-] sanj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrusi|10 years ago|reply
If background checks were more limited in the kind of background they checked for, say only restricting people who had injured someone using a firearm, then there might be fewer objections.
And felons who want to buy a gun for nefarious purposes are either smart enough to pay up and get an unregistered one on the black market (so you're not targeting them with background checks) or dumb enough to get one at a local gun store. But the dumb ones are still felons, which means they likely have criminal connections, and if they need a gun they probably can find another way to get one. So by stopping them from buying a firearm legally, they're more likely to end up with unregistered weapon, which makes the DoJ's job harder. I concede that a fair number of them might be inconvenienced enough to just not buy a gun, but then many of them will just go on to stab people instead of shooting them. The number of actual lives saved by background checks is probably much lower than people think.
Further, background checks are notoriously unreliable, turning up plenty of hard-to-resolve false-positives and dangerous false-negatives.
And then there's restrictions on mental health conditions. The problem with these is that people like guns, and if someone who likes guns thinks they might have a mental health disorder like bipolar or schizophrenia that would perclude them from owning one, they won't see a doctor. The result is that they won't get treatment and are more likely to hurt themselves, and indeed, others. Shootings and violent crime have been declining for decades, but the lives of the mentally ill have not been improving. I find the mental health problem much more important than the gun control issues to the proper functioning of our society, it's just that gun violence is more visible. This is a hard problem, and there will have to be compromises but it has to be part of the debate.
I don't know why the NRA opposes background checks, but there are good reasons to.
[+] [-] space_fountain|10 years ago|reply
A possible alternative I thought and have always wondered why it doesn't get used would be some sort of private public key cryptography where the seller would get a signed certificate proving they ran a background check and it's result, but the government wouldn't store anything.
[+] [-] ixtli|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fdhj4094njdf|10 years ago|reply
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/nra-supported-backgrou...
[+] [-] atemerev|10 years ago|reply
Conversely, anti-gun folks and self-driving car proponents consider guns and cars too dangerous to be left in hands of _those people_. Those a better left in hands of experts, they say.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
Not sure about guns, but your average driver is definitely not an expert in operating their car. Hell, the widespread rejection of the opinion of experts is a part of the driving culture (speeding, ignoring traffic laws). When it comes to cars, I'm totally willing to trust that (not so) "random programmer" over an average person.
[+] [-] yorwba|10 years ago|reply
That sums up my position nicely. I would not trust myself with either of these things.
[+] [-] rdl|10 years ago|reply
What I want most, specifically, is a bedside pistol safe, the size of a "gun vault", which is actually secure, but still rapid-access.
(The problems with the "gun vault" style safes are numerous -- some of them can be simply dropped 6" and they pop open from inertia on the locking mechanism. Others can be defeated surreptitiously by peeling off a sticker and inserting a paperclip to hit the reset button inside. They're not suitable for leaving a loaded firearm inside when you have untrustworthy people about for extended periods. The only reasonable model right now is to take a carry gun and put it in the safe every night (which is great IFF you carry every day), or to transfer a weapon from a "real" safe to the bedside vault every night. The problem is at some point you might forget, and both false-positive and false-negative kind of suck there.)
The tradeoff I'm willing to make is spending $1k for this vs. $100, and accepting two distinct entry modes: an slow-path "unattended/unprimed" mode which uses a UL group II electronic lock for access, with timeout-access, and a fast-path "day gate" (which would actually be night gate...) which opens quickly using (ideally) a chording keyboard mechanism, or biometric, or something else.
What I absolutely want to defend against is surreptitious entry when unattended -- i.e. for someone with kids, capable of entering hundreds or thousands of combinations in a week, there should be very low risk of users brute forcing the combo or otherwise gaining access in a way which doesn't leave evidence/alarm. Ideally, tamper events would lock the safe down to full TL-15 mode; if your kids can defeat a TL-15 safe, particularly surreptitiously when it is monitored every day, they might deserve the firearm for their new life of crime.
I'd be willing to have no override capability on the fast-path -- if it misreads, or is at all suspicious, if fails back to the slow-path. The mechanism for enabling fast-path might be unrelated to the slow-path entry mechanism (i.e. you don't need to open the door); what I was thinking of was some kind of presence-detect using bluetooth watch (Apple Watch) challenge-response, or something like that.
I could accomplish this today by buying an actual UL TL-15 safe of some size and putting a gunvault inside it, but that takes up a lot of space, and would weigh half a ton. There has to be a better solution.
I'd also like to have it tied into my alarm system and notifications -- if someone attempts to enter the safe, I want a notification on my phone. I'd also like to be able to force slow-path-only remotely. (I'd also like to have lighting, cameras, etc. controlled by alarm events, but that's a separate thing; I'd prefer NOT to have my bedroom recorded on video normally, but when the gun safe is opened, I'd like video logs to be streamed offsite in realtime.)
[+] [-] tomwilson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LyndsySimon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxzero|10 years ago|reply
To me, this is the real issue, not that there's a topic people disagree on.
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Re: SmartGuns — People kill people, and if someone wants to harm someone, they will. To me, a more natural solution would be to have areas, much like schools, that're gun free, and others that are not. Clearly this won't fit the issues, but it might end the debates.
[+] [-] aaroninsf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anonbanker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hga|10 years ago|reply
The bottom line is that Heller and McDonald mean we have a right to keep some types of arms, and bear them inside our homes, nothing more. And surely you've noticed how replacing Scalia is claimed by gun-grabbers as a necessary step towards reversing, de facto or de jure, both of those decisions, e.g. http://thehill.com/regulation/277248-chelsea-clinton-scotus-...
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fhrjfjc|10 years ago|reply
Also reminder that Marx was an advocate of widespread gun ownership by the working class, much for the same reasons that the founding fathers of the USA were. Solving the underlying economic issues causing suicide and violence would make far more sense than covering up the symptoms. At the end of the day it's all about poverty.
[+] [-] venomsnake|10 years ago|reply
I live in a country that has very restrictive gun ownership regime - and yet every person knows instinctively about the gun safety rules:
1. Always assume loaded, unless proven otherwise 2. Don't point it at something you don't want to kill.
I am sure that people will appreciate when their gun starts firmware update or resets during a boar charging at you situation.