

Silicon Valley tech foundation launches $1 million competition for safer guns - weu
http://www.fastcompany.com/3021232/silicon-valley-trio-launches-1-million-competition-for-smarter-safer-guns-exclusive

======
hga
This is the usual "smart gun" bullshit, which wouldn't make an appreciable
positive difference in the situation.

For one thing, it's telling they start out with a lie. Safety, if used
honestly in this context, refers to preventing accidents, which are an
"official" 600 deaths per year problem (scare quotes because I know criminal
homicides that are scored as "accidents" for the usual political reasons;
details on request).

The real issue is intentional homicides, i.e. guns being as designed. Note
we're talking about a nation with > 300 million existing old fashioned guns in
civilian hands, where in the last ~40 month every month except for last August
has seen greater sales than the previous month a year ago, currently running
at a million a month. Note that with a very minimum of care guns are
functional for decades and decades: I would not feel inadequately armed with a
Mauser 1898 (sic) rifle made in that year or soon after, and my teen
centerfire hunting rifle was sporterized surplus Springfield 03A3, designed in
1903 (using a few Mauser patents :-) and manufactured during WWII. The 3rd
most recent gun I bought was a M1 "Get Off My Lawn" Garand made a few months
after Pearl Harbor (and boy does a part of me wish I hadn't sold that
masterpiece of then cutting edge technology to buy a lighter rifle more
suitable for my RSI injured arms).

The conceit that somehow these new, expensive and less reliable smart guns
will displace the barest fraction of the above existing ones is ludicrous.
Even if you take a long view, it would take centuries.

Then there's the laws, like fanatically anti-gun New Jersey's one that once
there's a "smart gun" on the market, civilians will only be able to buy it.
But, somehow, the Only Ones AKA the law enforcement officers who our betters
insist are the only ones who can be trusted with guns
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6680266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6680266))
will be allowed to retain their old "unsafe" guns. Perhaps because _everyone_
knows they'll be a lot more reliable.

In a county where almost every state has a shall issue concealed carry regime
(obviously excluding most of California for now---the object lesson of
Illinois should give you pause if you're happy with that state of affairs),
adoption of these inherently more complicated and therefore less reliable guns
would surely result more of the wrong people being shot. Although one could
assume from how this is portrayed that to the extent the backers of this are
engaging in rational thought they score all "gun deaths" as the same.

Let me make this as a bottom line closer: if you think there's fierce
opposition to Obamacare, just try to push these on an unwilling population....

------
gnu8
So-called smart guns are not a workable idea, because the technology available
is not capable of producing such a thing.

First, all biometric modalities, including finger print and palm print
scanners, have a non-zero false accept rate (FAR) and false reject rate (FRR).
A biometric system must be fine tuned to balance security with usability,
which is fine for authenticating users of a computer system, but not
acceptable for a firearm.

Second, consumer electronics in general are garbage and have nowhere near the
reliability of a well made handgun. For any given electronic device, a
significant fraction of them will fail every year. Firearms can last for
decades or longer, provided they are maintained. Consumer electronics are not
maintained, they are thrown out when they break.

Finally, what people like this don't seem to understand is that a safe gun
must always fire when the trigger is pulled, as well as never fire when the
trigger is not pulled. The first is just as important as the second. A
legitimately held firearm, whether held by a soldier, police officer, or
private citizen, is a safety-of-life critical instrument that must operate
correctly when it is used, otherwise the user is likely to be killed himself.

------
leot
Do guns need to be lethal? If so, why?

~~~
hga
For hunting and pest control purposes, essentially (details on request, but
being humane is obviously part of it).

For dealing with two legged snakes, not _per se_. Ignoring high energy (not
.22 rimfire) rifles (can address that later if you wish), for normal handguns
in self-defense, what police and civilians can legally do is stopping a lethal
threat. Killing is not and cannot be the objective.

And there's basically three mechanisms for that, only one of which is
reasonably guaranteed to work with normal human marksmanship.

First, when shot once, a large fraction of people will stop their aggression,
e.g. Trayvon Martin is the most recent famous example. For that matter being
shot _at_ is often sufficient (browse YouTube some). But you obviously can't
count on it.

Hitting the central nervous system, brain, or spine high enough, will do it.
But those are small, hard to hit targets, we have strong instincts about
threats to our heads, the brain is well protected with bone, etc. etc. ... and
of course a hit to the brain is often fatal and almost certainly catastrophic.

Failing that, causing someone to lose enough blood they can't keep fighting is
what you're left with---but that's dicey, there are many many incidents where
e.g. heart function is outright stopped and the aggressor continues to be
lethal for 10s of seconds to in some rare cases minutes. And this mechanism is
obviously also hard to keep from going all the way to fatal.

One very special case for police snipers is the hostage situation where they
have to hit the perpetrator's brain stem to prevent him from reflexively
killing his hostage. That's invariably lethal (killed JFK), but still based on
the, in this case, narrow legal distinction that the intent was to stop the
perpetrator from killing a innocent 3rd party, not kill him _per se_.

Ah, I should add the deterrent affect. Being maimed or killed by a civilian is
about the greatest fear of criminals according to surveys; the fact that the
civilians will be using lethal guns is of course behind that. From that it
logically follows that the _vast_ majority of the 2.5 million gun self-defense
incidents in the US every year do not involve anyone getting shot, and almost
always even a shot being fired (warning shots are pretty much never
legitimate).

~~~
Pinckney
>First, when shot once, a large fraction of people will stop their aggression,
e.g. Trayvon Martin is the most recent famous example.

Is this _really_ how we ought to be doing public relations?

~~~
hga
Maybe not, but I decided to do a "Just the facts, Ma'am" posting ... and since
so many are using the Martin case to attack the very idea of self-defense---
and don't say that's silly, for the U.K. effectively outlawed it in the courts
in the '50s, by statute in the following decade or two---I don't think it
hurts to repeat the well established fact that he was the aggressor using
lethal force on Zimmerman when the latter was forced to shoot him.

If you want to dive into that case, it's also telling he only shot Martin once
(because Martin immediately ceased trying to kill him). That doesn't really
jibe with the bogus narrative.

