So, you have a new take on an old firearms design. The first production models come out and get mixed reviews from firearms experts. Still, your gun is so Buck Rogers looking and the the perceived recoil so minimal it appears you may have some success and market share in the very competitive US market. So, what should you do to ensure you don’t sale enough guns to buy printer ink? Insert not one but two RFID chips in your gun to track it from production to final ownership and beyond.
Smooth move from Chiappa Firearms! Yep, according to a news release, Chiappa guns will be tagged and you can rest assured any gun you buy from them will be able to be traced.
From the press release in Italian and using Google Translate:
Designed specifically for the delicate application, this system has implemented solutions to overcome the limitations of the TAG application, from a strong presence of metallic masses, while respecting the aesthetic product.
The microchip is a writeable, even in stages, which can be inserted in both the visible and protected in that weapon. It ‘hard to removable without significantly altering the characteristics of the weapon and then accompanied the weapon forever, providing all information earnings – and upgradeable – the production cycle, as well as information commercial property on registration and data.
Seriously? Who is in charge of your market research? Sarah Brady?
H/T to One Inch Group
UPDATE 7/28/2011: MKS Supply Inc. the US marketer for Chiappa Firearms has something to say about the chips.
What? Seriously? I hope this isn’t true, but if it is I won’t be getting one.
Apparently it is true. Chiappa has not come out to say either if it is true or not which is not good.
That really sucks then. I knew they still had some mechanical issues to work out, but the design looked promising.
Guys, there’s a reason they did this. The reason is because it implements the intellectual property rights they are attempting to aquire for all methods of encoding information of firearm usage and other parameters into RFID’s contained in the firearm. They know they’re done, so this is a last ditch effort to get patents filed for this idea. Their hope is that eventually the goverment will force all US firearm manufacturers to embed RFID’s into firearms – and guess what, Chiappa owns the patents, which will make them far more wealthy than they could ever have become by selling a butt-ugly revolver. Intellectual property is the “new age” gold mine… Just ask Kodak and other companies who are no longer spending money on R&D and product development – they’re just enforcing their patents with lawsuit after lawsuit. This is basically the same strategy that was used by the group who owns the microcoding technology used to encode spent ammunition casings with the digital ID of the gun that fired it.
Well, no way I’m getting one now.
IPE: It is gonna be a very lonesome and filled with dusty RFID-Tags-for-guns warehouse. As you can see, nobody wants a tagged gun and gun manufacturers will not go along with it.