Some students in a Plano, Texas school want to take a technological approach to stopping mass shootings.
Boy-howdy it’s a bad idea.
Smart Gun Prototype Aimed at Stopping Mass Shootings
You’ve heard of smart phones, smart cars and even smart homes.
Now, a group of Collin County teens are developing a new high-tech device: A smart gun.
After the Las Vegas concert massacre, the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and numerous guns brought on local campuses, the group of students said enough’s enough and developed what they hope will be a solution.
“It’s fear stimulating and in my group we were like, we can’t deal with this, we have to do something about it,” said Salwa Shahid, a junior at Plano West High School.
My problem with smart guns is this, eventually they will be made mandatory. New Jersey has the Childproof Handgun Law which bans all non-smart handguns three years after smart guns become “available for retail sale.” That may be too difficult to pass in other states, or at the Federal level, but New York has tried to push a law that would require gun owners to carry a $1 Million liability insurance policy as a prerequisite for gun ownership. I can see mandatory insurance on non-smart guns being used to make non-smart gun ownership prohibitively expensive.
Then there are all sorts of regulatory runarounds when it comes to mandating safety technology. Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell wants all new cars to come with BAC ignition interlocks so you have to pass a breathalyzer to turn on your car. “If it only saves one life.” Seriously.
Imagine what legislators could do to lock you out of your smart gun.
The Secure Gun is a modified Nerf gun.
A camera on the front uses artificial intelligence to detect if a gun is pointed at a person, crowd, animal or target.
If aimed at a person or crowd, the gun limits the amount of times you can pull the trigger.
Just how good is that AI? Can it tell a human from a Defense Criminal Investigative Service B-60 Target or a B-21 Qualification Target?
What is it’s rate of false positives, i.e., it thinks it’s looking at a person but it’s not?
How far away is the AI accurate?
Can it tell a good guy from a bad guy?
Also, for bad guys, how easy is it to override this technology. Can I just hang a picture of a target over the camera and make the AI think I’m shooting at paper? So the bad guy who wants to break the law can disable the safety, but the law abiding citizen can’t (because, disabling the safety will be illegal).
I don’t know but I don’t trust it.
“You still are allowed to do one bullet every 20 seconds so you still are allowed to use self-defense so it’s still going to work,” said Shahid.
Because good guys never miss. Because bad guys always go down with a first shot hit. Because there are never multiple attackers.
GPS on the gun would create geo-fences, stopping it from firing in certain locations like schools and churches.
Because things like the good guy who stopped the Sutherland Springs Church Shooting or the woman who stopped the church shooting in Colorado Springs never happen and there is no reason for a good guy to be at a church with a gun.
“We realize that this will offend some people but the thing is you have to have compromise … you have to have a compromise in order to have the better of humanity,” said Hanzala Rehan, a senior at Plano West High School.
There is no compromise on this. I am not letting anyone, other than myself, have the ability to control if the gun goes bang when I want it to.
The Secure Gun, they say, would be built into new guns and a version would be made to be retrofitted onto existing guns.
The prototype and any implementation – they know – has a long way to go.
But their sites are set on turning the tricked-out toy into in a solution to a serious problem.
The Secure Gun placed in the top five at a competition with innovations from 45 countries.
A patent for the device is pending.
And so it is on the path to becoming the next mandatory safety device imposed on us.
Anti-gun politicians can say:
“See, you still have your gun rights, we’re just limiting how fast you can shoot, what you can shoot at, where you can shoot, how many rounds your gun holds, and we can turn it off remotely. But we’re not taking your guns away.”
This is just awful.
There is only one upside to this that I can think of. Between a gun that limited to one shot every 20 seconds and a magazine capacity of 5 to 10 rounds, by other laws, I might have a decent chance of taking on Rob Letham or Travis Tomasie in a match if I just practice my reloads. It’s a much more level laying field.
Jesus, I feel dumber just from reading that article.
Edit: The news article, not your fisking, Miguel. Sorry, I looked at my comment and was like ‘Oh hell, that can be taken SO badly..’
On the million dollar insurance thing: I suppose NY would combine that with “legal” pressure against insurance companies insuring gun owners. They’d call it “murder insurance” or something like that.
The likely, and intended, outcome is that there would be an insurance requirement but no availability of that insurance. Skydivers know all about this, which is why they absolutely oppose any attempt to impose insurance requirements onto skydiving operations. (Instead they have liability waivers, serious ones that work.)
You’ll be able to disable it with a reasonably strong magnet, just like the last smartgun.
One of my problems with the “Next Amazing New Technology That Will Make Everything Great” when applied to life and death situations, is that no one seems to consider when (not if) it fails, is there a manual over ride, can it be hacked, etc? If the worst that happens is that I can’t watch “Justified” when I want because the internet is down, thats one thing, If I crash into a kid on a bike because my “self driving” car freezes up, thats a whole different issue.
Also there are a hell of a lot of perfectly functional “Dumb” guns in circulation. Bad guys can steal, these, or make their own. The big fallacy of gun control is that people who plan illegal acts will somehow obey the law regarding gun possession.
I’ve said this countless times. My dad had a brand new Mercedes with the latest drive by wire tech. He hit a 5 gal paint bucket that fell off a truck in front of him on the highway. The car died and left him without breaks or steering at highway speeds. It’s amazing he survived the accident. My truck can die but I still can stand on the break pedal and muscle the steering wheel in an emergency.
I have two gun safes, one has a digital lock for fast access. The other is a S&G mechanical lock. All my stuff is split up between the two safes with redundancy for just that reason.
Please start using “read more’ in your articles. The front page is a mess.
That was highly explanatory… NOT.
Care to share details of what offends you so much it has left you unable to provide a description?
I think he’s saying that he wants you to make your site like Wirecutter’s.
Gain an extra click? Nah…
“It’s fear stimulating and in my group we were like, we can’t deal with this, we have to do something about it,”
Fear is always a good basis for logical thinking & discourse… not. And they promptly follow that with the we-have-to-do-something-about-it excuse, favored by progtards as one of their main reasons to oppress others (think-of-the-children being their #1 excuse).
Yeah… this is going to go swimmingly. /sarc
What is it’s rate of false positives, i.e., it thinks it’s looking at a person but it’s not?
More to the point: What is its rate of false negatives, i.e., it thinks it’s looking at a “safe” target but it’s not?
Also: What is its failure mode, e.g., if the battery runs out or the AI fails to make a determination? Lacking a definite “yes/no”, will it go “BANG” or “click”?
Also: How susceptible is the AI to being remotely hacked to insist on shooting human targets (and going “click” on bulls-eyes)? On that note, how susceptible is the AI to being remotely hacked to do ANYTHING it’s not designed to do? Is security built-in? Was it included as an afterthought? Was it thought of at all?
Bottom line: If this ever makes it into production, I insist it be field-tested by the NYPD; it should become their standard-issue sidearm, and the AI should be installed on all their “patrol rifles”. Give it 10 years for trial and evaluation. Then (and only then) we’ll know if it’s a viable self-defense device for normal use and public safety.
Mandate it for the police first. Oh wait, that never happens because they know it’s junk and will get people killed.
And that alone proves it’s not ready for prime-time.
It’s the same as the argument, “‘Assault weapons’ are designed only for killing a lot of people as quickly as possible” so civilians shouldn’t be allowed them. But police should have them … why? Because of all the “killing a lot of people as quickly as possible” they do on a daily basis?
Following the same logic, if “smart guns” are designed only to save lives, police should be the VERY FIRST to get them, since they’re supposed to be in the business of stopping crime and saving lives, right? And if you’ll recall, the whole entire impetus for developing user-authenticated firearms was to prevent police from being shot with their own guns. But they’re exempted from that, just like they’ll be exempted from this … why? Because of all that “shooting whoever and whatever they want whenever they want and however fast they want” they do daily?
The arguments make absolutely zero sense.
“We realize that this will offend some people but the thing is you have to have compromise … you have to have a compromise in order to have the better of humanity,” said Hanzala Rehan, a senior at Plano West High School.
Not just offend people- it will kill people.
The flip side: the fire control group is electronic. About a week after the first one hits the market, it will be jailbroken and modified to fire full auto.
Apple will make one that only uses ammo made by Apple, and you will have to send it into the factory to be reloaded. iPhone fans will stand in line for 4 days to plunk down $4,000 to be among the first to own one.
Didn’t NJ repeal that mandatory smart gun law?