The Liberal Gun Club Forum

Because only rich people should have guns...

SwampGrouch: "hackable guns" is great framing. You win a big hug from George Lakoff!

SenorGrand: I was thinking, if this technology could benefit anyone, it would be someone with a particular risk of having their gun stolen and misused. And, yes, that would be LE more than anyone else. Still, anything an electronic lock could achieve would probably be done better by either an improved holster retention device, or a better safe, or both.

I don't like the reporter's analogy to computer and phone locks for several reasons. While a cell phone (unlike a computer) can indeed be a life-saving device in an emergency, its lock and its primary function rely on the same factors: electricity and wireless communication. So if the battery is dead, or you drop the phone in puddle, or a bad guy jams your signal, true, you cannot unlock it, but that is academic because you can't use it to make a (life-saving) call either.

A gun doesn't need electricity or wireless communication to function. If you lock it with a device that does, you introduce a whole new sets of fatal weaknesses, as others above have noted.

Sooo they've managed to make a .22 pistol that's even less reliable than the ones out there now? Amazing…

From the article:

Conway, out in Silicon Valley, said: “You let the free enterprise system take over. Just like everyone opted into the iPhone and abandoned the flip phone and BlackBerry, consumers will vote with their feet. We want gun owners to feel like they are dinosaurs if they aren’t using smart guns.”

The man may be a "titan" in Silicon Valley but that doesn't mean he knows jack shit about the market he's trying to involve himself in. Do you think anyone's told him that one of the two most popular designs of handgun on the market is over 100 years old? That the two most popular handgun cartridge calibers (the closest analogy to an operating system in handguns) are even older? That people pay good money to acquire a Type 03 FFL so they can more easily collect guns classed as "Curios & Relics"?

while the smart gun idea might be stupid, i've been mulling over some radical gun designs that i'd love to have funding for, mr. conway.

The Armatix can't be anything but proof of concept. It's WAY too expensive to be a plinker, it's too small and non-adjustable to be a target gun and not nearly powerful enough to be a viable self-defense or law enforcement gun

I've started the campaign. Found a Yahoo! story about these pieces of junk and used the term "hackable gun" as many times as possible in my comments

TheViking wrote:The Armatix can't be anything but proof of concept. It's WAY too expensive to be a plinker, it's too small and non-adjustable to be a target gun and not nearly powerful enough to be a viable self-defense or law enforcement gun

Yes, this. There was a picture in an article in The Economist that seems to be a more realistic depiction than the what looks to me to be an "artist's impression" of the iP1 in the WaPo piece (read: it's much more ugly), but either way, the only thing it looks good for, given that it's a .22, is a plinker and as you say, Viking, it's way too damned expensive for that.

Hell, the watch alone is projected to be more expensive than your average .22 rimfire pistol.

Euromutt wrote:

TheViking wrote:The Armatix can't be anything but proof of concept. It's WAY too expensive to be a plinker, it's too small and non-adjustable to be a target gun and not nearly powerful enough to be a viable self-defense or law enforcement gun

Yes, this. There was a picture in an article in The Economist that seems to be a more realistic depiction than the what looks to me to be an "artist's impression" of the iP1 in the WaPo piece (read: it's much more ugly), but either way, the only thing it looks good for, given that it's a .22, is a plinker and as you say, Viking, it's way too damned expensive for that.

Hell, the watch alone is projected to be more expensive than your average .22 rimfire pistol.

I've seen it on Armatix' website. Screw that, I didn't pay even near that for my .22 target pistol with adjustable sights and two grips...

Gun restrictionist "Digital Writer," Michele Richinick, weighs in. To be fair, her bio claims she is an "EXPERT IN Guns" so we must take her at her word.
http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/could- ... ntrol-2014

PiratePenguin wrote:Sooo they've managed to make a .22 pistol that's even less reliable than the ones out there now? Amazing…

Load it with Winchester White Box .22's and there's even MORE "safety" built-in. My Ruger 22/45 comes to mind.

I was waiting for a defendant to show up in district court Tuesday, and this story provided a few blessed moments of relief from that. Looking back on the idea, it still seems silly; all of these schemes are too complex and so bound to fail.

If this concept has any hope, it will come in the form of something extremely simple that uses no electricity and can operate in spite of poor grip, using either hand, and while soaking wet.

Something like an unimpaired owner with good judgment and trigger discipline, who keeps the weapon out of sight until its needed.

I might add, if the doohickey works in the hands of my colleague, SwampGrouch, it will work for anyone. I swear he could get a fuggin' 2x4 board to malfunction. But that's another thread, perhaps.

This changes everything. It's the future! Just like biometric locks!

Exactly. One of my NRA instructors talked about showing-off his new biometric safe to his 5-year-old grandson, who promptly put his thumb on the pad and opened the fucking thing.

Guns are never "safe". Putting more safeties on them make their owners less safe.

Keep it simple, stupid.


Great advice. Hurts my feelings every time.

Politicians seem to be moving closer and closer to the future speculated in this "tragicomedy" video a few years ago:

[youtu_be]http://youtu.be/wypFgcqHyvc[/youtu_be]

DoctorB wrote:I might add, if the doohickey works in the hands of my colleague, SwampGrouch, it will work for anyone. I swear he could get a fuggin' 2x4 board to malfunction. But that's another thread, perhaps.

At least my Malfunction Mojo wasn't working with the Mosin or the Officers' ACP.

Euromutt wrote:From the article:

Conway, out in Silicon Valley, said: “You let the free enterprise system take over. Just like everyone opted into the iPhone and abandoned the flip phone and BlackBerry, consumers will vote with their feet. We want gun owners to feel like they are dinosaurs if they aren’t using smart guns.”

The man may be a "titan" in Silicon Valley but that doesn't mean he knows jack shit about the market he's trying to involve himself in.

More importantly, we don't have free enterprise in the firearms market. Guns are allowed onto or withheld from the market through legislation, based on arbitrary features. That's something no one in Silicon Valley has to live with.

A New Jersey law mandates that three years after the first smart gun is sold anywhere in the US, only smartguns will be legally available for sale in New Jersey. If Conway pretends he doesn't know that he's a lying sack of shit. Armatix and Oak Tree Gun Club just threw the entire state of New Jersey under the bus.

In California we are already dealing with the concept of microstamping. A 2007 law similar to New Jersey's said that once microstamping was "viable," all new pistols sold in the state had to feature it. Our glamorous Attorney General "certified" microstamping last October, even though not a single production model anywhere in the world supports it, and so by the end of the year there will probably be almost no semi-auto pistols for sale legally in the state.

This is the reality of new "smart" technologies in the firearms market. Anyone who pretends to the press that it's all about free choice and free enterprise needs to be woken the fuck up.

More up to date coverage of the Oak Tree Gun Club / Armatix mess: http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local ... -gun-club/

There is such a thing as too much security making things less secure because it causes too much inconvenience.

For example, if you work at a place that requires complex passwords with a certain number of characters, numbers, capital letters, etc., the passwords tend to be shorter and harder to remember. If they force you to change them several times a year and have different log-ins for different computer applications and servers, people tend to keep a list of passwords written down. If the worker needs to use multiple passwords on a regular basis, they will likely paste the list on their computer screen with a post it note. Which defeats the entire purpose of the password in the first place.

With a gun you now may have a firing pin safety, hammer block, trigger safety, magazine safety, trigger lock, and now you add biometric safeties, electronic safeties, and on an on. People will be more likely to disable them after purchase to improve convenience and functionality. Thereby potentially reducing the actual security and safety of them by gunsmithing at home.

I use several very old design guns. They have one tried and proven safety mechanism build in. Unloading and a trigger lock is the backup safety.

The password thing is what happens when engineers design security.

The local technical college has an insanely complex password requirement to access your student account. No one remembers their password and everyone writes it down. The most likely way a student account is going to get hacked is be social engineering, not brute-force computer hacking, and the school is making that insanely easy.

here are the requirements....be sure to read the acceptable passwords at the end.

Length: minimum 8 characters/maximum 40 characters

Your password must contain at least one character from three of the following lists in the first 8 characters of the password:Uppercase Alphabetic (A-Z)Numbers (0-9)Lower case Alphabetic (a-z)


These special characters are allowed: ! " $ % & , ( ) * + - . / ; : < = > ? [ \ ] ^ _ { | } ~

These are NOT ALLOWED: # @ and the space character

You are not allowed to use:

Any words of 3 or more characters, including foreign words

Any groups of 3 or more characters of the same character type

Any names, person, places, or things found in a common dictionary

Any of your names (first, middle, last), any current Cal Poly username

Any previously used passwords

Sequences (such as abcd or 1234)

Examples of acceptable passwords:
Jk7-6rM5O

91gh6)vT

29b34+s

Best password summary I've ever seen.

http://xkcd.com/936/

Make guns significantly harder to operate than 100 year old simple designs and people will go back in time, not forward. Or they'll disable the smart safety and have none instead.

I hope that cartoonist gets a six figure deal with google.

To the point of "hackability", it's not just a Denial-of-Service (jamming, in this case) that we need to be concerned about. Some of you may remember how SSL-ifyed Web traffic is said to be so "secure". You know, with all this 128-bit or 256-bit encryption and such. "IT'S SECURE!!!", they loudly trumpet. Guess what? Those transactions ain't secure. How do I know? Easy; caching Web proxies, generally used by ISP's and corporate/government organizations, are quite capable of "Man-In-The-Middle" attacks on SSL transmissions and decrypting everything in that transmission...regardless of how many bits you use in the crypto. There's a basic flaw that allows this to happen, and the end-user won't get that browser notification that their transmissions have been compromised. So much for that bank account password o' yours, eh?

Any lock--ANY lock--can be broken. It just takes enough effort. Same for this electronic "gun lock" nonsense.

Another possibility comes to mind. My guess is that in order for this gun to actually be a gun, fundamentally it's got to be able to work without the electronic doohickey, much like S&W's "Infernal Lock System" for their revolvers was an add-on to an already functional (100-year-old) design. Additionally, the electronic lock mechanism has to be accessible to gunsmiths for repair purposes, meaning you've got to be able to take this thing apart and put it back together, like any other firearm. Therefore, should a New Jersey-like law take effect, it'll probably be a simple matter to remove the damn electronic gizmo and thus have a more reliable (and therefore safer) pistol. You know, "for the children".

inomaha wrote:There is such a thing as too much security making things less secure because it causes too much inconvenience.

Security is the antithesis of convenience. The most secure thing is the least convenient, like encasing it in concrete and dumping it at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. On the other hand, the most convenient thing is the least secure.

Note what Dopey does between 1:45 and 1:55.

I know I would remove it. Unless they require it to be present to have and not just present to be sold. Then I would disable it or worst case superglue the watch mechanism to the gun.

More than likely I'd just buy a 50 year old gun off a facebook ad for cash in a back alley and skip all the nonsense.

Note what Dopey does between 1:45 and 1:55.