The Liberal Gun Club Forum

Actually, inomaha, you've just made the case for the private FTF transaction without government interference. Unfortunately, that's illegal in places like the People's Republik of Kalifornia, but it's perfectly legal in Free America (e. g. Washington State, Vermont, Virginia).

I own a shotgun that's old enough the safety was "don't point that this direction". Drop it and it can go off. Snag the hammer on something and it can go off. So the safe way to carry it is to open the breech, then snap it together when you need it.

I could see adding a safety to it that was a simple lever arm, hammer block, and spring. I just went from close to zero safety with the breech closed to 99.99% safe if you slide the arm over to the S position.

Adding anything else to it adds complexity while increasing safety by at best 0.0001 percent while doubling or more the amount of effort it takes to put it in the safe position.

I view these types of safeties the same way. Minimal return on investment or worse. If you wear the watch people might get into a habit of not engaging the manual safety switch when they put the gun down and relying on the electronic proximity safety. Gun's safe right? You've got it on safe until you want to use it. And the manual safety will only slow you down.

So not only does added complexity have a diminishing return, it can actively lead to situations where people ignore the multiple safeties; thereby negating any added benefits. Or worst case, disable all the safeties in their gun when trying to get rid of the most obnoxious one.

Elmo wrote:But one concern is that it will eventually become required by law, making firearms more costly and arguably less reliable in critical situations.

Aaaaand you just hit on the actual "problem" this firearm is intended to solve.

mitch wrote:

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/

Here is a rehash article dated today in which Conway and his ilk would supposedly "rescue" the gun industry with smart tech.
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/04/22/sili ... 46523.html

Speaking at the International Smart Gun Symposium in San Francisco in February, Conway exuded the cockiness of a man who invested early in Google, Airbnb and Twitter. “The gun companies have chosen to sit on their asses and not innovate,” he said. “Silicon Valley is coming to their rescue.”

Conway isn’t a gun owner, and for most of his life, he never gave much thought to firearms. But after Adam Lanza shot up an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, killing 26, Conway created a foundation that has given $1 million to inventors. The goal: perfect user-authenticated firearms.

Doomed to failure.

Today, the NRA says it isn’t against smart guns, just laws that mandate gun owners use them. In 2002, one such law passed in New Jersey. Once smart guns become available, licensed dealers in that state can sell only firearms with user-authenticated technology. Even gun control activists concede the mandate hurt adoption of the technology, and the bill’s original sponsor is trying to get to it amended.