Furthermore, these people’s earnest desire for a technological quick fix to gun violence has blinded them to the many obvious problems with mixing software and small arms.

This piece is a bit long, so here’s the TL;DR for those who can’t or won’t read the whole thing:

First, no electronic technology is 100% reliable, and very few people will trust a gun that can be turned into a brick by a failure of some on-board circuitry.
Second, whenever you attach software to some new category of things — especially software that has any kind of connection to the outside world, whether via RFID or an actual network — then in addition to whatever problems that thing had before, you’ve introduced a whole host of brand new security and identity problems that are new to that thing and that must be discovered and patched, and then the patches will have problems that must be discovered and patched, and on it goes.
In short, software security is a virtual arms race, and when you put software into a weapon, you turn it into a literal arms race. Ultimately, adding software to guns (or cars, or pacemakers, or anything else) does not make them safer or more secure — rather, it makes them less secure because it gives creative bad actors a whole new avenue for exploits.

But most smart-gun opponents aren’t primarily worried about having their gun remotely disabled by a tech-savvy criminal or a hostile foreign or domestic government.

No, their primary concern with new-fangled smart guns dates back to a time when men carried a large knife as a backup weapon in case one or all of their pistols failed to fire.

If smart gun proponents are really serious about saving lives, they’ll quit wasting time on a doomed quest for a quick technological fix to a nasty set of social problems, and instead focus their efforts on changes that could actually save lives. How about ending the war on drugs, demilitarizing the police, advocating for prison reform, investing in street-level intervention programs, or stopping the drone strikes and the endless military interventions that kill countless civilians and radicalize the survivors. Even a small victory in any one of those areas would save more lives than the most advanced smart gun imaginable.

But all of that stuff that I just suggested is hard, and it involves politics, and our politics seem more hopelessly broken with every day that passes. So I certainly get the appeal of going around the system and throwing some Silicon Valley “disruption” at the problem of gun violence. And as the father of three beautiful little girls I wish to God that there were a killer app that could stop or even measurably reduce the killing. But there isn’t, and until someone invents a technology that can address the deeper, systemic problems that drive Americans from all walks of life to arm themselves, there never will be.

SmokeFan wrote:The last two paragraphs:

And as the father of three beautiful little girls I wish to God that there were a killer app that could stop or even measurably reduce the killing.

Eventually, all American gun control advocacy descends into science fiction. "If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint," Barack Obama asked last Tuesday, "why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?” For this reasonable-sounding inquiry, the president was applauded throughout the media.

As it happens, though, there is a good answer to this question, and it's not that the supposedly nefarious "gun lobby" is standing in the way. That answer is that there is no market for guns that work just some of the time. Guns are simple things, all told, designed to operate as easily and reliably as possible. The introduction of electronics undermines this simplicity, and to a degree that is flatly unacceptable to the consumer. As President Obama well knows, the fingerprint software on his phone works rather erratically: Often it takes a user two or three tries to log in; occasionally, it flakes out entirely and defers to the password. When this happens on an iPhone, the user is mildly inconvenienced. If this were to happen on a Glock, the user would be dead. There is a reason that modern smartphones put the camera function outside of the authentication process.

The comparison of firearms to other commercial products invariably falls flat. It is true that, say, cars have become considerably safer over the last few decades; true, too, that “research” has contributed to this improvement. But it matters enormously that a car is not intended to hurt people, and that in a perfect world nobody would ever be injured by one. Can we say the same of firearms? Of course not. Guns are killing machines, designed explicitly to do damage to living things. In fact, they have no other purpose. As such, the salient question before any free people is not “are guns dangerous?” -- they are -- but “who gets them, and why?”

Because of substantial consumer interest in a safer gun, the American gun companies now face a threat of lost revenue. So the trade association of domestic gun makers, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, located in Newtown, Conn., and the National Rifle Association are waging a smear campaign against these safer guns.

President Obama recently ordered the Departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security to expedite the deployment of gun safety technology to reduce the unauthorized use of firearms. They are also directed to consider the purchase of smart guns for their law enforcement officers.

This common sense approach to saving lives through technology will not interfere with anyone’s Second Amendment rights.

sikacz wrote:Fighting with an old smart phone that no longer works well, battery runs down faster, and programs can't be updated anymore is not exactly how I would envision a defensive tool.