Emily Bobrow looks at the lengths gun rights activists are going to—including intimidation and outright threats of violence—to keep “smart guns” out of the US:
As it happens, guns that work only when they are in the hands of their legal owners do indeed exist. Armatrix, a German company that makes a .22-calibre “smart gun”, had plans recently to begin selling them in America. But then something odd happened: the very people who were trying to bring these guns to market began receiving threats from gun enthusiasts. Belinda Padilla, the head of the American division of Armatix, no longer picks up the phone if she doesn’t recognise the caller, having fielded too many scary calls. Andy Raymond, a gun-dealer in Maryland, decided not to sell the Armatrix guns after receiving death threats. Both Ms Padilla and Mr Raymond are pro-gun; they simply believe there is room in the market for some with safety mechanisms. But aggressive and antagonistic campaigns from gun-lovers have ensured that not a single American gun-dealer will risk selling Armatrix smart guns.
This is remarkable. It is one thing for gun-rights advocates to quibble over a few paternalistic whistles and bells on some guns for sale; it is quite another for them to prevent these guns from ever reaching store shelves. Gun-lovers argue that the smart guns could pave the way for a host of new safety regulations. These fears are apparently heavy enough to justify manipulating the market.
As it turns out, all the fuss comes down to a law in New Jersey. Adrianne Jeffries explains:
There has been renewed interest in smart guns since the Newtown school shooting, which reinvigorated the gun-control debate. However, there is immense pressure not to be the first to sell them. That’s because of a New Jersey law passed in 2002 known as the Childproof Handgun Law, which says that all guns sold in New Jersey must be state-approved smart guns within three years of a smart gun being sold anywhere in the country.
The goal was to make smart guns mandatory as soon as the technology existed. Officially, no smart gun has been sold in the US yet — meaning if Raymond had sold one, it would have triggered the clause in New Jersey. … Smart-gun advocates say the technology will stop kids from shooting themselves with their parents’ guns, undermine the market for stolen guns, and protect law enforcement from having their guns used against them. “We need the iPhone of guns,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor, referring to the phone’s fingerprint unlock. Conway is backing a $1 million contest for smart-gun technology. “We want gun owners to feel like they are dinosaurs if they aren’t using smart guns,” he told the Washington Post.
But David Kopel lays out the arguments against smart guns:
There is an inherent difficulty in making a computer chip, which is supposed to read a radio wave, a palmprint, or some other identifier, function with perfect reliability in an environment a few inches from frequent gunpowder explosions, along with gasses and particles of lead debris.
Persons who own firearms for self-defense (the core of the Second Amendment, according to Heller) would be especially wary, since a gun which works 99.5% of the time is not sufficiently reliable for self-defense. Most people who have experience with fingerprint readers, magnetic key cards, etc., know that these devices are often convenient, but they are not reliable enough to bet one’s life on them. This is one reason why there has been zero adoption of personalized guns by law enforcement, even though the initial impetus for personalized gun research was for law enforcement use. Indeed, the New Jersey law exempts law enforcement; the exemption is an admission that personalized guns are insufficiently reliable for lawful defense of self and others. A recent article on the website of American Rifleman (a NRA member publication) details some potential problems with hacking or jamming of computer-dependent guns.
The Dish 