The Dish

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.

Derek Thompson examines the latest numbers:

Today, one in seven Americans is over 65. In 15 years, one in five Americans will be over 65. The gray boom is inevitable and it’s happening for two simple reasons. The first reason is that all Americans are living longer (except, for mysterious reasons, poor women). The second reason is that every living member of the baby boomer generation, the largest adult generation in U.S. history (there are actually more Millennials, born between the early 1980s and late 1990s), will be older than 65 in the year 2030. Here, from a new Census report, is a look at the steady growth of 65+ Americans—a population that will double in the next four decades.

Drum shrugs:

Take a look at the red bars in the chart on the right. They show the projected size of the elderly population in various developed countries in 2050, and the United States is in by far the best shape. Our elderly population stabilizes in 2030 at about 21 percent of the total population, a number that’s significantly lower than even the second-best country (Britain, at 24 percent). Most other countries not only have elderly populations that are far larger, but their elderly populations are growing. These countries have demographic problems.

It’s worth driving this point home: America doesn’t really have a huge aging problem. We have a very moderate aging problem, which could be handled in the federal budget with fairly modest changes to Social Security and Medicare. What we do have is a health care problem. But that’s a problem for us all.

Ben Casselman joins the conversation:

One reason the U.S. is in better shape is its comparatively high rate of immigration. Since people tend to migrate when they are younger, immigrants tend to bring down the age of the population as a whole. Moreover, at least in the U.S., immigrants tend to have a higher birth rate than the native-born population, although the gap has narrowed somewhatin recent years. The future direction of immigration, therefore, makes a big difference to the age breakdown of the U.S. population. The Census Bureau’s demographic estimates are based on a middle-of-the-road projection of future immigration, but the bureau also publishes alternative scenarios. In the “high immigration” scenario, the U.S. has nearly 22 million more working-age residents in 2050 than in the “low immigration” case.

Lydia DePillis adds:

Even as the elderly population increases, the younger population decreases in relative terms, which leaves the overall dependency ratio relatively stable. In 2050, it’ll even be substantially lower than it was in the roaring 1960s … Of course, youth dependency and old age dependency carry different kinds of burdens — older people require more medical care, while young people carry more educational costs. So the economy will still have to adapt to take care of the shifting load of non-working people. But overall, the picture is a lot less alarming when you know America has borne something similar in the past.

Lizzie Widdicombe tried out the food-substitute Soylent. What living on it felt like:

As [Soylent creator Rob] Rhinehart puts it, you “cruise” through the day. If you’re in a groove at your computer, and feel a hunger pang, you don’t have to stop for lunch. Your energy levels stay consistent: “There’s no afternoon crash, no post-burrito coma.” Afternoons can be just as productive as mornings.

But that is Soylent’s downside, too.

You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad. On Saturday, I woke up and sipped a glass of Soylent. What to do? Breakfast wasn’t an issue. Neither was lunch. I had work to do, but I didn’t want to do it, so I went out for coffee. On the way there, I passed my neighborhood bagel place, where I saw someone ordering my usual breakfast: a bagel with butter. I watched with envy. I wasn’t hungry, and I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

Previous Dish on Soylent here and here.