Smart Guns!!!!!

[Braznor]

He He, they are finally making guns which will allow only their owners to fire them. So happily this should eliminate school kids partying in their schools with their Uzis. On a side note, this development would give the word "Fatal Exception Error" an entirely new sub-context. av_biggrin.gif

web page (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1828963,00.asp)

[coldwave]

Is that all?!? And here I was, having visions of the mighty weaponry from ALIENS. Got me all excited... graemlins/av_whatever.gif

Anyhoo, very cool developement non-the-less!

[Angus McFeargus]

Great....so if an attacker shoots your pinky off, you are OUT OF LUCK. av_biggrin.gif

[calvin]

I don't know how mainstream this will become. I doubt there will be a law that requires this on all firearms. And even if there is, there are always older guns to be bought.

Either way, I very well doubt that this will be low-cost feature, further detracting from sales of smart guns.

[MarkN]

I'm not surprised that the NRA's against it even before it's come to complete fruition. Maybe they'll change their mind afterward, if not immediately then after some time. I seriously doubt it but hey, it could happen.

I also wonder how'd the electronics would stand up to shooting outdoors in the rain or snow or just very cold, wet temps. Then there's dropping the gun and how well the electronics could withstand such an event. And of course if someone breaks into your home, steals your guns and discovers the electronics then would they, or someone they know, be able to remove or alter them or would that completely render the gun useless no matter what? The article doesn't address any of these so I'm just wondering is all.

[Patrick.Cox]

Speaking of 'Aliens', the Army is only a couple years out from deploying a M2 .50 Cal replacement... half the weight, programmable on the fly rounds that can burst on, behind, all over their targets, smart laser sight, environmental sensors, etc. Most impressive...

[calvin]

Originally posted by GNNR:
Speaking of 'Aliens', the Army is only a couple years out from deploying a M2 .50 Cal replacement... half the weight, programmable on the fly rounds that can burst on, behind, all over their targets, smart laser sight, environmental sensors, etc. Most impressive... An "associate" of mine is in the military, and I talked to him a few months ago, and he got to test the next-gen weapons. He concurs that these replacements do, indeed, kick major ***. Straight from the horse's mouth. av_smile.gif

[T.N.D.]

Speaking of 'Aliens', the Army is only a couple years out from deploying a M2 .50 Cal replacement... half the weight, programmable on the fly rounds that can burst on, behind, all over their targets, smart laser sight, environmental sensors, etc. Most impressive...Arn't you talking about the replacement for the M16, I saw a segment on cable not long ago about the OICW (http://www.hkpro.com/oicw.htm).

[Wingnut]

Cops and military don't seem to trust the idea of a smart gun, so why should the average person? Firearms are relatively simplistic weapons. They perform a pretty simple funtion. The introduction of several new layers of complexity add a bunch of new places for a very simple machine to fail. In a life and death situation, that is typically not something you want to count on.

It would also be quite difficult and expensive to retrofit this to older weapons. More than likely it would require a owner to completely change out the firing mechanism. This would be hard in autos and near impossible in revolvers.

Let the manufactures offer them, but I don't think that it should be mandatory. But until government agents wholeheartedly and completely place their trust and lives in this hands of this technology, I think I will stay away from it.

Kinda of like how in Arizona or some such someone wanted to install beath interlocks on all cars. You know, so that you would have to blow as you are driving down the road to prove you are not drunk. No possible problems could arise from that!

[Patrick.Cox]

A 'smart' guy system can't effectively and reliably be retrofitted to existing weapons on the whole, especially civillian small arms. Just doesn't work.

There are 'smart gun' designs however that can go into production now.

Think of the Judge Dredd law giver side arm... an encoded RIFD device embeded subcutaneously in the hand with a reciever on the weapon for ID (since DNA scan on the fly is not exactly scaled down yet in size to something that can fit on a small side arm, let alone a rifle). An electrically fired round tied to a hardened logic system with RIFD reader. The MetalStorm electrical weapon and ballistics system.

I saw several recent articles on police and military testing of metalstorm pistols and light rifles... very promising, initial designs are ready for manufacturing, but they have to 'convince' the powers that be about their serviceability (almost no moving parts, easy mass production, low cost ammo once it's in mass production, simple electronics, safe, and powerful... not sure what the 'powers that be' are missing here, but which ever).

Simply put, the weapon will not arm and discharge for anyone but the owner.

This is not a viable solution for the military, as having personel individual and locked weapons is counter productive on a battlefield for numerous reasons, but in the civillian and law enforcement world it's brilliant.

Taken a step further, the weapon can encode rounds in a similar fashion to that seen in Judge Dredd... again, not a DNA encoding, rather a magnetic stamp inside the bullet itself, the weapon coding a embedded media strata at the core of the bullet as well as recording firing events (time/date stamp) in a hardened and tamper proof recording system (a simple CF memory system of say 256mb could record tens of thousands of firings and be cheap as heck to include in the design).

[calvin]

Originally posted by Wingnut:
Cops and military don't seem to trust the idea of a smart gun, so why should the average person? Firearms are relatively simplistic weapons. They perform a pretty simple funtion. The introduction of several new layers of complexity add a bunch of new places for a very simple machine to fail. In a life and death situation, that is typically not something you want to count on.I wanted to say something similar, but I couldn't find the right words. Very fluently put, Wingnut. av_smile.gif