Telling Lies About “Smart Guns”
BY Herschel Smith5 years, 11 months ago
Elizabeth MacBride is doing just that. Take a look.
“The firearms made by our member companies are designed to perform in austere and less-than-ideal conditions when lives are literally at stake,” wrote the NSSF spokesman. “To date, authorized-user technology developments have only introduced points of failure that could put the lives of lawful and authorized users at risk when they need those firearms to preserve lives.”
I asked iGun founder Jonathan Mossberg about how reliable the iGun is. He says the gun already passes military specification testing, including “a 3,000 round torture test including freezing and dropping.”
“We have already built a personalized firearm that is more reliable than most commercial firearms available,” he wrote.
Based on conversations with companies and engineers developing military weapons with chip technology, reliability is a valid worry – but it’s an existing worry for every gun. Weapons without chips or ID technology fail now (we don’t know how often, but they do).
“The market should decide which technology and which product to buy based on its merits as the market does now,” Mossberg said.
It’s important to note that in the gun community, where the belief in the singular defensive power of guns is common, a higher risk of a gun failing means a higher risk of dying in a confrontation.
This would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad. Read it again if you must.
First of all, she said that the iGun founder “wrote.” In other words, she sent him an email and he responded. This is reporting, apparently.
Second, freezing and dropping has nothing at all to do with anything. That she didn’t know how to press the issue with him is an indication that she shouldn’t have been writing this piece.
Third, she (or her sources) acknowledge that failure of the technology is a “valid worry,” but she dismisses that “worry” because a failure can happen anyway. This shows absolutely no knowledge or understanding of anything mechanical or electronic.
The fact that a tire on an automobile can burst while driving and throw the automobile into a spin is no reason for sticking a nail in the tire. The nail increases the probability of failure.
Let’s turn to the next bit of propaganda on smart guns, written within a few days by none other than Ms. Elizabeth MacBride.
There’s a revolution building in gun design, one with far-reaching implications in military and civilian weaponry, says one of Israel’s top tech investors.
“We believe that in less than 5 years every gun that will be produced will have a smart chip in it,” said Ron Zuckerman, a long-time executive, investor and angel whose list of successes includes co-founding Sapiens International Corp., which develops software for the insurance industry, serving as CEO of Brazilian telecom GVT and as co-founder of influential Israeli venture funds, including Magma. Now a California-based angel, he is an investor in many tech startups.
One of those is a small tech company, Secubit, that is focused on one of the hottest areas in the gun world: tech-enabled weapons. Zuckerman estimates there is a $50 billion market for high-tech guns, including military, law enforcement and civilian. The company’s first market is the military, where there is a growing interest in tech-enabled weapons as war becomes more distant and mechanized.
Yea, there’s “growing interest” in smart guns in the military, just as in law enforcement. Right. That she would publish shit like this is embarrassing. To her.
So in case readers have forgotten it, my bet is still on the table.
I am a registered professional engineer, and I spend all day analyzing things and performing calculations. Let’s not speak in broad generalities and murky platitudes (such as “good enough”). That doesn’t work with me. By education, training and experience, I reject such things out of hand. Perform a fault tree analysis of smart guns. Use highly respected guidance like the NRC fault tree handbook.
Assess the reliability of one of my semi-automatic handguns as the first state point, and then add smart gun technology to it, and assess it again. Compare the state points. Then do that again with a revolver. Be honest. Assign a failure probability of greater than zero (0) to the smart technology, because you know that each additional electronic and mechanical component has a failure probability of greater than zero.
Get a PE to seal the work to demonstrate thorough and independent review. If you can prove that so-called “smart guns” are as reliable as my guns, I’ll pour ketchup on my hard hat, eat it, and post video for everyone to see. If you lose, you buy me the gun of my choice. No one will take the challenge because you will lose that challenge. I’ll win. Case closed. End of discussion.
Ms. MacBride? Questions?
On December 3, 2018 at 2:25 am, IA Brooks said:
This from the same crowd who tell us the Second Amendment is useless, because no militia can defeat a modern army. Then they want to equip that modern army with personal weapons inferior in reliability to flintlock muskets and pistols. And these people command billion-dollar industries and deliver themselves of political opinions…
On December 3, 2018 at 12:04 pm, TheAlaskan said:
A gun is only as smart as the person holding it.
On December 3, 2018 at 8:14 pm, Jaque said:
The book at the attached link was one of many that I used during my time in the trenches. I call it out to enlighten the reader of the complexity in analyzing electronic failures in complex systems. Techniques such as those in this handbook are essential in any serious design effort by a maker of electro-mechanical small arms. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know from experience that if a gizmo requires a chemical battery to function it is going to be less reliable than a gizmo that does not require a battery.
MILITARY HANDBOOK
ELECTRONIC RELIABILITY DESIGN HANDBOOK
https://instructure-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/account_290000000098865/attachments/55116575/MIL-HDBK-338%20Electronic%20Reliability%20Hdbk.pdf?response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3D%22MIL-HDBK-338%20Electronic%20Reliability%20Hdbk.pdf%22%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27MIL%252DHDBK%252D338%2520Electronic%2520Reliability%2520Hdbk.pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAJDW777BLV26JM2MQ%2F20181204%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20181204T004451Z&X-Amz-Expires=86400&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=66acdb2ad493c73aa29ad30891bebbe947b3e431ff051602e690d4eb705b564a
On December 4, 2018 at 6:25 pm, Jeffrey C Dege said:
“We believe that in less than 5 years every gun that will be produced will have a smart chip in it”
Do they have a battery, yet, with a thirty-year shelf life?
On December 4, 2018 at 11:14 pm, Doug said:
The best way forward is to stick to the past …. and a 1911 in .45ACP
On December 5, 2018 at 8:08 pm, Pat Hines said:
Smart guns are a solution searching for a problem, none will be found, ever in my opinion. Fully functional smart gun tech is stuff of science fiction novels.
On December 11, 2018 at 2:57 am, skybill said:
Hi Herschel,
There is not now nor will there ever be anything that can be labeled a “SMART GUN!!!!” Only “DUMB PEOPLE” who believe there can be….
Audentes, Fortuna, Ivat,
III%,
skybill