Why the NRA hates smart guns • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#71

Post by venomsnake » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:46 PM UTC

Reasons against smart guns - smart appliances don't work well, never have, never will. I prefer things simple, mechanical and working instead of praying that some Dilbert style company developed an usable software.

I live in a country that has very restrictive gun ownership regime - and yet every person knows instinctively about the gun safety rules:

1. Always assume loaded, unless proven otherwise 2. Don't point it at something you don't want to kill.

I am sure that people will appreciate when their gun starts firmware update or resets during a boar charging at you situation.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#72

Post by rdl » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:49 PM UTC

Scramblejams wrote: post #48

gnu8 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those youtubers are just jerking off. A .50 caliber rifle is just a big expensive dangerous toy. No one is going to commit a shooting spree with one. It's not practical. Regulating them only impacts people who like loud bangs and will never hurt anyone.

My congresscritter a while back put out a statement supporting the 50 BMG ban in California, because she wanted "these dangerous weapons off our streets." I emailed her, asking how many of these weapons, exactly, she'd happened to find on our streets! I figure, they're so rare and expensive, if I could walk outside and trip over one, I might as well go out and pick one up that'd been left in the nearby hedges! She di…

Do you mean "criminal shot by police/civilians", or shooting-by-criminals?

Pure negligent shootings which happen to damage property or injure/kill people happen at range all the time, and the shooter is by definition a criminal. Celebratory fire, particularly at a 30-45 degree angle, is going to have serious range, even if inaccurate, and is guaranteed to hit something.

Most of the fear of .50 was anti-armor, not so much pure range.

The "DC Beltway sniper" fucktards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks) were under 200m shots, but that's still solidly rifle distance.

Famously, Charles Whitman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman) had many shots resulting in injury or murder at 400-500m. He was firing from a tower, and high angle shooting rewards flat trajectory even more than the distance itself would indicate.

JFK was 81m, also well outside handgun range. I suspect there are a reasonably large number of 50-200m range shootings with rifles (there are very few shootings with rifles overall, but when they do happen); that's easily house-to-driveway-end in a lot of places.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#73

Post by hga » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:49 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #69

hga wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right you are, and I'm ashamed I forgot that the longest recorded sniper kill was with .338 Lapua Magnum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_recorded_sniper_kills as were another couple beyond the generic "1,500 yards" range it's said to have. (And if I had a place to shoot it, I'd like have a TRG-42 as well.)

For pure sporting use, if I had an 800-1000yd range less than 2.5h away from me (sigh), I'd probably build/buy a Palma rifle in .308, at least as long as my eyesight supported it.

What not neck that down to 6.5 mm, which I've heard works a lot better at those distances.

Ah, and, yeah, the eyesight is also getting to be an issue for me, I should be in bifocals but am putting that off as long as I can get away with it (I don't drive).

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#74

Post by schismsubv » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:50 PM UTC

vaadu wrote: post #66

This article is an ignorant POS. The NRA hates smartguns for at least 3 reasons. First is the government is trying to force an unreliable and complex feature onto a product that needs to work every time. Second is the government has no plans to use it themselves, which speaks volumes about what their LEOs and the US military thinks of the reliability this technology. Last is the government is trying to solve a people…

While I agree with (and just stopped writing a long response about) the unreliable and complex feature argument - consider adding the necessary components to a semiautomatic handgun - I wouldn't call the article ignorant. There are many reasons the NRA and gun owners in general dislike "smart" guns, some of which include the soft, social reasoning the article outlines.

Hard technical arguments of feasibility and reliability tend to have little effect on those that espouse this form of gun control. They'd typically prefer the guns not be there in the first place, and don't particularly care how feasible or reliable the result is. Social arguments, however, tend to affect them more, or at least can put the argument in a place they find harder to dismiss. We need both parts to make the strongest argument.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#75

Post by Avshalom » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:51 PM UTC

Avshalom wrote: post #59

Dagwoodie wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, left leaning politicians constantly threaten their fundamental constitutional rights, either overtly or not. Every time a gun is used in a crime that rises to national prominence politicians sprint to the microphone to decry gun ownership or at very least to make it harder or much harder to acquire a gun. Bigger than that though, the entertainment media is largely left wing and extremely vocal of thei…

Well, except that fundamental constitutional right is about 50 years old http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/so-you-think-you...

It's probably not worth pointing out because its so obvious but even in the event of an individual right to carry guns you still don't actually have a second amendment right to use guns in defense of person or property: that comes from non-constitutional laws.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#76

Post by appleflaxen » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:53 PM UTC

Washington regulates a million things over which is has no particular expertise. Including, but not limited, to medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, food production, law, agriculture, investment banks, the oil and gas industry, and on and on.

The fact that the government is bad at regulating these things doesn't mean that any step they take will be bad. The details matter, and it doesn't mean you should terminate any regulatory effort before it is defined.

In many (maybe all) of these areas, some regulation is needed.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#77

Post by woodman » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:57 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #65

woodman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all too common tragedy Any murder is too much murder, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as common. Cops are nearly as likely to die of a car accident as they are of getting shot. A cop friend of mine was going on about how the recent media focus on them has made things so dangerous - officer murders were up by 15%! I asked him if that translated to an increase of 5 or 6 a year, and if that was actually above the…

Well, you're got a point, especially with modern retention holsters, but it's still a major issue, and those holsters also slow down the draw speed of officers (but one defeated the Boston bombers' after they murdered the MIT Campus Policeman, that murder was for naught).

I stopped having to carry daily around the time that serpa holsters got popular. All the combat vets accurately predicted that the release mechanism would lead to a lot of negligent discharges - many training courses wouldn't let you on the range with one. I'm surprised to see that they are still being sold, I'd have thought they went the way of the lawn dart.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#78

Post by SpaceX_Tech » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:05 PM UTC

space_fountain wrote: post #67

sanj wrote: post #4

If the better approach is to focus on the "who", why does the NRA oppose background checks?

The argument I have heard is that a universal background checks system would require the government to keep a registry of gun owners to be at all useful. You have to be able to go back and prove whether a seller performed the proper background check before selling a gun to a particular person. A possible alternative I thought and have always wondered why it doesn't get used would be some sort of private public key cr…

I've also heard the argument that having a national registry makes the possibility of future mass confiscation much more palatable.

There are probably a good deal of people who wouldn't mind amending the Constitution to rid it of the Second Amendment but who still view the 4th Amendment favorably. It would be very difficult to enforce a policy of mass confiscation without the aid of a national registry that wouldn't be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#79

Post by atemerev » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:10 PM UTC

I wouldn't say "hate", as it is too strong a word. But smart guns have the same problem as self-driving cars: they take control from you and transfer it to unknown actors (a random computer programmer? Clueless legislators? Various three-letter government agencies?)

Conversely, anti-gun folks and self-driving car proponents consider guns and cars too dangerous to be left in hands of _those people_. Those a better left in hands of experts, they say.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#80

Post by philh » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

woodman wrote: post #62

hga wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose so, but it's not like that would make any difference in the number of illicit guns on the street, and I've never heard of smart guns being designed for that much harder use case, where an adversary had lots of time to modify them. The most common one is limiting who can fire it, e.g. preventing the all too common tragedy when a criminal snatches a cop's gun and kills him with it.

> all too common tragedy Any murder is too much murder, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as common. Cops are nearly as likely to die of a car accident as they are of getting shot. A cop friend of mine was going on about how the recent media focus on them has made things so dangerous - officer murders were up by 15%! I asked him if that translated to an increase of 5 or 6 a year, and if that was actually above the…

> Cops are nearly as likely to die of a car accident as they are of getting shot.

Unless cops die of car accidents significantly less than the base rate, that is not reassuring.