Why the NRA hates smart guns • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#81

Post by atemerev » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

cvwright wrote: post #56

jboggan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The NRA has 4 million American members which I think makes it the largest lobby by membership. I doubt they're all pawns of the gun industry. If the NRA wanted to solely juice sales and sell more guns they would give heavily to elect more Democratic candidates. The current presidency has been great for sales [0]. 0 - https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/nics_firearm_...

Left-wingers ranting about the "gun lobby" are like right-wingers ranting about the "LGBT lobby". Everybody loves to pretend that the opposing political party is driven by some strange, inhuman machine, not by a bunch of normal people pretty much just like themselves.

LGBT lobby? And what this lobby political agenda would be? Promoting skinny jeans?

(I consider myself to be a right-winger, as I am certainly pro-gun and pro-business, and straight as a rail, but I never heard about LGBT lobby concept, except in jokes about fashion. LGBT guys and gals are fun.)

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#82

Post by Vexs » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

jboggan wrote: post #11

Good article, glad to see some knowledgable firearms writing in the general press. This is how I've felt as a gun owner over the last two decades, translated into computing: Imagine that someone in California hacked into a power station and caused a blackout. Police responded and found the hacker and their equipment. Shortly thereafter an "anti-hacking" bill appeared in the state legislature to prevent a repeat of su…

What's kinda funny is that's very similar to what's actually going in computing, especially with encryption most recently.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#83

Post by crikli » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

I'm an engineer, gun owner, and former NRA member[1].

I hate the idea of smart guns, but politics are a distant secondary concern.

Firearms fail all the time, even the simple reliable ones. Bad primers, failure to eject, failure to cycle, stovepipes, etc. It takes education and then repeated training to know how to deal with failures. In a pressure situation you revert to your lowest level of training; muscle memory will give you the best chance to respond appropriately.

Just dealing with mechanical failures quickly and correctly takes very intentional practice.

The last thing I want to have is another thing that can fail in a pressure situation that can't be resolved via trained response. E.g., for a bad primer or failure to eject I can do what's called a tap/rack/bang drill. But there's nothing I can do to train for some type of software failure or battery being dead or some other type of non-mechanical failure that bricks my firearm.

[1]Former because the NRA"s lobbing efforts and powers are ridiculously overstated. Their entire entire existence as near as I can tell is to sell their member's names to third parties. I've never received as much crap snail mail and email as I did during the year I belonged to the NRA.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#84

Post by muglug » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

jboggan wrote: post #11

Good article, glad to see some knowledgable firearms writing in the general press. This is how I've felt as a gun owner over the last two decades, translated into computing: Imagine that someone in California hacked into a power station and caused a blackout. Police responded and found the hacker and their equipment. Shortly thereafter an "anti-hacking" bill appeared in the state legislature to prevent a repeat of su…

Except that metaphor falls flat because Linux has many uses beyond hacking businesses and utilities (or rehearsing such activities).

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#85

Post by Vexs » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #17

curun1r wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the push for smart guns for law enforcement would come from law enforcement's negligent inability to keep track of their own weapons. A local news channel covered the story of one Bay Area city's police department releasing a report on an inventory of the weapons used by police officers. They were literally missing hundreds of them. Often, the weapon would be lost when an officer left it in an unlocked car, e…

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.

I never really thought about that aspect- smart guns only really prevent someone from picking up your gun and shooting you with it. I mean that's basically it, it's safety for the gun owner and nobody else.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#86

Post by jonstokes » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:23 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…

Author here. I covered all three points you raised on my previous piece for TC this topic, so I didn't see the need to repeat myself here. That piece is linked in the opener of this article.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#87

Post by fiatmoney » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

muglug wrote: post #84

jboggan wrote: post #11

Good article, glad to see some knowledgable firearms writing in the general press. This is how I've felt as a gun owner over the last two decades, translated into computing: Imagine that someone in California hacked into a power station and caused a blackout. Police responded and found the hacker and their equipment. Shortly thereafter an "anti-hacking" bill appeared in the state legislature to prevent a repeat of su…

Except that metaphor falls flat because Linux has many uses beyond hacking businesses and utilities (or rehearsing such activities).

Guns have many uses besides killing people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biathlon

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#88

Post by Vexs » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:26 PM UTC

crikli wrote: post #83

I'm an engineer, gun owner, and former NRA member[1]. I hate the idea of smart guns, but politics are a distant secondary concern. Firearms fail all the time, even the simple reliable ones. Bad primers, failure to eject, failure to cycle, stovepipes, etc. It takes education and then repeated training to know how to deal with failures. In a pressure situation you revert to your lowest level of training; muscle memory…

See, I actually like the idea of smart guns. The only thing it really does (or should do) is prevent you from getting shot with your own gun. If someone steals your gun out of your house, they could remove the smart part. If you're thinking about logging gun usage, you could probably edit the logs or corrupt them beyond usability.

I think you could make the system work. It's not complicated, maybe just an RFID reader and a solenoid. The issue is that if politics try and stick a bunch of extra crap onto it. All that extra stuff is what can cause failures, and cause an otherwise good idea to become vilified.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#89

Post by zardgiv » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:31 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…

Please elaborate on what these "people problems" are. I'm interested in what you think is common amongst the cities you've cited.

Re: Why the NRA hates smart guns

#90

Post by SpaceX_Tech » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

adrusi wrote: post #40

sanj wrote: post #4

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

If you commit a felony and are as a result never again allowed to purchase a firearm, your rights are being perpetually limited, and I and a lot of other people object to that, and it's arguably a violation of the 8th ammendment. If background checks were more limited in the kind of background they checked for, say only restricting people who had injured someone using a firearm, then there might be fewer objections.…

I agree with you that on the fundamental level I don’t like the idea of rights being perpetually limited on the basis of being a convicted felon. As far as I’m concerned once a person has served their sentence, including parole, they have paid their debt to society in full and shouldn’t be barred from exercising any rights that non felons enjoy. This isn’t limited solely to the right to bear arms but also the right to vote, which many states still bar for convicted felons. If we as a society are so uncomfortable with the people who have paid their debt that we deem they must be prevented from exercising their rights even after serving their sentence, then perhaps it’s time we take a hard look at the failings of our “corrections” system.

On a hypothetical level, even if I did support the current laws barring convicted felons of certain rights in perpetuity, I would still have a problem with the way this is being administered today. I’ve read some pretty damning reports on some of the discriminatory practices that continue at the institutional level within the broader criminal justice system which seem to primarily affect certain segments of our population. Poor people, particularly minorities and specifically black males, face some very specific challenges when it comes to things like selective enforcement, pretrial plea bargains, rates of conviction and length of sentencing. At this point I can’t really describe our justice system as anything but blatantly discriminatory.

Even in a more equitable and just system, I personally wouldn’t support the taking away of rights in perpetuity, and I certainly don’t support it when it seems to have such a deliberate and specific impact on certain groups.