http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... ric-holder

Do it, fcuktards. You only have to present it as 'saving one child's life', and at least that'll be a truthful statement for once.

And where exactly has truth ever mattered in the American gun control debate?

First Law of Robotics.

It will never happen - the National Rifle Association will quickly squash any chance of that succeeding

Is gun crime in the States mainly through the use of stolen firearms, or is it use by registered owners? If the person who is supposed to be firing the gun is the person firing the gun, it being a 'smart gun' will make no difference at all. If you can still go out and buy a smart gun without having to go through psychological checks or such, smart guns aren't going to cut down the number of deaths that much.

Basically, as long as you can buy a gun legally and then shoot someone with it, it doesn't matter how smart the gun is, because it's the component holding the trigger that has to be 'smart'.

The practical merits are probably limited. But it's a good divide and conquer move for the gun control lobby.

Criminals want cheap guns they can throw away easily, and they don't want to have to microwave them first or whatever you have to do to remove your palm print from the internal memory. Then there are the shrill maniacs - some of them too extreme for the NRA - who see every attempt to simply know who owns which guns as the cruel advance of the fascist Antichrist. For them, this sort of thing is the start of a federal gun and related biometrics registry.

But the main money in the gun industry is in the mainstream, where people aren't necessarily savage or insane. If you can make the market tailor its product ranges towards these consumers with safety features that those others can't abide, you push up the costs, forcing maniacs to use either boutique providers, or deliberately broken guns. You also make guns less easily transferable and sever the commercial links between the mainstream and nut job markets. So the secondary gun market gradually loses liquidity. The costs for both criminals and militias would therefore rise (assuming most of the people buying the fancy new smart guns would probably hold onto many of their old dumb guns too).

And most importantly, you break the political links between the small but noisy lobby that won't tolerate any form of gun control, and the larger population who will side with those guys less often once the mentalists start calling them traitors for buying safer guns.

America doesn't need smart guns, it needs smart Americans.

Thanks, you owe me a new keyboard!

The argument about smart guns isn't necessarily entirely about crime prevention. There is at least some accident prevention going on there - kids accidentally shooting themselves or someone else with their parents gun (I seem to recall a recent incident where a toddler shot it's mother in a supermarket becuase she had a gun in her handbag or something like that).
Also it mitigates a justification for law enforcement officers gunning apparently unarmed people down - "he was going for my gun so I shot him", which I believe has been used as a defence in a number of shootings of black teenagers. If the suspect won't be able to fire the weapon even if he's managed to get hold of it then it's considerably harder to justify shooting him in the face pre-emptively but also means there should be little point trying to grab the officers gun in the first place. Whether or not that would actually stack up in reality is an interesting question of course.

They have smart guns in Mega City One. Doesn’t stop the perps from getting their own weapons.

you just won this debate.


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What he said. I was thinking similar thoughts as I scrolled through.