Children, "smart guns," and smart adults

by Ralph D. Sherman

Anyone who has watched science fiction movies in the past 20 years has seen a “smart gun”—a computerized gun that will fire only by an authorized user. In real life, however, such guns do not exist—and for good reasons.

There are two basic problems with a computerized gun. The first problem is that the gun may not fire when it should. The second problem is that the gun may fire when it shouldn’t. Both situations are frightening. Both have caused legitimate manufacturers to back away from the concept.

Let’s look at the first basic problem. If something goes wrong with the computer inside the gun, the gun may fail to fire when it’s really needed. Computers are not foolproof, as anyone who uses an ATM or a word processor is aware. And a computer inside a gun would be subjected to tremendous physical force every time the gun is discharged. Think about taking a hammer to laptop.

A gun that fails to fire when needed is not desirable to anyone who owns a firearm for self defense. Although some police bureaucrats have advocated the computerized gun, no patrol officer wants such a gun in his or her duty holster. In actual tests computerized guns have never proven adequately reliable.

But even if the computer problem were solved, another real-life difficulty has prevented the production of guns that recognize authorized users. A gun that contains sensors to recognize fingerprints will not work when the user is wearing gloves. That means that police, hunters, or anyone who needs to use this type of gun outdoors in cold weather will have a problem.

Those who advocate computerized guns say they would be safer because they can’t be fired by children or by criminals. But does that mean that one could leave a computerized gun where a child could find it? Of course not. So child safety really would not really be improved by putting a computer inside the gun. The gun still must be stored so that children don’t have access.

This brings us to the second basic problem. A computerized gun may fire when it shouldn’t. But the computer "safety" feature will nevertheless tempt some persons to store the gun where children can find it. (A study in the 1990s showed that “child-proof” aspirin containers actually caused the number of child poisonings to increase, because too many adults depend on the “child-proof” feature, instead of storing aspirin out of children’s reach and teaching their children that aspirin is not candy.)

Another possible benefit of computerized guns is that they might be safe if they fall into the hands of criminals. That’s the theory behind steering-wheel locks, too, but millions of cars are stolen every year. The fact is, if a criminal steals a gun, he’ll have plenty of time, after he gets home, to open the gun and disable the safety mechanism. In fact, it may be very easy to do this.

For several years Colt’s worked on a computerized gun, which never got past a prototype. At one point the big question was, what if the battery dies? Should the gun be designed so it fires or so it stays locked?

Colt’s had received a government grant to design the computerized gun for use by police. If a police officer were using the gun to defend himself, he’d want the gun to work even with a dead battery. So that’s how the gun was designed. That means that if a criminal stole such a gun, all he would have to do is remove the battery. Then the gun would shoot for anyone.

Ironically, the original reason that computerized guns were proposed was that they might prevent police officers being murdered with their own guns. Somebody suggested that police officers were often disarmed by criminals and then murdered with their own guns. But the facts show that this is an extremely rare occurrence. According to the FBI, in a recent year six officers in the United States were killed with their own weapon. Every one of those cases is a tragedy, but that’s six officers per year out of about 700,000 sworn officers in the entire United States—hardly a widespread occurrence.

In the late 1990s several gun manufacturers posted information on their web sites about their ongoing attempts to develop computerized guns. Today the web pages are gone. A firm in Oxford, Connecticut, that made a news splash with advanced fingerprint technology for guns has also disappeared. The company’s web site promised that the technology would provide “a high degree of certainty” in the operation of computerized guns. The web site is gone.

A gun that operates with “a high degree of certainty” is at best unnecessary and at worst downright dangerous. Smart adults who have guns at home treat them as if they are always loaded, all the time. And smart adults treat children as if they are always curious, all the time. Smart adults teach children from an early age that guns are dangerous for children—the same as power saws, kitchen knives, and electrical outlets. Smart adults store guns in locked cabinets so that the guns are not accessible to children.

Smart adults also use the National Rifle Association’s Eddie Eagle safety program, which teaches children what do to if they come across a gun when they are playing outside or at another home: Stop; don’t touch; leave the area; tell an adult.

Smart adults—a much more sensible solution than “smart guns.”

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