A maker of “smart guns” which use fingerprint technology to unlock the weapon says her firearms will solve the gun violence problem in America. This is kind of like saying that smart refrigerators will solve world hunger, only dumber. They only thing her smart guns will do is sucker wealthy liberals into buying her shitty unreliable product.
ABC reports, because of course they do:
One manufacturer believes it has a solution to the gun violence plaguing the United States – a personalized smart gun that uses fingerprint technology to make firearms safer.
Ginger Chandler is the co-founder of LodeStar Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She said she believes her company’s smart gun can be a solution to the rising gun-related deaths in the country.
Chandler said the smart gun can only be fired by an authenticated user; in this case, verified by his or her fingerprint.
“What we know is if an unauthorized person picks up that firearm in a time of stress or they’re going to do something quick, they’re not going to be able to do it,” Chandler said.
Solution? Not likely. There are so many problems with this, I don’t know where to begin.
My iPhone unlocks with a thumbprint but doesn’t work if my hands are slightly moist or mucked up with barbecue sauce. In a life or death situation do you really want to tie your fate to some finicky technology that may or may not work? Seriously, what if someone attacks you while you’re eating ribs and you don’t have a napkin?
Speaking of phones and technology, people steal phones all the time and hack them to be used by someone other than the original owner. How is this so-called smart gun any different? In fact, I’d be willing to bet that whatever locks the gun up could be easily removed. A gun is a gun, so whatever locks this one is probably a pin somewhere in the trigger mechanism.
Additionally, anything like this is hackable. If people can hack your smart house, they can hack your smart gun and turn it off. Again, do you really want to put your life in the hands of something a 15-year-old kid or Russian troll can turn off just to f*ck with you?
Then there’s the problem that there are already 400 million non-smart guns in private hands in the United States. With some basic care, a gun can last several lifetimes and doesn’t need to be replaced. I have guns older than Joe Biden that still work flawlessly. In order for this smart gun revolution to stop gun violence, everyone would have to replace their existing firearms with the these stupid things. I know democrats want to make it a law but as we’ve seen, confiscating firearms isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Plus this is one handgun in a single caliber (9mm I’m assuming) but what about rifles, shotguns, and other types of handguns? Nobody, even the government forces it, is going to ditch all of their existing firearms to only have a (crappy I’m assuming) 9mm pistol.
Which brings up another problem: most gun-related deaths are suicides committed by people with their own firearms. These people would still obviously be able to take their own lives because they are the authenticated users.
Along those same lines, what’s to stop authenticated users from using their smart guns to shoot other people?
The biggest problem however is: who the hell would buy one of these things? The only people I can think of are rich liberal assholes who would lock it up unloaded and never ever take it out. They’d buy them to make an empty gesture that they are combating gun violence. It’s the same reason they buy electric vehicles to fight global warming.
You simply cannot stop gun-related crime by targeting law-abiding responsible gun owners. It’s why gun control is such a spectacular failure, which is what I predict for this smart gun company.
