Abort, Retry, Fail?

Antigunners at the Daily News are getting an erection over this:

“College students in Brooklyn are about do to something the National Rifle Association has refused to — build a smart gun …

NRA is not a manufacturer.

“… Borough President Eric Adams has tasked college students with developing technology that would allow a weapon to be fired only by an authorized user. The NYPD will help test the designs …”

Eric knows a lot about gun safety.

“… “The NYPD’s range officers will help work out the kinks,” said Adams, who thought of the idea after the murders of Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in 2014. “We want to do something the NRA has prevented gun manufacturers from doing.” …”

The NYPD has yet to work out the kinks with regular guns.

“… Adams turned to borough colleges — the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Pratt University and New York City College of Technology among them — to work on the project. The one with the best proposal gets $1 million from Adams’ budget to advance the program …”

Ahh, there just had to be a public monetary component in all this.  Eric has a history of spreading it around.  God bless Tammany Hall.

“… The plan already has been blessed by City Hall. “The city is proud to take the lead in anti-gun violence strategies, and looks forward to testing out this new gun technology,” a spokeswoman said. The NRA didn’t respond to requests for comment.”

They were too busy laughing.

7 thoughts on “Abort, Retry, Fail?

  1. I am an engineer by trade. Been doing it for decades. Done a fair amount of (serious) gunsmithing / design. It would necessarily be a little ASIC (digital brain) inside the firearm that makes the decision based on an RF ring, palm print, whatever. So yeah, if it is taken off the user in a physical confrontation, it may not fire (although an RF signal from your transmitter may still arm it if the perp were right on top of you). But if it is just stolen, Im not sure what could be designed that could not be defeated. If it were just a mechanical lock out (little bar sticks into the trigger, sear, or hammer), that is nothing. Just remove it. If it were an electronic trigger (small solenoid operated by electronics where trigger just sends signal, and everything were molded into polymer, would possibly be harder to defeat. But still, I do not believe it will be reliable. Also, with the latter design, it better have something like a grip safety cause the code might decide to fire on its own if there is a bug, noise, etc. Lots of people with limps in the future.

  2. My background is IT. No matter what they do it will never be as reliable as a gun without electronics.

  3. I’m an EE with mechanical inclinations. I know how this stuff works. I could build them one myself with my electronics lab in the basement and machine shop in the garage. I’ve been an EE with mechanical inclinations long enough to know how things fail. This is why all my safes have dial combination locks. I’m more concerned with the thing working when it’s supposed to than not working when it isn’t, and the fewer things between the trigger and the bang the better.

  4. You guys are absolutely right. Even the FDA acknowledges that ALL software driven devices have anomalies in their code, even class III (life support).

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