PA Bill Number: SB1198
Title: In plants and plant products, providing for plant and pollinator protection; conferring powers and duties on the Department of Agriculture and ...
Description: In plants and plant products, providing for plant and pollinator protection; conferring powers and duties on the Department of Agriculture and .. ...
Last Action: Referred to AGRICULTURE AND RURAL AFFAIRS
Last Action Date: May 17, 2024
Smart Guns Are No Silver Bullet Against Violence :: 05/05/2016
President Obama, after praising moves toward the much-hyped technology in the past, has announced that the White House will be promoting the development of firearms that shoot only when their owner is holding them, called “smart guns.”
Let me be frank: I think the push for smarts guns, at best, is a waste of time and resources.
Guns are primarily bad because they are incredibly powerful weapons designed for maiming and killing. No new technology is going to change that. And perhaps more importantly, technology is not going to change the social, cultural and political impediments to effective gun control measures.
There are several broad reasons I’m skeptical about the benefits of smart guns.
Gun rights advocates hate smart guns
It’s obvious that gun rights advocates are not happy with this idea. That doesn’t bother me at all – I’ve rarely hesitated to broach ideas that displease second amendment absolutists.
But if they’re not enthusiastic about the idea, then it’s going to be hard to force them to start buying the smart guns. And if they don’t adopt this idea, then most guns still won’t be “smart,” anyway. And as it stands, there’s around one regular gun for every American.
Perhaps the idea here is that, as New Jersey has proposed, we could ban all non-smart guns from the marketplace. But the political power of the gun lobby would make this nearly impossible. And if it were possible, it’s likely more wide-reaching gun regulations could be achieved instead.
A larger market for guns
Smart guns may lead to an expansion of gun ownership. Some people, currently (rightly) reticent about owning guns, may feel that their fears are mollified by a supposedly “smart” gun. So the introduction of smart gun technology might simply increase the number of guns and gun owners overall.
But having more guns around, even those of the smart variety, would probably still make us less safe. Suicides are by far the most common deadly outcome of firearm ownership, and smart guns won’t keep people from killing themselves. But having more guns around is associated with having a higher risk of suicide.
One of the benefits of owning smart guns would be that other people, and children in particular, would be less likely to accidentally injure or kill themselves with the gun. But smart guns might still be prone to malfunction, while their technology makes us complacent. And besides, it’s not clear that the “smart” technology offers any benefits on this front over a better safety mechanism or locking a gun away in a safe.
Supposedly, smart guns would prevent firearm thieves from using the purloined weapon. But while this might deter the one-off opportunistic burglar, do we really doubt that the illegal markets would quickly find away to disable and sell this smart gun technology?
And while people might think smart guns make their families safer, this is far from certain. All these smart gun owners would still be liable to accidentally kill a family member, friend or themselves, which, by the way, happens more frequently than killings in self-defense.
Resistance from police
There is one other potential market for smart guns: the police. According to NPR’s Planet Money, smart guns were first marketed towards police departments and officers.
But they, much like the NRA, have not been big fans of the idea. One big problem was that many initial tests just didn’t always work. The police will not accept a gun that might decline to fire when they need it.
This idea has been around for a while, and it’s clearly not going away. And if people want to develop and purchase smart gun technology, I certainly won’t object, at least not any more than I would to the unnecessary purchase of any gun.
But there’s little reason for our government to get involved in this kind of project. We shouldn’t think smart technology could be a panacea for gun violence. It almost certainly won’t be, and it’s not even clear that it will do more harm than good.
http://www.care2.com/causes/smart-guns-are-no-silver-bullet-against-violence.html
