From: Michael S. Lorrey (mike@datamann.com)
Date: Fri Apr 07 2000 - 15:12:53 MDT
john grigg wrote:
> Michael Lorrey wrote:
> Good effort Ziana. They don't mention that if the registered owner isn't
> home and his wife gets attacked by a rapist/robber/murderer, she has no hope
> of defending herself or the kids. So you buy your wife a gun, fine. Your
> kids, who under such circumstances are most likely to not be theobject of
> immediate attention, actually have a very good chance of being the ones to
> retreive either weapon, neither of which they can use. Smartguns are for
> dumb people.
> (end)
>
> Could a 'supersmart' gun be designed that has two or more people that are
> able to use it? Both a husband and wife? That would solve much of the
> problem.
I don't discount the possibility, and if such is possible (it likely is) I will
adamantly say that it should not be mandated until the technology can be
integrated into any gun of any price teir. The fact is that the 'smart'
technologies that are out right now are highly restrictive, highly prone to
failure, and add a minimum of $1000.00 on the price of any given gun. When your
average pistol costs $350.00-450.00, putting what amounts to a 200% tax on the
gun only does one thing: it makes it impossible for poor people, who are most
likely to live in high crime areas and are most freqently victims of crime (and
are most likely of a minority group), to defend themselves against crime. This
is an elitist and racist policy to propose until it can be afforded by all. The
dirty little secret of the Democratic Party is that most gun control laws passed
prior to 1950 were part of Jim Crow legislation. What cop is gonna let a black
man carry a gun?
Back to the cost: Those that claim the logic can be designed into a single chip
and made for a few cents are thinking in the wrong scale. Chip efficiencies of
scale of this magnitude occur when you reach hundreds of thousands, if not
millions of units each year. While a couple million guns are sold each year in
the US at most, they are made by several dozen gun manufacturers. Each one of
these manufacturers will have to come up with its own chip design (if not
multiple chip designs), since sharing designs like this is collusion and an
anti-trust actionable offense. Each manufacturer will never make more than a
hundred thousand or so chips a year. For those of you in chip design, who might
want to advance gun technology so that it is affordable, I suggest you make a
chip design, and make it free and open source like linux is, start manufacturing
up, and get the prices down. And design it so that the government can't use it
as a means of gun control/registration/permitting.
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