Safety Beyond the Switch: New Age Gun Technology

Gun safety is an issue that has been dominating American politics since the early 1990’s, and is only becoming more prevalent in recent years. With the rising concerns, technology firms have been devising new methods to make guns safer, and effectively make accidents much less likely.

Many of these companies are steering away from the simplicity of the common firing safety (a small mechanical switch that prevents shooting when activated), and moving towards technology better associated with today’s standards. According to Jeff Johnson, “In the past several decades, many devices that were mechanical or analog electrical 50 years ago became digital” (35). Everything from calculators to cash registers has since been upgraded, which raises an interesting question, why not guns? Johnson continues by offering ten feasible solutions that would decrease gun related crime and accidental misuse. One of his idea “seeds” includes a radio frequency that can disable consumer weapons within a specified area, such as schools, banks and hospitals (Johnson 36-37). This technology, in theory, would be no more difficult than programming a signal to register within the gun to initiate a lock, just as the frequency from a remote control would register within a toy car to move it. Elaborating upon this idea, Johnson notes that different guns would contain different, “RFID” tags to distinguish the user, so that law enforcement, “could temporarily render all nearby guns, or all ‘"consumer"’ guns, inoperative” (36-37).

Another technology, however, is already past the conceptualization stage, and is currently being sold around the world. This revolutionary advancement, Johnson adds, is the necessity for weapons to authenticate their user before use (36). Unfortunately, according to Roger Parloff, due to conflicts with gun enthusiasts who see the technology as a, “step toward gun control”, the safety pistol is still too controversial to hit the mainstream market (103). In fact, dealers of such advanced weaponry, like “Doug”, have to be, “hush-hush. [For] If his last name were made public, people would try to put him out of business and, perhaps, threaten to kill him” (102). The weapon Doug sells is the Armatix iP1, a handgun loaded with various new age safety mechanisms and electronics. The gun’s designer, Earnest Mauch, has developed it in such a way so that it “shoots only if it is within 10 inches of a special watch, activated by the user with a five-digit PIN code for a set period [of time]” (qtd. in Parloff 102).

Figure 1: The Armatix iP1

Next comes the question of how reliable this weapon truly is, for it is always a top priority of any gun owner that their weapon will work when needed. In an effort to hold true to his decorated name in the gun industry, Mauch designed his weapon to not only match the industry standard, but to surpass it tenfold with, “no more than 10 failures in 10,000 firings”. The weapon was also field tested in many conditions, powering through over “a quarter million rounds” with exposure to “rain, dust and mud” (qtd. in Parloff 105). Mauch expresses much concern when it comes to such violent opposition to his weapon that promotes safety. “Think about it,” Mauch continues. “If your son would kill, with your gun, his best friend. It’s horrible…but happens very often. If there are other technologies available, we should not close our eyes”(qtd. in Parloff 108).

The only way technology such as this would truly take off is if it saw Congressional action, which unfortunately is being overlooked. The primary concern of presidential delegates for the past decade has been focused on passing laws rather than trying to find a fix at the source. According to Tyler Kimberly of Case Western Reserve University, there are currently “270,000,000 to 310,000,000 guns [in circulation in the United States]” (256). This raises another question, will weapons such as the Armatix iP1 make a noticeable impact on lowering violent crime and accidental injury? With the vast amount of weaponry already around America, it would require near full citizen cooperation to trade their weapons for smart guns to make a profound impact. This of course is highly unlikely, and would receive a heated response from the NRA and conservatives alike. However, Kimberly makes sure to include another important statistic, being, “One out of every six police officers who is killed in the line of duty is shot with his or her own gun,” providing a shimmer of hope for smart gun technology when it comes to immediate results (257).

There is no doubt that this slowly emerging industry will have major implications in the future. It is truly just a matter of time until citizens begin to adopt these guns to reap the instant peace of mind of burglary protection and child safety. There will always be those who prefer the analog handgun, rifle or shotgun, whether for sport or home protection, and there is no legal or sane way to take that choice away from the people. Nonetheless, the inception of a new era of weaponry will offer people a choice to feel safer, and more importantly, be safer.

Works Cited
Johnson, Jeff. "Can Computer Professionals And Digital Technology Engineers Help Reduce
Gun Violence?" Communications Of The ACM 56.3 (March 2013): 35-37.

Kimberly, Tyler J. "A Higher Caliber Of Regulation: Is Making Smart-Gun Technology
Mandatory Constitutionally Permissible?" Case Western Reserve Law Review 65.1
(September 2014): 251-278.

Parloff, Roger. "SMART GUNS: They're Ready. Are We?" Fortune 171.6 (May 2015): 100-108.

Armatix iP1 photo: http://www.guns.com/2014/12/02/new-jersey-wont-be-selling-smart-guns-exclusively-attorney-general-says/