Bobby Miller
Writer Website
How Smart is a Smart Gun?
2,500 words
Although the United States today is flooding with political controversies, one of the most intense topics out there is gun control. On one hand, some argue against gun control measures by claiming that they violate the Second Amendment and might prevent good people from protecting themselves. On the other hand, some argue that we need stricter gun control laws in order to reduce the number of shootings that happen every night across the U.S. and to prevent massacres such as school shootings.
Guns are certainly a dangerous tool. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that about 31,672 Americans died from firearm injuries in 2010, composing about 17.5 percent of all injury deaths that year. Many of these victims are young. According to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), “77 percent of homicide victims ages 15-17 died from gun-related injuries” between 1976 and 2005. The website OpposingViews.com goes on to note that, in the first half of 2013, American toddlers getting their hands on real guns resulted in eleven deaths, as compared to the four deaths U.S. terrorists caused in that same timeframe with the Boston Marathon Massacre.
A recent report by the NIJ explains that researchers want to prevent children from using misplaced firearms and stop criminals from using ones that they have stolen. With these incidents in mind, various gun manufacturers and tech companies have invested in “personalized firearms,” which are sometimes called childproof guns, user-authorized handguns or smart guns. The NIJ explains that a smart gun is one with safety mechanisms designed to recognize the authorized user. It will fire if the correct person is using it, but will refuse to activate if the incorrect person somehow gets their hands on it.
Our government believes that smart gun development is essential to making firearms safer. From the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, the NIJ invested over $11 million in smart gun research. In a release published by WhiteHouse.gov, President Barack Obama promised to support the smart gun industry. “The Administration will issue a challenge to the private sector to develop innovative and cost-effective gun safety technology and provide prizes for those technologies that are proven to be reliable and effective,” the release said.
For some, smart gun projects resonate on a deeply personal level. Families of the victims in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have created the Sandy Hook Promise Innovation Initiative to give prizes to companies capable of creating safer guns. They believe Silicon Valley’s growing technology is “so fast moving and innovative” that it’s a great place to seek solutions to gun problems, as NewtownBee.com explained.
However, the development of smart guns has come under fire from all sides. The National Rifle Association has snickered at the idea, and the Violence Policy Center believes they will only increase the number of firearm-related injuries seen every year. So what exactly are smart guns, and can they save lives like their advocates claim?
Token-Based Smart Gun Technology
Various companies around the world have developed smart gun prototypes. They often use different technology in order to have the gun discern between an authorized user and an unauthorized user.
Armatix, a gun company based in Germany, has developed a .22 caliber pistol called the Smart System. It relies on “token-based technology” to work, as the NIJ explains. This means that the gun’s authorized user carries or wears some sort of device, a token, that the gun recognizes so it knows who is allowed to use it. In the case of Armatix’s Smart System, gun users wear a device that looks much like a wristwatch; it even keeps time. This watch in disguise sends out a radio signal that the gun recognizes, allowing the gun to fire if they are within fifteen inches of each other. This is referred to as radio frequency identification (RFID).
Using the technology as such should prevent anyone from snatching the gun out of a police officer’s hand and then using it against them. Plus, running away with the gun would be useless. If the watch itself is somehow stolen, it will deactivate itself within a few hours. To reactivate it would require a PIN, presumably known only by the gun’s true owner.
Other than the LED light designed to tell you when the gun is ready to fire, the Smart System looks like a standard firearm. (Credit: NCJRS.gov)
Armatix has tried to make the gun user-friendly. An LED display on the Smart System glows red if it will not fire, that is, if the watch is out of range of the gun or not activated properly. It will blink if the battery is low, and it will shine green when the watch is in range, making everything ready to go. Also, for police departments who might swap guns or watches around, it’s possible to set up one watch to work with multiple guns or for one gun to work with multiple watches. The company has sold the Smart System in Europe and Asia and is currently seeking to extend its commercial sales to the United States.
Some are skeptical of using token-based technology with smart guns, though. SafeGunTechnology.co believes it’s too easy for the gun user to lose the token, whether it’s a watch, ring or bracelet. If the token is lost, the person is vulnerable until they order a replacement. Also, if a criminal attacks a home in the middle of the night, a citizen protecting themselves would have to fiddle with both the token and the gun, putting them at a severe disadvantage. It would be possible to get around this flaw by injecting a small RFID chip right into the user’s hand upon purchase.
However, Duncan Long, an internationally recognized firearms expert, believes that RFID technology is inherently flawed for smart gun use. If RFID smart guns became widespread, criminals might figure out how to create “a powerful radio transmitter to jam that signal,” as he explains on his website. An illegally-armed criminal could march into an area knowing that equipped citizens and even police officers have no means of resisting them with jammed-up RFID guns. Long also adds that if everyone were required by law to have a radio-based gun or none at all, a criminal could detect radio frequencies in order to determine which houses are armed and which ones are not.
Fingerprinting Gun Users
Kodiak Industries, which is based in Utah, takes a different approach to smart gun user authorization. It has developed the Intelligun, which is a fingerprint-based locking system that can be installed on any regular .45 caliber pistol.
Once someone purchases the Intelligun, they grip the gun and place their finger on the fingerprint sensor. The system will recognize them as the administrator and register their fingerprints accordingly; multiple samples should allow it to detect the user properly. The administrator can then register more users if necessary, so an entire police department could be registered on one gun, or a married couple could make sure the gun recognizes both of them. The NIJ claims that removing the Intelligun system from a firearm would require “substantial knowledge” of how guns work and would probably render the gun unusable. Kodiak planned to sell the gun add-on in 2013, though it appears smart gun advocates will have to wait for it a little longer.
The Intelligun’s locking system can be discretely placed on various guns. (Credit: NCJRS.gov)
Kodiak boasts that the gun properly recognizes an authorized user and fires 99.99 percent of the time, so you can count on it to work. In fact, that’s a better success rate than most standard firearms today. However, these tests were conducted with new guns in pristine environments. Duncan Long, the aforementioned firearm expert and smart gun skeptic, doubts fingerprint guns would work well in the real world. As he explains, the gun’s user “must have clean hands,” which could be problematic for police officers who have been chasing a criminal through a forest or the back alleys of a city. Even just sweat could mess up the fingerprint detection. Plus, as Long notes, the user couldn’t be wearing gloves, which would be difficult for officers patrolling in the winter months.
Dynamic Grip Smart Guns
Dynamic grip technology has also been applied to smart guns, though to a lesser extent than token-based technology and fingerprinting. The New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has developed what it calls a Child Safe Personalized Weapon. It can detect who is holding the gun based on their grip. Sensors recognize the amount of pressure the hand applies at various positions when the gun is held. It looks at hand size, geometry and pressure in order to identify an authorized user. Although the technology is rarely used because it has shown underwhelming results so far, the NJIT has continued to improve the accuracy of its smart guns. Its current prototypes recognize an authorized user properly 97 percent of the time and reject an unauthorized user about 98 percent of the time.
(Credit: NJ.com)
The Issue of Reliability
But the NJIT’s guns are still just prototypes. A 97 percent chance of working successfully might be fine for some products, including guns used for sport, but not for smart guns being used in situations where one’s life is on the line. Shooting Times technical editor Dick Metcalf has told Wired.com that “there is zero room for error here.” For instance, “if you swipe your ATM card and it doesn’t read it, do it again. But if you reach for your gun to defend yourself and it doesn't recognize your identification, you don’t get a second chance.”
For this reason, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has been extremely skeptical of all smart guns, dreading a day when the government might make them legally required before they’re effective enough. They’re not the only ones who seem concerned about how reliably a gun works. Police officers want to know that their guns will fire properly if they’re in a life-or-death situation, so the NIJ has found reliability to be the biggest smart gun concern for police departments. Regular citizens also share this concern. While the iGun Technology Corporation of Florida was able to develop a personalized firearm back in 1998, it was never released due to a lack of consumer demand.
It’s also questionable whether or not police departments would actually benefit from smart gun technology. One pioneer in the field, Sandia National Laboratories, was inspired to enter the personalized firearm industry after hearing about police officers in the line of duty having their own guns used against them. However, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there are only about thirteen U.S. police officers a year who are fatally wounded by a criminal taking their gun. While these deaths are tragic and should be prevented, one must wonder if malfunctioning smart guns would cause more deaths than they would save.
Also, to ensure that a smart gun is reliable, we must make sure that it works in less-than-pristine conditions. The U.S. Army uses a Test Operations Procedure to make sure a weapon is consistent and durable, according to the NIJ. Testers expose the firearms to “extreme temperatures, rain, sand and dust” as well as “rough handling,” which includes dropping the gun at different angles. Smart guns have undergone similar testing, but many have shown unremarkable results thus far.
However, this has not deterred some advocates of smart guns. Innovation requires that we go beyond what we see immediately before our eyes. Perhaps we must continue working on smart gun technology until it’s entirely reliable and durable. Taurus International MFG, a leading gun manufacturer, has even paired up with the New Jersey Institute of Technology to tackle this challenge. “We don’t disagree that it’s going to be a monumental challenge to achieve a level of reliability in order for this to be usable technology,” Taurus marketing manager Eduardo Fernandez told Wired.com. “But knowing it will eventually happen, we feel better being a partner in that development instead of waiting on the sidelines for it to be handed to us.”
Gun Control Advocates against Smart Guns
Although the NRA, gun manufacturers and police departments focus mostly on smart gun reliability, it is not the only concern people have with the growing technology. The Violence Policy Center (VPC), which advocates for stricter gun control laws and educates people about the dangers firearms can bring, believes that smart guns might not solve the major problems that firearms pose.
The VPC’s main concern is that the rise of smart guns might increase the number of guns in circulation, which in turn could increase the number of gun-related deaths. The National Opinion Research Center conducted a survey in March of 1997 and found that 35 percent of people who said they were “unlikely to buy a gun in the future” would “consider buying a handgun that would only fire for the owner of the gun.” Hence, there are many people today who would not purchase a normal gun, but might buy a smart gun if it’s advertised as “safe.”
The VPC believes this is dangerous because a person who owns a gun is actually more likely to be the victim of gun violence than one who does not. The Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Epidemiology, the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine have all found that homicide and suicide rates are highest in homes with guns. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, “a gun in the home makes the likelihood of homicide three times higher [and] suicide three to five times higher.” A smart gun would not alleviate these problems. Besides, locks already exist for guns to prevent people (namely children) from firing them by accident.
While the VPC concedes that smart guns would at least discourage people from stealing firearms, the technology would not “strike a serious blow to the criminal market for guns.” The number one way criminals get their hands on guns illegally is through a “straw purchaser.” That is, someone legally purchases a gun, but then sells it to someone else illegally. A smart gun would do nothing to stop this because the “straw purchaser” could simply give the criminal the token used to operate the gun or register their fingerprints in it. In light of all this, the VPC announced on its website that it opposes the government using our federal tax dollars to support smart gun research.
Firearms violence is a huge problem in the United States. According to GunPolicy.org, a person living in America is four times more likely to be shot than someone in Canada, eight times more likely to be shot than someone in Germany, over 40 times more likely to be shot than someone in the UK and over 170 times more likely to be shot than someone in Japan. Why is firearm violence so much lower in these countries? It isn’t thanks to smart gun technology, which hasn’t been widely implemented in these places either.
While smart guns may effectively keep authorized users safe someday, they currently present more problems than they solve.
Bobby Miller originally wrote this article for the digital magazine Nvate in December of 2013. Due to its age, some of the information or links in the article may be outdated.