Vice President Joe Biden, as head of the White House's (illegal?) "anti-violence" task force, indicated Friday, after meeting with representatives of the video game industry (when first person shooter games are outlawed, only outlaws will have virtual guns), that he would be interested in laws mandating "smart guns." From Politico:
Biden plans to meet next with technology experts. “A lot can change if every gun purchase[d] can only be fired by the person who purchased it,” he said.
Ah, yes--"smart guns." Biden's boss has also touted those. Interestingly, although one of the main selling points behind this (still unworkable--years after New Jersey mandated it) technology is that it would protect "Only Ones" whose guns are grabbed by criminals, as perennial gun grabber John Rosenthal has himself argued (emphasis added):
According to gun maker Smith and Wesson, guns could be made with personal recognition technology such that only the intended user could fire the gun. This practical technological solution would save the lives of countless victims of gun violence, accidents and suicides each year. It could also help save the lives of the 17% of police officers killed in the line of duty by a criminal accessing the officer's gun.
The interesting part is that when New Jersey passed the "smart gun" mandate, police were specifically exempted, presumably precisely because police would have fought the legislation tooth and nail, if they had been expected to entrust their lives to this cockamamie technology.
Actually, Biden is not alone in this recent push for "smart guns" (which had kinda faded from discussion over the last couple years). Jeremy Shane, who served in Bush the Elder's Justice Department, thinks that guns could be made so "smart" that atrocities like Sandy Hook Elementary School would become impossible. From CNN:
The root of the problem is that guns are "dumb." Pull the trigger and they discharge bullets mindlessly, regardless of who is doing the aiming or where they are aimed. Guns should "know" not to fire in schools, churches, hospitals or malls. They should sense when they are being aimed at a child, or at a person when no other guns are nearby.
So . . . guns should (somehow) "know" to be useless to stop killers in schools, churches, hospitals and malls (the killers, of course, will have no difficulty acquiring one of the hundreds of millions of guns already in the U.S. that are too "dumb" to be useless for killing in such places).
If guns are to "know" that other guns are around, the new "smart" guns would apparently have to constantly broadcast their presence (what kind of battery are we talking about?)--and again, the old, "dumb" guns (which don't broadcast their presence), even if banned, will be around in the scores of millions. And for those trying to defend themselves from a knife-armed rapist? Sorry--no other guns around means your gun is not allowed to shoot--let's hope the rapist does not intend murder when the rape is done, and that he's HIV negative.
The point of making them "sense when they are being aimed at a child" would presumably be to make firing impossible under such circumstances. What is a "child"? Under the age of 18? Kinda like the mobs of "children" who attack people, and sometimes kill them, without needing guns to do it?
We should probably be grateful that he does not insist that the gun "know" when it is being pointed at an "Only One"--an "Only One" like, perhaps, Tyler Peterson.
Granted, Jeremy Shane can be dismissed as an idiot, and if he truly believes what he is spouting, the most primitive matchlock firearm in history is indeed a good deal "smarter" than he is (and a good deal more useful in stopping a would-be mass murderer of children in a school than his "smart" guns would be). And yet even so, his idiocy was not enough to keep him from a position of power in the federal government, and now he is presumably being paid by the mass media to shape public opinion.
We don't need smarter guns. We need smarter voters, to keep "smart gun" fanboys like Biden and Obama well away from the levers of power.
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