Smart guns: how Obama hopes to create a market for personalized weapons
Facing suspicious potential buyers, the US is acting as a ‘midwife’, encouraging law enforcement agencies to use the guns that can only be fired by their owners.
For more than a decade, smart guns have been stuck in a Catch-22: personalized guns don’t have a proven market, and buyers don’t want a gun they think is untested or hard to find. Now Barack Obama is trying to break that stalemate by creating a market for smart guns among law enforcement agencies around the US.
Some gun rights advocates view smart guns with suspicion, fearing that the new technology will be pushed on gun owners unwillingly, as a New Jersey law tried to do in 2002. The guns use fingerprint sensors or RFID tags to prevent the weapons from being fired by anyone except an authorized user.
“As long as we’ve got the technology to prevent a criminal from stealing and using your smartphone, then we should be able to prevent the wrong person from pulling a trigger on a gun,” the president wrote in a White House Facebook post late last week.
In a Friday report, touted by the White House as a milestone in the president’suphill battle to reduce gun violence, federal agencies said they were working with law enforcement officials to develop standards for smart guns that could be used by police officers. Once those new standards are released, the agencies will encourage law enforcement officers to volunteer to test smart guns in the field. They have promised that federal funding will be available to help police departments and other agencies buy new guns.
If the technology can meet the standards – and if agencies can cooperate – the purchasing power of the federal government could be an enormous boost to the nascent industry.
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