Smart Gun with Minicam and Biometric Access

StrawberryFrog writes "Ya well no fine, those crazy South Africans are at it again, this time with a "intelligent firearm". You may have heard of guns with fingerprint recognition before, but this also uses a laser to ignite the propellant, has multiple barrels and incorporates a minicam to record as evidence what you are shooting at. It's a very different gun design, and one that depends on electronics to make it work."

Re:I learn somthing new every day.

[Anonymous Coward]

Warlords? In South Africa? Ignorant twit.

Re:ya well no fine

[CaseyB]

This says [tripod.com] it's South African for "I'm bored".

Not a solution

[rzbx]

"...In effect, the curtains will always be open. When your neighbours can see in, you tend to be a lot more careful about the way you conduct yourself."

I found this line to be quite scary. Next thing you know it'll be against the law to keep your curtains closed. The device is quite interesting and all, but I have object to it. Sure, you'll stop some of the low level crime, but a black market for modifying these things will exist and it will be run by high level criminals. Have they yet to understand that guns are not the source of the crime? Change the gun and in effect you change the crime, but no where do I see the elimination of crime due to these guns. There may be a slight reduction possibly, but then one must take a look at the other side. Do innocent people die because they are unable to use the gun against an intruder? Is more money being put towards the underground gun smugglers to modify these weapons? There are more questions to be asked. So just step back and think about how much this will actually help.

Re:I'm not proposing anything.

[Warped-Reality]

Usually you buy them, but theres nothign stopping you from pouring your own. You can buy blocks of lead, along with bullet molds, from a lot of sporting goods places. The hard part might be making copper jackets, but those aren't really *needed*. I think the hardest thing to get would be the powder/casings/primers, if such things were banned. cases wear out after excess firings, so they wont' last forever.

WRONG! the NRA wont let that happen

[goombah99]

I did some preliminary research for a project aimed at marking bullets. Its theoretically possible to give every bullet a serial number imprinted on it. But I eventually gave up after talking with people who had been down that road before and got squelched by the NRA

for example, the best idea was to not mark the bullets but rather the gun powder with plastic micro-taggants (basically a dust whose particles are made up of snadwhiched layers of plastic that form a sort of bar code that can be read under a microscope). The test project put this into commercial dynamite and in fact several 1960/1970 convictions were obtained based on the taggants. but they tried it in gunpoweder and it workd just fine. The NRA moved in and killed all the legislation. Now a days dynamite is no longer tagged.

the wonderful thing about this stuff is that when the gun fires the power gets onto the shooter, bullet and target and is hard to remove. indeed its so hard to remove its main current use is in secretly marking designer clothing (e.g. to reconize real jordache jeans over the couterfeits)

the NRA, is, surpisingly, not you and me, nor even most US gun manufacturers, but rather its mainly funded by foreign owned cheap gun maunfacturers. They want to keep hand gun laws uncomplicated so more folks can own guns cheaply. The more expensive (mainly US + european based) manufacturers are not big NRA supporters since they would prefer to see the fixed costs of gun ownership rise a bit, so that the differential costs of their higher quality weapons are not as noticable. In fact the better gun manufacturers are solidly behind legistlation to improve handgun safety since anything that would make people have to go out an buy new and higher quality guns is good for them

taggants and the consequent legislation and regulation and tracking of bullets would increace the costs of gun ownership but not the cost of guns, thus favoring the quality manufactureres.

unfortunately the quality gun makers dont have the clout the NRA has.

As it is police dont even track ballistics and shell casings across juristiction boundaries. THe homeland defense hysteria may finally cure this with a central database. Which is a great worry to 2nd amendment people. And of course to the NRA.

Re:ya well no fine

[Nurf]

Heh. Actually, it is spelt "Ja well no fine". It has a bunch of uses, and is a sort of catchall phase for some people.

It can be used to indicate agreement about something that will soon be done. "Ja well no fine, let's go sort it out" would be a classic use.

It is a sort of shorthand. "Ja" = "Yes". "Well" is used as in English meaning as a scatting word "welllll", or to mean that things (or you) are well. "No" indicates that nothing is wrong (as if the other person had asked if there was a problem), and the "fine" is to back this up.

"Ja well no fine" = "Yes all is well, no really, it's fine"

or

"Ja well no fine" = "Yes! ummmm... no, definitely, it's fine!".

The second use would be when you have made a strong decision.

It's hard to pin down, but I think that will do as a start. The link some other guy posted about it meaning "I'm bored" is just wrong, in my opinion.

There. I bet you wished you never asked. :-)

not flamebait -- this is a good question

[wattersa]

Ironically, you have a valid point-- the answer from a legal standpoint (without black market worries) is that it will take the remaining life expectancy of people who owned dumb guns before the ban on future purchases of non-biometric weapons. Case in point: California's Assault Weapons Control Act. In 1989, it became illegal to purchase any of a number of specified firearms, but current users who registered their assault weapons could still keep them. Assault weapons may not be transferred by will, so there is no legal way to pass on the assault weapons to other California residents. See Cal. Penal Code 12275 et seq. [ca.gov] Essentially, the assault weapons "die" with their owners-- those who were at least 18 years old in 1989. Assuming a life expectancy of 75 years and that people born in 1970 actually purchased assault weapons, the 1989 assault weapons ban will have eliminated that segment of assault weapons around the year 2045. Of course, there are other factors at work, like the 1999 amendments that expanded our state's Assault Weapons Control Act, and also whether in the future the state has an outright ban versus a ban on future purchases. Not to mention the black market. A bill in the state senate to allow transfer of assault weapons by will failed last year, but it might pass in the future. The point is society can still change its laws, but realistically once the inertia builds it becomes more difficult to change.

Re:Clint Eastwood's next famous line

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Dirty Harrys gun was a revolver and as such, doesn't use magazines. But you make a good point.

Cops won't use these

[The Tyro]

Nobody who seriously trusts their life to a firearm would use one of these... the FOP membership would revolt enmasse.

Check this link... NJ put a smart gun law into effect, but law enforcement is exempt. [newstribune.com]

You may form your own theory about why that is... mine says that this technology is nowhere near ready for prime-time, and police officers know it. They have enough problems with regular guns malfunctioning, and those are simple, blow-back operated mechanical devices that any machinist can make. If the simple stuff sometimes fails, how can this complex system hope to do better?