Depends entirely on circumstances. Range is a big factor. In tactical shooting, there is a concept called a Tueller drill. IE, a person with a knife 21 feet away from you. The drill is to draw and fire before you are stabbed. It is exceedingly difficult. Personally, I don't really want to be shot OR stabbed. Hell, there was recently a mass stabbing in asia. Coupla dozen victims, if memory serves. Knives can be quite dangerous in the wrong hands.

This is incorrect. Shots fired in violent incidents vastly exceed the number of individuals killed. There are no shortage of cases with dozens of rounds fired and 0-1 dead people. You may have noticed an incident in Boston recently. There was a gunfight in that chase, with two bombers vs...a lot of police. HUNDREDS of rounds were fired. Only one bomber was incapacitated by gunfire, and he hardly expired instantly. Yes, guns can kill, but wildly misrepresenting how they are used only serves to portray you as yet another person who relies on movies for his information on firearms.

It seems like it'd be particularly easy to make other, similar apps to demonize other groups. Why, if this catches on, we'll soon be able to designate our local "godless communists", "racist rightwing nutjobs", and every other demographic imaginable! In a year or two, perhaps we can have an entire social network devoted to the people who despise you most describing you. Society will be vastly better once we are all unwillingly enrolled in Hatebook.

It's partly a media issue. I've appeared in media pieces regarding firearms a dozen times or so, and I've yet to see a single mention of any safety precautions make it through editing. I did, however, have to veto at least two terminally unsafe proposals from media folks. One wanted a firearm pointed right at him for a more dramatic shot. Another wanted to borrow a firearm to take it through airport security as a demonstration. Obviously, such attitudes are doing little to promote an awareness of proper firearm safety. The NRA, on the other hand, spends the majority of it's budget on it.

And if I swerve in my car, I can also kill someone in seconds. However, in practice, most of us don't really want to kill people on a whim.

I somehow doubt that random people using an app are going to check over your history at length before tagging you one way or the other. It's like expecting an erudite review from a youtube comment. Sure, it's possible in theory, but in practice, people on the internet who don't need to confront you can easily be assholes.

Good luck if you live in Detroit. They've just announced that their average response time for top priority 9-11 calls is....58 minutes.

How so? Did we not just have another mass stabbing in china? Twenty dead or some such? Drunken brawls are not safe. Promoting tolerance of such behavior is deeply irresponsible. Unlike how the movies portray the world, there really is no safe level of punching people in the head. Alcohol kills a LOT of people directly, and manages to ruin a lot more lives. We tried banning it, but it worked out pretty poorly. People still died, lives still got ruined. Jumping from identifying a problem to an attempted banning entirely skips the whole decision making process. How many alternatives were there to save lives from alcohol that never saw the light of day due to the fixation on prohibition? How many more reasonable ways to stop violence today? I submit that the focus on a single solution points to a solution in search of justification, not a genuine attempt at solving a problem.

Military has a truck to plane system for palletized cargo that works pretty decently. Well, ok, k-loader to plane...not the most standard of trucks. However, it does work for simplifying loading/unloading of aircraft, and there's no particular reason that the same pallets couldn't be used elsewhere. Vehicles utilizing them and automated inventory systems for them already exist.

Additionally, the volley gun was in service in the British military at this time. Seven rounds, shoulder fired gun...and also rockets and mortars and warships and rifles. Gun tech moves a lot slower than many people believe. There's a reason we're still using the 1911. Gun tech just hasn't changed that much in over a hundred years.

Style, like with apparel, refers to how something looks. So, "assault style", means the individual thinks the gun looks like what might be used in assaults. In short, it probably resembles something he or she saw in an action movie once.

Ammunition consists of powder and shot. If you're electrically detonating it, you don't need the right electrical current, you just need an electrical current. In other words, a "smart" weapon can be trivially modified to work by replacing the expensive biometric portion with a bit of wire and duct tape. Or, yknow, hitting the bullet with something hard, the way we do it now.

And, just like all of those cheap POS HPs and Dells, the average user will just ignore the fingerprint stuff, and the net gain will be pretty much zero.

He's referencing Kleck's work on the subject. I presume your "billion to one" number has a source, then?

The possible abuses of a "no gun" signal should be obvious with even a second's thought. For one thing, it'll be trivial for a crook to disable the tech on his gun in advance. Now he's the only person with a gun in that zone. This doesn't even bring up what someone with a slight bit of technical competence could do.