I agree with the point you're making, in this post and others, but what if the smart gun manufacturers erred on the side of an operational, not disabled, weapon? In other words, if the battery dies or fails, or if it's determined that a fingerprint scan couldn't be gathered successfully (if it's using fingerprints), then default to an enabled state?
This would still put the onus of making the gun safe on the gun's owner, much like making sure a trigger lock is in place, requiring that the battery be checked frequently, and so on.
I realize that there are still other fail cases that would reduce reliability (like, in the case of fingerprints, a scan was successfully gathered but is not correctly identified), but eliminating the power failure, among others, by defaulting to an enabled state would no doubt get much closer to your high reliability target, would it not?
The way I see it, this would likely prevent more accidental shootings while getting closer to that reliability target.
However, you may be able to say that a flash suppressor has no affect on the function of the weapon in a literal sense, but I'd argue it completely changes the weapon's intended use. A weapon intended for target practice, sport, or self defense has absolutely no need for a flash suppressor. This type of "feature" is intended for covert use of the weapon, which I'd argue falls under what most would categorize as an assault weapon.
More than one year before the Pebble there was Metawatch [metawatch.org] (which uses exactly the same display type), and ages before the Pebble there were much, much more advanced "smartwatches".
Like the inPulse watch? You know, made by Allerta, who became Pebble?
;-)
No doubt this false sense of security (and driving talent/experience) comes standard with most 4WD/AWD/4x4 vehicles.
When I had a 4x4 SUV, I even found myself having trouble keeping in mind the fact that I wasn't invincible.
My girlfriend and I were in Illinois a few Christmases ago when we found ourselves having to begin our 5-6 hour drive after 5-6 inches had already fallen. Even in IL, those country roads were not cleared one bit. We were in a Hyundai Sonata (4-door sedan, front-wheel drive), going maybe half the speed limit. We encountered numerous vehicles in the ditch, almost all of which were SUVs. We did end up doing a 180 in the middle of a straight road (presumably hitting some hidden ice under the snow), but we were able to at least make it to a major city in Indiana where we gave up (having gone half our distance in 5-6 hours) and stayed the night.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982