No, just the sometimes harsh math of the policy wonk...I have no idea how to weigh saving one person's life against costing another's, so I settle for second best and try to accurately count them. The OP's point was that this (or really any safety lock) will cost lives, my reply was that under even unreasonable assumptions, it will save more lives than it costs. That in no way devalues the lives lost. Since any gun policy (including no change from current laws) is going to involve some trade off of innocent lives, I don't see how we can be squeemish about counting deaths.

To your second point, I agree, safety locks do nothing to prevent premeditated murder. It's the unknown number of unplanned killings that may be reduced. And, of course, there's no real chance that something like this goes into wide enough use to really make any difference.

Well, if the thing can be easily flashed, the whole concept is pretty pointless. As far as simply using another means of suicide, people who try to commit suicide with guns are far more successful than those who use other means. This article has data on suicide success rates, and guns are much more lethal than other suicide methods. Personally, I've known people who attempted suicide with guns, and now they're dead, and I know people who tried with other means, and they've recovered and gone on to live full lives.

Are minors ever authorized to use guns unsupervised? Honest question--I thought in most states you had to be over 18 or 21 to own a gun, and that minors have to be supervised. For example, even Utah, a pretty gun-friendly state, has pretty strict restrictions on when kids can be alone with guns. So, shouldn't someone under 18 always be under some sort of temporary use permission? i.e., "Junior and I are going to the range/hunting/whatever, he's good for 6 hours" sort of thing.

For whatever reason, the suicide stats that I can find use 15-24 years old as an age rage, so I couldn't' easily see how many minors used guns to commit suicide. From a quick google ~4000 people in that age range commit suicide per year, and about half use guns. So, guesstimate that around 1000 underage people use guns to kill themselves per year. Even if the only effect of this system was to reduce that number, it would be more than all the justifiable homicides by both police and civilians.

Couldn't find anything on how often the person who commits suicide is the gun owner, but even the common-sense step of taking family members who have recently expressed suicidal thoughts off the 'gun access list' would probably save hundreds or thousands of lives per year.

There were also 393 shootings by cops; I don't know enough about law enforcement to have any opinion if this is a good idea there. I wasn't able to find the needed stats about how many of the shooters were unauthorized. I am aware that ~20k were suicides, and think this does apply to suicides as well as homicides, as the person committing suicide is not necessarily the authorized user of the gun.

I have a vague memory of reading that the most likely lethal use of a privately owned gun is for a family member to kill him/herself. Grim statistic, if true.

Because sensible regulation works better than banning. We've been working on car safety for 50+ years, and the number of people killed by cars has been steadily dropping.

Why do gun people insist on turning every conversation about gun safety into an emotional confrontation? This isn't really about your precious guns, it's about the tens of thousands of people who are shot to death every year. Discussing that it might be nice if fewer people were shot to death doesn't immediately mean that we're going to ban guns.

In personal life, people who inappropriate emotionally escalate conversations are usually trying to avoid something they'd rather not talk about. Can't help thinking that's what's going on here.

I have no idea about millitary or law enforcement use of this, but in the civilian world this something like this doesn't have to work very well at all to save lives.

In 2011, 32,163 people were shot to death in the United States. 260 of those were justifiable homicides by private citizens (e.g., self-defense). Even if this technology failed and locked out the owner 100% of the time, and 100% of those failures lead to the death of the owner, it would only have to block less than 1% of the other uses to be a net positive. I can't find any stats on what percent of non-self-defense gun killings are done by people using a gun they weren't supposed to use, but even if it's a pretty small percent, this will save a lot of lives.

That cooperative threat reduction is basically helping the FSU keep track of and dismantle their nukes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn%E2%80%93Lugar_Cooperative_Threat_Reduction

By "Ruby Ridge crowd" I didn't mean the people at Ruby Ridge in 1992, but the people who emulate/idolize them. I've heard a surprising number of people lately say things like "If the government ever comes for me, it will be another Ruby Ridge." I was using Ruby Ridge crowd as shorthand for the political subculture in the U.S. that seems to think hunkering down with a bunch of guns lets them defy the government.

It's a pretty funny story, but hard to figure out what was going on there. Maybe the Dutch are more easygoing about this sort of thing, but the team's action doesn't seem like they were actually ordered to get in. You're right though, I guess there is an intermediate case where they're enough of a nuisance to provoke half-hearted action.

I don't know..I'm not a combat engineer, but I don't think any bunker can last long if determined professionals are allowed to freely operate outside it. "nuclear bunker" means certain things about tolerance to over pressure, shock, contaminated air, etc., but doesn't do all that much against people with jackhammers and drills. The wikipedia page says the cyberbunker has 5 meter thick reinforced concrete walls, which would probably keep you and me out, but I'm sure can be defeated in time with civil engineering equipment. Beyond that, if you've got guys who know what they're doing poking around outside the bunker, there's whole worlds of things they can do.

These Danish cyberbunker people seem to share a mindset with the U.S. Ruby Ridge crowd, and they're both wrong. Making yourself an immobile target and defying state power in a developed nation really only has two outcomes: either you're not enough of a nuisance to provoke action, or you get crushed.

Because that does nothing for the innocent people harmed by the idiots?

So the top of the article has a picture of a building that looked like someone'd been going at the walls with a sledgehammer for a while. Anyone else see this and think "Man, they gotta make that thing a little lighter..."

you forgot 3. If it goes crazy and starts trying to kill everyone, it looses power after a few feet.

If I had mod points, +1 funny for "Cinderblock throwing have never really been any industry metric..."