Most street muggers are not professional criminals. They've hit a need to cash and fast. They look to weaker prey as any predator will. They have a script running in their head "Ok, I do this, victim does this, I get money, run off". they rehearse it repeatedly over and over in their head. When someone breaks this script, through a gun, a weapon, or simply fighting back, that script is broken, they're off balance and they are now in a reactive state. (in IT most of the time is in a reactive, crap is broken state). This reactive state is least optimal for the mind to be in and only well seasoned and experienced people can deal with it properly, their mind adds more to the rehearsal.
A biometric gun is not perfect, probably wont be, but there's no reason to dismiss them. But they absolutely should not be mandatory by law. Laws like this are hard to follow, add complexity and raise price. But that is probably exactly what lawmakers want. Since they cannot ban guns outright, make them cost prohibitive to the average person. It's bad enoguh the ones I want are $500 plus. Add in Bio and it's a possible extra $200...
Same scenario, She pulls her biometric gun, but the man was standing too close and manages to wrestle it from her hands. He aims, the gun doesn't recognize the prints and beeps an error. He tries again, frustrated it wont fire. He throws the gun down in anger and runs off before others see. She collects her gun and purse. Shaken but alive.
There's a million other ways this can happen, but take the whole dead horse "for the children's safety" crap. I'm tired of kids being used to pass laws. Children are not that stupid. My father taught me and my siblings, all while younger than 8, how to respect and shoot guns and could leave them on the kitchen table, no one would ever bother it. Kids not taught, they show their friends, they play with them, they don't know it's loaded and shoot each other. Most accidents are out of ignorance...
This is a decent safety measure. Sure it can be hacked just like any other electronics, but that takes removal from the site, and time. It can't be instant hack. Biometrics are getting faster. We'd need something that can recognize it is being held, scan and ready to fire in less than a second. Make it possible i'd buy. Just dont force it on every gun made. Give us the choice as the consumer to buy it or not. Freedom is in choices not in laws.
Traditional retailers want business? Change their service, train staff better, have more registers open, kick out the rabble who just hang out in stores and never buy stuff. Most of all lower prices. Even with shipping and sales taxes, I've bought quite a few items online far cheaper. It adds up. Time saved, gas saved, not desiring to punch a moron, or rude person. Despite our need to be around people, malls and shopping just sucks. It's not the same pleasant experience it used to be.
As far as Gamestop goes, and the used market. It's about dang time it gets a shakedown. sure it sucks that publishers are sucking the lifeblood from us by eliminating used game sales. Imagine if car manufacturers did the same for used cars... But... Have any of you gone to a gamestop in the past 2-3 years?
It sucks. It's a shop of despair and crushed spirits. You go in and there's a line a mile long for people trying to sell their used games at $10 or so a pop. The wait for a clerk, so you can buy a game, you know, "give them money", is eternal. Service is slow, it sucks and now with Amazon and Best Buy and all these other places selling games there is no need to go there any more. Gamestop is nothing more than a Pawn shop disguised as a retail outlet. They charge $50 for a used game, that may or may not even have a manual and $60 for the new game that is complete. I prefer to pay the extra money. Sure for some of the older, hard to find games like the "Persona" series, gamestop may be a gem, but those situations are so far and few to mean anything.
In the end I do pray Gamestop changes it's business model, provides marginally better service, or priority over those who want to make a purchase. I've many times dropped my items right where I stood and left the store. I don't need launch day games. I can wait another week or two. Most games are just not fun anymore. they provide no challenge, then there's Capcom, the only game maker that doesn't appear to cater to the mentally numb. Dragon's Dogma, is a gem on the line of the Dark/Demon Souls line. and the original god of war. These gems are too rare.
How many times have you seen, or are you the pedestrian, that blindly walks across the street without so much as a glimpse, in trust the sign saying walk, will save them? As if a magic force field or a contingent of lawyers will protect them from vehicles. The laws of physicals ALWAYS trump the laws of man. That's just one example, but one of my biggest peeves.
I have to flip through 30 pages of safety notes to get to 2 pages of instructions on assembling furniture, tools, electronic devices...
I have to skip 20 lines of warnings on an over the counter aspirin, exedrin... just to find the one line I need on how many and how often to take them.
When will this be enough? When will we stop regulating ourselves to a culture so safe, we die of boredom? Rubber foam sand under swings in playgrounds, rubber bumpers on edges of walls. If you never feel it hurts, you'll be less likely to avoid the situation. Less likely to know dangers.
I recently went on a trip to summit Mt Hood. A simple mountain, but rife with dangers. One of the people was 18 years of age, the other 22. they were so clueless on the dangers of the mountain, that every step it was plotting ways to murder us. High winds, melting ice, snow collapse, steam vents under the snow... At one point returning, there were rocks, good sized rocks laying ontop of the snow. Instead of realizing the high winds above were tossing these baseball sized chunks of death at us from 100 foot high walls, the youngons, were wondering what type of rock it was and how it formed. Not the imminent danger of if one hits us we're going to be seriously injured or die.
We're building a weak society, oblivious to dangers and in the end, it will hamper our progress, make us weaker, more feeble.
Banning guns, it's a bandaid act to make the politicians feel achieved. It's a false way of feeling like they did a job. In the end It disrespects the constitution, and the 50+ million legal gun owners who haven't murdered anyone.
and no, the founders most likely never foresaw machine guns and rocket launchers. But they learned from thousands of years of history that standing armies, soldiers that are bored with no wars, will turn on the citizens. This can be noted in the small towns with bored police... This can be seen across the world as we know it now. when the citizens cannot defend themselves, the government get's arrogant and diminishes the freedoms of the people. this is what our founders saw, and fought against, and it is what they know will always be the case. So they built into our constitution a way for the people to control government. Even they saw, 20 years later, the government was already too big for their liking but flew out of their hands.
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh