It's not too bad as long as it can be accurately compensated for, as is the case in naval gunnery, or any other type of platform-mounted gunnery for that matter.

The problem, as you point out, is one of stability, or rather, stability versus portability. So while it wouldn't work very well on a guy's backpack, for fixed installations, Aliens-style shoot-at-anything-that-moves robot sentries are perfectly realisable with today's technology.

But as the current debate on robotic weaponry (and indeed the Ottawa treaty) show, this type of indiscriminate, human-out-of-the-loop weapons are not very popular at the moment, so I'd be surprised if we saw them deployed anytime soon.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in both the armed forces and the defence industry, please allow me to disabuse you of the notion that technology, any technology, has any impact on collateral damage. In WWII there was widespread collateral damage from strategic bombing of industrial centres. If such a full-scale war between roughly equal powers were waged today, with our smart bombs and pin-point accuracy missiles, the exact same thing would happen. This is because while technology advances, the objectives of war remain the same.

In this particular case, "intended" is not the same as "illuminated". The gun doesn't know what your intended target is, only what you light up. If you point it at a child, that's what it will track: the responsibility is yours. Or put another way, guns don't stop people from killing people - people do.

This product is marketed as a way to improve accuracy and record shot videos, not to make the gun safer. Weapons are inherently unsafe, and the only way to make one safe is to destroy it.

http://tracking-point.com/innovations/hardware/tag-button The target is not marked by anything physical. The distance to target is measured with a laser range finder, but they don't go into any details as to how the subsequent tracking is performed (and understandably so, that's where they make their money). It could be an active system, where the scope continuously bounces laser off the target and corrects for movement within reasonable limits. It could be visual, where the system guesses the target's outline and then tracks it using the camera. Or it could be something else. Either way, automated tracking of ground targets is notoriously difficult compared to targets in air or on water, so it would be interesting to know how they deal with things like one deer moving briefly behind another, or standing behind a tree for a while and then coming out again.

They actually let someone use that word in a youth-oriented prime time show in the early '80s?
You guys really have regressed.