EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of a series of articles on gun rights. Each addresses a common anti-gun trope.
“We need smart guns! Technology will prevent misuse!”
Yes, lets talk about technology and firearms, and not just “smart guns.” What is a “smart gun,” by the way? It is a firearm that contains embedded technology permitting only authorized users to fire it. Various forms of implementing this feature have been proposed or are being developed, including fingerprint sensors, biometric sensors, or some unlocking device, such as a ring or wrist watch, that activates the gun when in proximity (via RFID or similar means).
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Sounds like a neat way to keep the bad guys from using your gun against you, or from using stolen guns, and a great way to keep your kids safe. Also sounds like something else that can go wrong, in precisely the moment that you need everything to go right. After all, in the rare event you need to actually fire your gun to save your life or the life of another, do you really want to risk that your stress screws up the biometric reading, or that your fingerprint doesn’t register properly, or that, oops, you weren’t wearing your special ring or watch, or something had a weak or dead battery?
Perhaps you do. Perhaps you are willing, when the technology is mature enough, to go the smart gun route for the aforementioned reasons. Maybe you believe it’ll be safer around your kids. Maybe you really worry about being disarmed by a bad guy. Those are personal choices, and it’s not my place to tell you you’re wrong. After all, some people don’t trust semi-automatic pistols, preferring the greater reliability of revolvers, while some want the higher magazine capacity of semi-automatics. Some prefer shotguns over handguns for home defense, and vice versa. There are many personal choices people make when it comes to firearms, and not just for home defense or concealed carry. And, there are many who prefer not to have a gun in the house at all.
A free society, even one with robust gun rights, respects individual choices such as these, and should respect the same choices regarding smart gun technology. Unfortunately, smart guns are being touted by gun control advocates not just as another option, but as something that should be mandated for all. New Jersey has already written legislation mandating that, once smart gun technology is mature, only smart guns may be sold in the state.
What could possibly go wrong?
First, who decides when the tech is mature enough? That decision should be yours, not that of some (very probably anti-gun) bureaucrat. “Close enough for government work” is not a threshold that I’d trust my self-defense to.
Second, consider the privacy issues. Walking around with an RFID device that tells anyone with a scanner that you’ve got a concealed handgun, or, worse, can be used to collect identifying information… well, there’s a problem that I have yet to see addressed.
Third, there’s the Big Bad Government angle. Imagine if your smart gun had malware secretly installed, or if the government developed jamming technology. Lest we forget, the core purpose of 2A is to keep the populace armed against tyranny. Do we place further trust in a government that’s already been busted for hoovering up our telephone conversations and our emails?
Finally, there’s the flip side of the gun-technology matter: 3D printers and other home manufacturing. Already, the technology exists to make a gun at home in a 3D printer, and already, one can purchase a home-use CNC mill that can make the central component for a semi-automatic rifle (i.e. the lower receiver of an AR-15, i.e. the part that is tracked via serial number, i.e. you can buy the other pieces). While home manufacture of firearms isn’t a new thing, technology’s relentless forward march tells us something vital to understand: the ability of government regulators, banners, and gatekeepers to restrict what we own is diminishing. So, even as gun control advocates advance smart gun technology as a way to restrict misuse of guns, technology is taking away the ability to control the supply of guns via legislation and regulation (the same is going to happen with illegal drugs. I expect that home-based chemical printers will become a reality in our lifetimes, making the War on Drugs even more pointless).
Imagine, a decade or two from now, a mandate that all new guns be “smart guns.” Imagine, also, that the government mandated all concealed-carry pistols be smart guns – across the nation, that by some impossible turn of events, there wasn’t a revolt in the 41 states that have passed right-to-carry laws, and that dumb guns were being slowly phased out of ownership. If we can imagine that, we can also imagine a couple guys, working the basement of a rented house, making guns on that era’s newer, better 3D printers and CNC machines, and selling those guns on the black market. Completely untraceable, completely outside regulatory reach. Sure, that could be made illegal (it already is in many places), but so are meth labs, and they dot the landscape (and produce a consumable, rather than a durable, product).
What does all this tell us? That technology is more apt to obviate government restriction and regulation than it is to enable more of it. That mandating smart gun technology isn’t going achieve what its advocates expect, predict, or wish for. That such mandates will, as usual, only infringe on the rights of the law-abiding, and quite possibly make things easier for criminals.
So,
Gun rights lesson #522: Far from being a mechanism for more gun control and restriction, technology will make government infringement of gun rights less and less possible.
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