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President Obama’s Plan to Make America Smarter About Guns

by GBRKarma138 Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Friday, President Barack Obama released a plan for the federal government to promote the development of smart-gun technology. The guns, also known as “personalized firearms,” employ biometric or other sensor technologies to prevent them from being fired by anyone other than their owners.

“Today, many gun injuries and deaths are the result of legal guns that were stolen, misused, or discharged accidentally,” Obama said in a Facebook post. “As long as we’ve got the technology to prevent a criminal from stealing and using your smartphone, then we should be able to prevent the wrong person from pulling a trigger on a gun.”

Obama began advocating smart guns in January, as part of his latest push to confront America’s costly gun violence crisis. He ordered the departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security to develop a strategy to promote the technologies and expedite government procurement of the weapons. The report released Friday details the following initiatives:

By October, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security will establish requirements that smart-gun manufacturers need to meet in order for their guns to be purchased by law enforcement agencies. They will also identify agencies willing to participate in a smart-gun pilot program.
The Department of Defense will help manufacturers test smart-gun technologies at the US Army Aberdeen Test Center in Maryland. Manufacturers will be eligible to win cash prizes for successful designs.
The Department of Justice has authorized agencies to apply certain federal grants to the purchase of smart guns.

Gun companies first pursued smart guns in the 1990s, in part at the urging of the Clinton administration. Colt, Smith & Wesson, and O.F. Mossberg & Sons developed prototypes. The products were shelved, however, when market research showed consumers didn’t trust the weapons—and after the National Rifle Association and other gun rights activists denounced the companies for a product they claimed was a Trojan horse for gun control.

The recent rise in mass shootings has helped renew interest in smart guns, including among investors in Silicon Valley. The Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, created by angel investor Ron Conway after the 2012 Newtown massacre, has handed out about $1 million in funding to gun safety startups. One grant recipient was Jonathan Mossberg, a former Mossberg & Sons VP and the developer of the iGun, a shotgun that will only fire if the shooter is wearing a special ring. Mossberg, who is working on miniaturizing his technology for handguns, told me by phone on Friday that Obama’s efforts could “raise a whole lot of interest and give people a sense of this market.”

By one estimate, smart guns may be a $1 billion slice of the industry. The White House initiative could help create more opportunity in the major market for supplying law enforcement agencies. Mossberg and a handful of other smart-gun developers have long been trying to get police departments interested in their weapons; an estimated 5 to 10 percent of police deaths occur when officers’ own firearms are used against them. Some law enforcement leaders have shown support for adopting the technology, including San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr.

But strong opposition continues: The NRA remains sharply critical of Obama’s policy, which suggests the gun industry is likely to follow suit and ignore efforts on the technology. The Fraternal Order of Police, a national interest group representing the rank and file, is also signaling skepticism. “Police officers in general, federal officers in particular, shouldn’t be asked to be guinea pigs in evaluating a firearm nobody’s even seen yet,” FOP Director James Pasco told Politico. “We have some very, very serious questions.” (Politico failed to note that a charity run by the FOP has received at least $125,000 since 2010 from another conservative gun lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.)

Obama on Friday also announced several other gun safety initiatives, including a proposed rule requiring the Social Security Administration to better report mental-illness information to the federal background check system, and a gun violence prevention conference to be hosted by the White House in May.

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President Obama’s Plan to Make America Smarter About Guns

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Welcome to the Future of Gun Control

by HollyBlomfield4 Posted on February 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Mossberg wanted to be the Steve Jobs of firearms.

In 1999, a few years before the invention of the iPod, Mossberg began to build the iGun, a computer-chip-equipped “smart gun” that could only be fired by its owner. (The “i” stands for intelligence.) He saw the technology as a commonsense way to prevent gun violence—a no-brainer safety device like seatbelts or air bags. The iGun is a shotgun equipped with a radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor that only allows it to be fired by someone wearing a special ring. By 2000, a fully functional version had endured a grueling round of military-grade testing and was ready to hit the market. “When I filed my patents, my patent attorney said, ‘You’ve got the next dot-com,'” Mossberg recalls. “He was blown away.”

Mossberg wasn’t the first person to envision a smart gun, but he was well positioned to make it a reality. He was a scion of O.F. Mossberg & Sons, the nation’s oldest family-owned gun company, which makes one of the world’s best-selling lines of pump-action shotguns. He’d overseen manufacturing for the company and had also served as president of Uzi America, an importer of Israeli weapons.

Also read: How smart guns once misfired big time in New Jersey

But the iGun hit a wall. Consumers were skeptical, in part because gun rights groups had been painting smart guns as a Trojan horse for gun grabbers. A few years earlier, gun manufacturer Colt had unveiled a smart-watch-activated pistol, and Smith & Wesson had pledged to explore “authorized user technology” for its weapons. Both projects were abandoned in the face of withering criticism from the National Rifle Association, which led a boycott of Smith & Wesson. In 2005, under pressure from the NRA, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, making gun manufacturers immune from lawsuits related to gun accidents or misuse—and removing another incentive to develop smart guns. (Today, the NRA says it doesn’t oppose smart guns but claims they are an attempt to make firearms more expensive and “would allow guns to be disabled remotely.”)

Ever since, no major firearms maker has touched the smart-gun concept—including O.F. Mossberg & Sons. “They are doing so well that they have little to gain,” Mossberg says of his family’s company (which he left in 2000). Though they see the benefits of smart guns, “should this turn into a Smith & Wesson boycott-type thing, they don’t want to be associated with that. And I don’t blame them.”

After shelving the iGun for more than a decade, Mossberg has reloaded. Americans’ trust in consumer electronics has grown, along with their concern about gun violence and safety. “The whole thing has gained a lot of momentum again,” says Mossberg, who today owns the exclusive rights to produce and market the iGun. He says he receives emails nearly every day asking about its price and availability.

Silicon chips have shrunk to the point that Mossberg can produce a 9 mm handgun version of the iGun, tapping a much larger market. While O.F. Mossberg & Sons’ research once suggested that gun owners were skeptical of weapons containing circuit boards, a 2013 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun manufacturers’ trade association, found that 14 percent of all gun owners were somewhat or very likely to buy smart guns. Though the NSSF spun those results as bad for smart guns, Mossberg sees an opportunity potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “I know lots of people who would love to get 14 percent of the firearms market,” he says. And new research shows the market could be much bigger. A nationally representative survey published by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in December found that nearly 60 percent of Americans, if they were to buy a new handgun, would be willing to purchase a smart gun.

Police departments have also come around to the concept of issuing firearms that can’t be used by bad guys. More than 5 percent of officers killed in the line of duty are shot with their own weapons, often 9 mm handguns. In November, San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr told 60 Minutes that he wanted his officers to have the option to carry smart guns if they were available. More than a dozen law enforcement agencies in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Florida have tested the iGun in recent months, according to Mossberg.

Smart guns have also gained a powerful ally in Washington. In January, President Obama directed the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense to develop a strategy to promote smart gun research and expedite government procurement of the weapons.

To bring a smart pistol to market, Mossberg says he needs to raise about $1 million for research and development—money that almost certainly won’t come from O.F. Mossberg & Sons or any other major firearms company. Following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway announced an effort to fund start-up companies dedicated to promoting gun safety. Conway’s Smart Tech Challenges Foundation gave Mossberg a grant of $100,000, which helped generate buzz for smart guns in the Valley. Yet nearly two years later, not a single venture capital firm has backed a smart-gun company. Margot Hirsch, the president of Smart Tech Challenges, says tech investors didn’t have smart guns on their radar in the past, but she hopes that now “the VC community and impact investors will be interested in investing, not only to make money, but to save lives.”

Mossberg sees no reason why his product should be controversial. “In the 1700s and 1800s, there was still no manual safety device on a gun,” he observes, referring to the safety catches that are now ubiquitous on American handguns and rifles. “And then somebody put one on there and nobody cared. This is nothing more than that.”

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Welcome to the Future of Gun Control

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