Entrepreneurs Alan Boinus, Robert McNamara and Omer Kiyani spoke about so-called “smart gun” technology in Seattle.
By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
An international symposium on so-called “smart guns” in Seattle began with something of an embarrassing misfire that called the reliability of anything electronic into question.
As KIRO News later reported, “Staffers (at the symposium) couldn’t get the technology for the video projector to work, and that’s a lot less complicated than smart guns.”
True enough, as the audience of symposium attendees and journalists waited patiently, a short presentation was scrubbed when the projector could not be made to operate. This prompted KIRO reporter Essex Porter to ask a panel of technology developers and moderator Ralph Fascitelli, “So why should gun owners trust that this technology will ever work?”
After the press conference broke up, Alan Boinus, CEO of Allied Biometrix, a California firm, acknowledged to Porter and TGM that the equipment failure was “embarrassing.”
Fascitelli, president of Washington CeaseFire, had invested considerable effort in putting together speakers and attendees from all points of view, including representatives from the firearms industry. However, the big winter storm that hammered the Northeast prevented Rick Patterson, executive director of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute, from attending, and electronic malfunctions provided even more embarrassment.
Patterson, in a telephone interview, told TGM that he had offered to join the conference via live audio and video feed, but was apparently told it was a no-go because “the technology is too unreliable.” He was quick to point out the irony, which left little to be argued about “smart gun” technology.
Rick Patterson
He suggested via telephone that smart gun technology is “nothing more or less than a gun lock.” By no small coincidence, an electronic gun locking device was among the things discussed by a panel that included Omer Kiyani, founder of Sentinel. This device is activated by digital recognition; a finger placed on a pad by the user opens the device. Nothing, he said, goes inside the gun.
Kiyani was joined at a press conference by Robert McNamara, co-founder of TriggerSmart, which uses wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, and Alan Boinus, CEO at
Patterson said that the notion of promoting smart gun technology as “a panacea…undermines fundamental firearms safety.” No technology, from a trigger lock or cable lock up the scale to electronic recognition hardware is a substitute for common sense when using firearms, he intimated. After all, guns are designed to launch projectiles, and in an emergency situation, if they go “click” instead of “bang,” the results, according to Patterson, “can be tragic.”
The firearms industry is not opposed to technological advances, he insisted. After all, as Patterson noted, the development of firearms was technology unleashed; no small factor in the beginning of the industrial revolution.
However, industry and Second Amendment groups are uniformly opposed to government mandates requiring that only guns featuring new technology be allowed for sale to consumers. A law passed several years ago in New Jersey includes such a mandate, and it was written to include a “countdown” to implementation 30 months after any so-called “smart gun” becomes commercially available anywhere in the United States.
Scott Bach, who heads the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, has called “smart guns” a “dumb idea.”
If gun prohibitionists were expecting support from law enforcement, they were also disappointed. King County Sheriff John Urquhart participated on one panel, perhaps as a substitute for a scheduled speaker who couldn’t make it, and he indicated that, in his opinion, the technology is far from being viable for commercial sale.
That’s not surprising, because historically, smart gun proposals have invariably exempted police and the military. There are multiple reasons why this may be the case, not the least of which is the potential for one officer to have to use another’s gun, and the electronics failing at a most inopportune moment.
But critics contend that if the technology is not good enough for police and the military, it should not be sold, much less mandated, to consumers.
Second Amendment advocate Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, told the Seattle Weekly that “If someone could come up with a smart gun that was reliable and workable, I would buy it tomorrow.” Others might not be so quick with their cash, because there are lots of firearms already out there; guns that don’t have electronics don’t need batteries and that do go “bang” when they’re supposed to.
Perhaps Patterson put it best when he noted that “There are some people who want to define safety as something that never goes bang.”
