Want To Build A Safe Gun? A New Government Report Won’t Help.
Remember Aesop’s Fable, The Mountain in Labour, about how the mountain shakes and out comes a mouse? I was thinking about this little verse as I was reading the long-awaited report from the Department of Justice which details the technical specifications that would have to be met by any manufacture who wanted the government to buy their safe gun. The report doesn’t commit any government agency to actually buying a safe gun, but if a federal agency were to consider such a purchase, the weapon would have to meet the ‘baseline specifications’ for design and performance as detailed in this report.
The idea of manufacturing and selling a gun that can only be used by a particular individual with an electronic passkey of some sort has been floating around for more than twenty years. It was initially a brainchild of the Clinton Administration, which awarded several gun companies R&D grants to design such a gun; when the Bush Administration put the kibosh on all Clinton’s gun-control efforts and instead awarded the industry immunity from class-action torts, this technology withered on the vine, but was revived in the private sector once a more regulatory-friendly President name of Barack Obama began looking for ways to reduce the violence suffered from guns.
Barack was never able to scare up any money to push safe-gun technology beyond talk, but he convened a series of technical meetings with experts from just about every federal agency whose personnel might actually carry a gun. These baseline specifications; i.e., how the gun has to look, feel and perform, were developed by a team which included folks from ATF, DEA, FBI, Marshalls, Protective Services, Border Protection, Coast Guard, Secret Service, and every other law-enforcement and security acronym in between.
The report is divided into two sections: “Baseline Specifications” which is 28 specific sections on the size and design of the gun, and then “Performance and Testing Requirements” which is 4 specific sections on how the gun should perform. Together, these two sections contain 185 individual baseline design and testing requirements, of which a grand total of 14 requirements have anything to do with what is referred to as the ‘safety device;’ i.e., the gizmo which requires some sort of digital identification match before the gun can actually be used.
By the way, you can skip the other 171 design and testing requirements because these consist of nothing other than the description of a Glock pistol carried by a majority of law enforcement personnel throughout the United States, as well as what appears to be the standard field-testing protocol that the U.A. Army has developed to test a replacement for the Beretta pistol which replaced the venerable Colt. So what appears to be a very detailed and comprehensive report is basically nothing more than old wine in a new bottle: the mountain shakes and out comes a mouse.
And the mouse is really quite tiny when it comes to the description and testing of the ‘safety device’ which is what this report is supposed to be all about. It’s not even clear from the report whether the security device is actually part of the weapon itself or a gizmo that is worn by the shooter, such as a ring or a wristband, or both. And furthermore, while the security device has to be programmable to afford access only to predetermined users, there is nothing that describes how or what the actual programming process will involve – a finger print, a password – who knows? The best part is the requirement that when the safety device malfunctions, “it shall default to a state to allow the pistol to fire.” But there is absolutely no description or requirement which details how a shooter would even know if the security device went on the blink.
With all due respect to the so-called experts who cut and pasted this mess together, it’s not a report, it’s a sham. And anyone who thinks this report marks a step forward in safe-gun technology doesn’t know anything about safety or about guns.
