<story><title>Why the NRA hates smart guns</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/30/why-the-nra-hates-smart-guns/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crikli</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m an engineer, gun owner, and former NRA member[1].&lt;p&gt;I hate the idea of smart guns, but politics are a distant secondary concern.&lt;p&gt;Firearms fail all the time, even the simple reliable ones.  Bad primers, failure to eject, failure to cycle, stovepipes, etc.  It takes education and then repeated training to know how to deal with failures.  In a pressure situation you revert to your lowest level of training; muscle memory will give you the best chance to respond appropriately.&lt;p&gt;Just dealing with mechanical failures quickly and correctly takes very intentional practice.&lt;p&gt;The last thing I want to have is another thing that can fail in a pressure situation that can&amp;#x27;t be resolved via trained response.  E.g., for a bad primer or failure to eject I can do what&amp;#x27;s called a tap&amp;#x2F;rack&amp;#x2F;bang drill.  But there&amp;#x27;s nothing I can do to train for some type of software failure or battery being dead or some other type of non-mechanical failure that bricks my firearm.&lt;p&gt;[1]Former because the NRA&amp;quot;s lobbing efforts and powers are ridiculously overstated.  Their entire entire existence as near as I can tell is to sell their member&amp;#x27;s names to third parties. I&amp;#x27;ve never received as much crap snail mail and email as I did during the year I belonged to the NRA.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joesmo</author><text>Exactly! If the fingerprint scanner on the gun works like the one on my phone, many people will unnecessarily die. What do their families do then? Sue Congress?&lt;p&gt;Seriously, the idea of smart guns is really stupid. Can you build a system that&amp;#x27;s 100% reliable? No. Then people will die unnecessarily because of this legislation and, of course, no gun owner will want this optional piece of equipment with a nonzero failure rate. I&amp;#x27;m glad no gun company wants to make this idiotic and dangerous technology.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why the NRA hates smart guns</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/30/why-the-nra-hates-smart-guns/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crikli</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m an engineer, gun owner, and former NRA member[1].&lt;p&gt;I hate the idea of smart guns, but politics are a distant secondary concern.&lt;p&gt;Firearms fail all the time, even the simple reliable ones.  Bad primers, failure to eject, failure to cycle, stovepipes, etc.  It takes education and then repeated training to know how to deal with failures.  In a pressure situation you revert to your lowest level of training; muscle memory will give you the best chance to respond appropriately.&lt;p&gt;Just dealing with mechanical failures quickly and correctly takes very intentional practice.&lt;p&gt;The last thing I want to have is another thing that can fail in a pressure situation that can&amp;#x27;t be resolved via trained response.  E.g., for a bad primer or failure to eject I can do what&amp;#x27;s called a tap&amp;#x2F;rack&amp;#x2F;bang drill.  But there&amp;#x27;s nothing I can do to train for some type of software failure or battery being dead or some other type of non-mechanical failure that bricks my firearm.&lt;p&gt;[1]Former because the NRA&amp;quot;s lobbing efforts and powers are ridiculously overstated.  Their entire entire existence as near as I can tell is to sell their member&amp;#x27;s names to third parties. I&amp;#x27;ve never received as much crap snail mail and email as I did during the year I belonged to the NRA.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drmilsurp</author><text>They have a &amp;quot;do not promote&amp;quot; list that you must request to be added to which solves the spam&amp;#x2F;marketing mail problem. That you have to ask is problematic but there is a solution if this was the only problem.</text></comment>