4.10.00
Unreliable Guns Aren't Smart

4.06.00
Will Gore Be Held Accountable?

4.06.00
Turning on Greenspan

4.04.00
Two Cheers for W.'s Environmental Message

4.04.00
A Well Endowed Democracy

4.03.00
An Unsettling Antitrust Case

4.03.00
The Ph.D. with the Lamp

3.31.00
Elian, Still in the Middle of the Ocean

3.31.00
The Clintonization of America

3.30.00
A Real Shipwreck

3.29.00
The Dead Baby Thing is So Over

3.29.00
Are Gun Locks Like Aspirin Caps?

3.28.00
Putin Together A Government

3.27.00
The Dangers of Mandatory Gun Locks

3.24.00
What Hath Ward Wrought?

3.24.00
Leave E-commerce Alone

3.24.00
E-mailgate

3.23.00
Senator, You're No Ronald Reagan

3.23.00
Against Microsoft: A Primer For Conservatives

3.22.00
Kessler Control

4/10/00 12:45 p.m.
Unreliable Guns Aren't "Smart"
If your life depended on it, would you want a gun that functioned as reliably as your computer?

By Dave Kopel
Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute.

espite a massive lobbying effort from Governor Parris Glendenning, the Maryland legislature rejected forcing gun companies to make firearms with internal computers that prevent unauthorized persons from using the gun. While many firearms companies are spending lots of research money on prototypes, legally mandating that only such guns can be sold would be dangerous.

If your life depended on it, would you want a gun that functioned as reliably as your computer? What if the computer chip were subjected to frequent, extreme, repeated stress from gunpowder explosions two inches away from the chip?

After two decades of manufacturing computers for the consumer market, computer companies still can’t make models that never crash. Nor, so far, can gun companies.

For example, Steve Sliwa of Colt’s (a company which has received millions of dollars in federal corporate welfare for computer gun research) was showing off a new model to some Wall Street Journal reporters. The gun was supposed to be activated by a radio signal from a wristband. When Sliwa pulled the trigger, nothing happened. “For a while it worked fine,” he remarked. (P.M. Barrett, "Personal Weapon: How a Gun Company Tries to Propel Itself into the Computer Age," Wall Street Journal, May 12, 1999, A1, A8.)

Moreover, guns that run on radio signals and other electromagnetic communications can easily be disabled by countermeasures. If the criminal turns on a radio jammer, he may knock out every law-abiding citizen’s firearms, as well as police firearms.

Even if 100% reliable, computer guns may be so expensive as to make gun ownership impossible for some people. People who live in poor neighborhoods with little police protection, and who rely on a $75 pistol for defense, may not be able to defend themselves if the pistol costs $150 or $350 because of mandatory internal computers. Since many poor people have no small children in the home, there is no realistic safety benefit from the government forcing them to buy a gun with expensive technology. And there is great harm to public safety if guns are impossibly expensive for the poor.

But since the anti-gun groups oppose gun ownership for lawful defense, they don’t care.

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