If smartguns become popular, the government can then outlaw non-smartguns without too many people caring (they can still own and fire guns).

Then the smart-stuff is leveraged to "enhance" security - transferring ownership, for an example, could be made subject to a government permit, which can then be used, explicitly or implicitly - imagine a "no fly list" for guns, with the same opacity - to prevent large groups of people to own guns (well, specifically, to fire them).

Further not-very-fantastical "enhancements" could include remote-disabling of guns, initially for law enforcement use, but quickly extended to much broader use.

All this, of course, while the criminals (who are already obtaining guns illegally) keep using "dumb" guns and aren't affected by this.

These are the simple, practical reasons - there's also the ideological reason founded on the historical reason for the 2nd amendment: A government can't turn on it's own people if said people is armed. If the government can effectively control the guns of the people, that stops being a factor.

I wish the public at large could understand these are largely parallel to the arguments FSF makes (at least to me, they are)

edit: to make this comment more than just a dumb throw-away joke, I'll add that sometimes the consequences of an argument are as important as its assumptions/logical soundness.

If they don't, they should (I'm not a gun owner or an NRA member). If you look at history, it is exceptionally rare to find a 100 year stretch where governments and militaries didn't kill more civilians than any amount of murderers. Not always domestic governments, but that only adds to the point.

> if things got so bad that the government was "turning on its own people" with weaponry, somebody really thinks some guys with guns from Wal-Mart are going to be what stops them?

I'm not going to speculate, but it might not be as one sided as you'd think. Put all the hunters in the U.S. together and you have the largest army in the world by a factor of five.

Regardless it doesn't have to be that bad. Government apathy or corruption can be enough to justify retaining the right to self defense. Consider the police work slowdown in NYC turning into a thinly veiled version of protection money. Local LEOs that ask for more money every year or 'gee I guess we will have to just let everyone out of jail'. Or consider something like that judge that sold children into private prisons. Imagine that despite protests and uproar, they sweep it under the rug and continue? History is rife with examples of people being exploited simply because they were dependent or defenseless.

Someone who has your best interests in mind won't demand that you be defenseless or dependent upon them.

Since then it seems like federal law enforcement has taken a softer touch with their sieges. This could be simply a change in doctrine to avoid bad press but enough people believe it's more than that.

Also, these days it isn't so much about guys with guns from Wal-Mart as it is country boys that did a couple tours in IQ/AF as a 11something and their friends. <digression> That's also why the NRA is touchy about funding for studies on things--there's a perception that "the powers that be" want to diagnose everyone who served with PTSD and then use that as a reason to take away their guns. This is compounded by some despair over disarming IQ villagers so they are easy pickings for ISIS and the perception that "they were training us to do it back home". </digression>

So, yes, I believe it. Because I'm seeing it happen.

Sympathy from the armed forces and various forms of political pressure, foreign and domestic, would be far more helpful than a few deer rifles, and if you've got that your private arms aren't really necessary. A domestic rebellion wouldn't win by shooting enough people, it'd win when the tactics necessary to stop it were beyond what the government and/or military were willing to do.

Guns are much more useful when:

1) the enemy is foreign (killing enough people actually might make them go away), and/or

2) your position doesn't actually have popular support so other means are unavailable to you, and/or

3) foreign powers have the will and capacity to bomb the shit out of your country if the government goes too far in its attempts to suppress your uprising (this, or loss of military support for the government, are basically the only reasons authoritarian states fail to stop revolutions in the modern world)

Actually, having closely studied the dissolution of a modern European country (the former Yugoslavia) and seen the fallout from up close, it's not that simple (at least not always).

What happened in that case was that although the Yugoslav government [1] retained control of most of the heavy weaponry (artillery, tanks), and although the succeeding republics (Croatia and Bosnia) were initially limited to small arms belonging to local militia and hunters, the republics did have an abundance of active and retired officers with loyalty to their ethnic homelands who were quick to raise and lead battalions of troops into the field [2].

Those troops then went on to capture some heavy arms from the Yugoslav army, and scored lots of small arms, and eventually heavy arms and aircraft, from overseas allies.

Eventually, after lots of brutal warfare, ethnic cleansing, and in Bosnia, genocide, the republics did gain their independence from Yugoslavia (with significant help from the U.S. and other countries).

What was key in this case were the experienced military leaders who quickly assumed charge in the succeeding republics.

I suspect a worst-case, nightmare U.S. scenario would look much the same, with experienced military leaders taking control of ad hoc forces in their respective states and/or regions, and then fighting with small arms until they were able to capture heavy arms, receive outside help, or were defeated/captured.

1. Essentially, Serbia and Montenegro, plus ethnic Serbs elsewhere

2. Slovenia's succession was a different story than that of Bosnia and Croatia, for a variety of geographical, cultural, and historical reasons.

The more realistic scenarios don't actually involve the military itself turning against the people. It's far more likely that police will overstep their bounds a little and try to go house to house, and one reason they don't do that, outside of exceptional circumstances that the public will back them up on, is the fact that doing so is actively dangerous.

As for "guys with guns from Wal-Mart" in the US, let's not forget that we have tens of thousands of experienced returned officers and NCOs, who are very knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare and who identify very strongly with that rural population base here in the US.

Also, look at the Nazi invasion of the Island of Crete. A ton of local farmers with gun took a huge toll on the Nazi paratroopers.

In the city, where most people are anti-gun, the police are often very close by, and rhetoric often talks about how guns are not needed because of the police.

In the country, where most people are pro-gun, the police can easily be very far away. I have co-workers who live at least an hour from the closest police station. Naturally, rhetoric covers the fact that the police very likely cannot help you.

I don't see how a libertarian, as many gun advocates but certainly not all, can make a rational argument for preventing a private company from selling smart-guns to individuals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_...

It is also not generally the case that guns are always "bad"; guns are also significantly used in self-defense, usually without even being fired. Those who present "oh, just remove the guns" as a cost-free move are being disingenuous; again, people can reasonably disagree about the relative nature of the costs and benefits but those who present this as a zero-cost transaction are trying to pull one over on people.

It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down, and crime has significantly dropped in the past couple of decades. This is not exactly a set of circumstances that leads a rational person to leap to the conclusion that the presence and ownership of guns is an obvious root cause... and, yes, again, there may be confounding variables at play, but it still provides a bound on what you could even hope for if guns were entirely removed.

When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.

Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.

> It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down

That's actually the direct opposite of what the article says. The very first paragraph states: "Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards."

> When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.

I agree. That was the premise of my question. Unfortunately, I haven't seen too much clarification yet :(

They don't give a source, but their own graph [1] shows that, aside from a tick on 2006, gun deaths have been trending down, almost indistinguishable from flat in recent years.

I couldn't find a nice graph, but googling gave me these two years (that I did not cherry pick): here's an anti-gun site giving the numbers for 1998 as 30K [2] and another anti-gun "just the facts" editorial in 2013 saying it's 31K. [3] Using normal per-population numbers, the US increased in population over 13% over that time.

The US in the 21st century is a very safe place to be. Foreign news may distort the picture, but middle-class Americans don't worry about being killed by guns.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

[2] http://college.cengage.com/english/resources/research_guide/...

[3] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/16/16547690-just-the...

> Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.

The cost at issue here is generally not monetary. Most safety features are designed to prevent the weapon from firing, which gives rise to the expression "loaded club."

Consider, e.g., the magazine safety, which prevents a semi-automatic weapon from firing without a magazine, even if a round is already chambered. If I owned a handgun, which I do not, I would absolutely want this feature. The likelihood that it would prevent a potentially fatal negligent discharge is much higher than the likelihood that it would be the decisive factor in me losing a gunfight. However, there are combat techniques that depend on the weapon firing without a magazine, and competitions in which it would be difficult or impossible to participate without that ability. There is also the risk that the safety would otherwise interfere with the operation of the weapon.

Therefore, the only conclusion available is that the theory is incorrect.

You may be able to salvage pieces of the result your are trying to obtain by a more careful analysis, but the facts do not permit "guns = gun crime" to be sustained at such a simplistic level. By the time one is done examining what the facts do sustain the result is far, far weaker.

That there is easy access to and widespread ownership of firearms in the US has not, to my knowledge, changed in the past 10 years, so a lack of change in the gun crime statistics indicates pretty much nothing.

As someone from a country with no easy access to firearms (and generally unarmed police), and knowing the gun crime statistics, I am continually amazed that people can argue that guns are uncorrelated with gun crime and keep a straight face.

Guns also have safety features that protect against accidental discharge, namely the trigger safety. Some guns have an additional trigger safety that triggers if the gun is pressed against something (or someone). Since these features don't reduce the reliability of a gun when it is intended to be used, the NRA doesn't have any problem with them, and at least the trigger safety is standard on all guns.

The NRA also does a lot of work to teach firearms safety to children (which basically boils down to "don't touch it and tell an adult if you find an unexpected gun somewhere"). For those who do shoot, the NRA is also good with basic safety principles.

No implementation of a TouchID-like system for guns would be perfect and so the gun owner must weigh the potential benefits and risks. I don't think the NRA's members want to take that choice away from the gun owner, but even having a commercial solution come to market means some states will require it's use. IIRC one state has laws on the books to mandate the use of the technology once it's commercially available.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections...

Politicians fear them, because they have money and get out the vote power. There is some thought that the NRA cost Al Gore his presidential run.

Its complex, because a lot of the US (The more rural parts mostly) have a much stronger gun culture. There is some distrust of government and any regulations.

Within 50 years quality 3-d printed guns will make a lot of regulations moot anyway.

As a side note, it's funny to see that parts of the media still mechanically repeat LaPierre calling the ATF "jack booted government thugs" in 1995 like it was a bad thing, after the full-on liberal awakening over police militarization via the Boston Marathon Bombing and Ferguson, MO. The NRA was 20 years ahead of the curve on that.

After '68 there was a huge split in the organization between hardline types who wanted to focus on politics and lobbying and traditionalists who wanted to focus on shooting sports. At one point the NRA was even going to move from the DC area to Colorado and essentially give up politics altogether. In 1977, the political types took over the organization and purged the organization of sportsmen types.

Interestingly, the new head of the NRA was a former chief of the US Border Patrol who had shot and killed someone when he was a teenager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlon_Carter

The organization grew exponentially in membership, budget and political influence. Interestingly, they went through a few cycles of purging people who were even more hardline than their leadership.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325178...

Effectively, allowing smart gun technology would cause a bunch of other guns to get banned, so based on their values system it was logical for the NRA to oppose the tech. There have also been complaints that the tech is not reliable. I looked into this myself and frankly, I would not trust my life with it. Also, in most cases it's using passive RFID technology which is a joke for "security" (there is one company that's using a challenge response system though.) I can think of half a dozen ways to disable or clone most of these systems, but they are sold like they are a panacea.

The gun control side claims they "don't want to take away your guns" or they "don't want to take away all guns" but when you look at DC and Chicago, where they have the most power, they completely banned private ownership of handguns. This demonstrates their goal, and this is what the NRA is fighting against.

It is much harder to repeal a gun control law than to pass it (if you look at things on the scale of decades and/or centuries), partly because this is a demographic issue and the pro-gun demographic is smaller and shrinking.

So the NRA has absolutely no incentive to concede ground in the battle for private gun ownership. I've never heard a gun control proponent suggest "OK if you give us background checks, registration and capacity limits, we will loosen gun laws in states where they are more strict and promise never ever to go further." That would be compromise. I've never heard it, neither has the NRA.

That is why they are absolutists, because ultimately so is the other side. (Their leadership anyway, which is what counts, not the moderate "let's split the difference" voter who only cares about the issue when its a major news item.)

Also keep in mind that a lot of NRA folks are rural. They have almost no local gun crime and have (what they feel) are legitimate reasons for owning a gun (self-defense, hunting, etc). Their opinion is why should they give up their guns because the city folks have a problem?

(I don't count myself in either of those camps but I listen to them enough to be able to explain their arguments.)

Imagine that people were regularly being killed by hammers. Or better yet, baseball bats. Now somebody comes along and claims that if we spent an extra $500 per baseball bat to bolt some complicated new mechanism onto the side of the bat, that would prevent some deaths. Said mechanism hasn't been invented yet, hasn't been proven to work, hasn't been proven to prevent any deaths, and is guaranteed to inconvenience every normal law-abiding user of baseball bats - from now on people would have to spend extra money for a feature they don't want or need. Congress proposes legally mandating this mechanism. Shouldn't the bat-making equivalent of the NRA oppose it?

Do you have an iPhone that unlocks via thumbprint? Have you noticed that the (otherwise quite impressive) sensor doesn't work when your hands are wet, or sticky, or greasy, or you're wearing gloves? If you thought you might need a gun for self defense, would you rather have one where pulling the trigger simply fires the gun, or one where you have to have clean bare hands to work and occasionally it stops working reliably and you need to spend a few minutes figuring out how to retrain it?

As for that "public-health research that might show...", our public health organizations have already supported a large number of truly terrible politically-motivated studies on the subject. Do we really need to fund more people like Kellerman to give us more nonsense stats supporting positions they already had going in?

It's no different the the argument people here sometimes make that black markets and TOR are necessary for freedom of speech and civil liberties, even if having them means enabling criminal activity - because the greater threat is always the threat of a government which can't be spoken up against. In the case of guns, the greater threat is always a government which can't be put down.

Unlocked by owner's thumbprint? Tough luck, police officer wearing gloves. Unlucky, dear soldier with muddy hands.

Unlocked by radio-frequency? Rob a bank after installing a radio-frequency jammer.

I guess unlimited "Gun Admins" would be an okay compromise.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325178...

Essentially, once a smart gun becomes available for sale in the US, all guns sold in New Jersey must be "smart" within 30 months. I wouldn't be surprised if other jurisdictions had similar laws in place. This dramatically increases the cost of legal firearms while doing very little to impact firearm murder or suicide rates.

Such a law already exists in New Jersey and was proposed at the federal level by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

The other reason people oppose them is because it would reduce the gun-owner's ability to re-sell the gun to criminals with no difficulty or government intervention. It would remove some control from the gun owners.

One man's safety feature is another man's oppressive inconvenience.

Furthermore, most gun owners have firearms at least in part because of the criminal element. I find the argument that a significant number of gun owners want to be able to resell their firearms to criminals to be patently absurd.

I disagree with your comparison. If a gun owner wanted the simplest thing that would work, then their guns would not be so fancy / complicated. There would not be a market for non-restrictive but non-essential gun enhancements.

Sorry my joke wasn't clear to you and that you missed the point that it's conservatives that fear government control over ownership/reselling who have issue here.

If gun safety studies come out, guns look BAD. Regulation goes up and sales go down. If special safety mechanisms are allowed, and show positive impact, they may be more forcefully imposed, raise costs and decrease margins.

It may just be a sign of how jaded the last few years of news have made me, but I'm far more likely to expect malfeasance from those who hold the reins and have significant amounts of money on the line than those who just want to 'blow stuff up.'

In an ideal world, cars are designed to be as safe as possible, as they are transports and getting people home safely is their most important aspect.

In an ideal world, guns are designed to be a dangerous and murderous as possible, as they are killing devices and efficiently turning people into corpses is their most important aspect.

The NRA does exactly what it should: advocate for murder device efficiency and access.

Of course, whether easy access to highly efficient murder devices should be allowed is a public policy question, but in the US, the answer is yes, and the NRA's strategies are a rational move based on that policy. The problem here is that advocating for easy access and efficiency of murder machines kinda looks bad.