Robb has a pretty good round up of the issue this past week, where Chiappa was found to be putting RFID tags in their firearms. Chiappa notes that it’s for inventory control. That is a legitimate reason, but if that is, indeed, the reason, you address your customer’s concerns by making it easy to remove, and helping the customer remove it. I also would suggest that banding the firearm with a tag would be far more preferable than gluing it into the grip.
But even as a form of inventory control, I am not pleased with Chiappa, or any other firearms manufacturer even going there, because this would make gun control in public places perfectly enforceable for the law abiding. Why? Because the next thing our opponents are going to start pushing, and thanks Chiappa, for giving them the idea, is to make RFID tagging on firearms mandatory, and making it illegal for an owner to remove or destroy the tag.
Now all you need is an RFID scanner to find out if someone is carrying. Now all a thief needs is a scanner to look for their presence in a home. Now all you need, if your goal is to get as many gun owners in prison as possible, to have a tag fail, and the police accuse the person of disabling it.
So I’m with Robb. Chiappa either didn’t think this through, or doesn’t care. Neither excuse is acceptable. We’re willing to pay more to do things the old fashioned way so we don’t open this can of worms. One thing I will say for sure, if they ever do mandate RFID tagging in guns, I’m going to develop a scanner for the pant wetters among our opponents that tells them when they are near someone with a gun. Why? Because they’ll find out how often that’s actually the case, and it’ll either help them get over their phobia, or force them to lead a secluded life behind closed doors.
I predict a sales plummet for Chiappa.
I was reading about this earlier this morning. I also came to the same conclusion; mandatory RFID for ‘licensing’ purposes. Won’t be a problem if you have a programmer to alter the information it relays. Does this scare me? Not currently. You can pull the tag with a minimum of effort and you are not prevented from doing it legally. Do I want someone near me able to read my tag info? Certainly not!
It will be a while yet before they show up in stores, if you want an Italian firearm without an RFID chip you had best buy early. That chip is required by the Italian government and there is not much Beretta,Benelli,Tanfoglio, and other Italian makers can do about it. As the proverb goes, “When the wind blows, the grass must bend.”
I cannot support the disrespectful attitude of the current Chiappa distributor, but perhaps a few facts from an RFID chip makers web site would help take the confusion out of the situation:
http://www.verayo.com/product/pufrfid.html
Note the maximum scanning distance. 100 mm, about four inches. Most of the small RFID “chips” are in that scanning range, with large chips having greater ranges.
Stranger
“Note the maximum scanning distance. 100 mm”
You might want to tell that to the hackers at Defcon who were reading RFID chips for 29 floors up.
Antenna man, it’s all about the antenna.
Haha! I was there. Though it’s not as good in recent years as it has been in the not so recent past.
Indeed, I was reading notes and project papers on how far you could read the smaller chips using large antennae. The results are NOT comforting.
Well, now that this has become the “cause’ celebe” of the Pro-Gun Blogs, Barry’s Internet Tzar and his staff of Tax-Payer Funded Trolls will be sure to pass the word along to the “Common Sense- Kill the 2A” Commission to make sure that RFID chips will be Mandatory in all U.S. Manufactured Weapons as a means of “Tracking Terrorists.”
Why didn’t the ATF put RFID chips in the smuggled Gunwalker guns so they could track them? They’re not very smart.
Note to self: Never buy any firearms made by Chiappa.
RFID scanners do not appear to be directional; which makes this a lot less scary.
*ahem* http://www.iautomate.com/products/Directional-Patch-Antenna-433-MHz.html
And that’s just an off the shelf solution. With a bit of skill and effort the scary becomes more possible. Not that I’m trying to raise fear of this, I don’t think these are nefarious tags being used in the factory. There’s just the possibility of abuse which is the real concern I believe.
“Its reception field is of a hemispheric nature”
“Dimensions: 15.5 IN x 15.5 IN x .75 IN”
Somewhere in that half of the room is someone with a gun, and I know this because my chest plate picked it up. I don’t have a reliable distance estimate because I don’t know what the materials between me and the gun are. This is a bit of a concern in fixed installations sniffing for firearms, as Sebastian points out – but magnetometers and millimeter-wave radar sets exist too, and don’t require honest folks.
I’m about as worried about RFID requirements for firearms as I am about microstamping requirements for firearms.