Most days I feel like I’ve seen about everything from the media that’s worth even commenting on, but sometimes they outdo themselves. Such an example can be found in this editorial from the Middletown Press:
Yet gun-rights activists have successfully intimidated stores in Maryland and California into not selling the iP1.
The gun-rights movement is treating the expansion of consumer choice not as free enterprise, but as treason.
It takes quite a lot of gall to suggest we’re fighting “the expansion of consumer choice.” We’re fighting smart gun mandates which would essentially create a sweeping gun ban across a large percentage of the population of the United States. This could have been about consumer choice, but people like the Editorial board of the Middletown Press, Bryan Miller, and other anti-gun nitwits made another choice.
Few industries need innovation as desperately as the gun trade. As Mauch writes in his essay, which appeared in the Washington Post, “Firearm safety has not meaningfully advanced in the past century.†Automobile safety, by contrast, has progressed so significantly in that same period that guns are poised to pass auto accidents as a cause of death.
And what do you idiots know about innovation in the gun trade? I’m always amazed at the arrogance of journalists willing to opine about topics they know absolutely nothing about. That seems to go double when the topic is firearms. Come to SHOT one year, and then argue there’s no innovation. There has been a lot of innovation. There has even been a lot of SAFETY innovation. Virtually all modern firearms are drop safe. That wasn’t the case even a few decades ago.
So maybe a compromise is in order: If New Jersey allows the marketplace to dictate the fate of smart guns, will the NRA and its followers be willing to do the same? That’s a deal worth making.
You put your cards on the table already. No deal. We fight the technology because we know what will be coming next. We simply do not trust you not to mandate the technology once it hits the market and you, the people who know nothing about firearms or firearms safety, decide it’s working well enough to impose on those people who do know about those things. Sorry, not accepting the firearm market being controlled by clueless journalists, sniveling politicians, and pearl clutching ninnies. That’s what we’re inviting if we give in to the smart gun technology.
I’d be happy to let the market decide the fate of smart guns.
But as you say the problem is the political booby-traps attached to it… and those are intolerable.
At this rate it’ll take an Amendment banning any such mandates for me to even consider supporting the technology at all.
If so-called Smart Guns were so great, the police and military would be lining up to get them. And, in fact, politicians could mandate those entities buy them without a massive public backlash.
Really, if they are so great, why aren’t they trying to get them into the hands of the police ASAP?
Follow-up on that:
http://gunfreezone.net/wordpress/index.php/2014/05/21/top-ten-police-departments-issuing-their-officers-smart-guns/
It’s a Firearm, not an iPad. And as a former Navy Electronics Technician, the LAST thing I need is a Self-Defense Devise that can be remotely “Switched Off” by some Political Hack who insisted that the software that makes the damn thing work has some “Kill Code” wrote into it.
They’re either unwilling or unable to admit that compromise only comes with trust, and after 80 years of getting continually screwed by their side operating in bad faith, there’s no trust to be had.
There’s no compromising with people who will never stop. Nothing has ever satisfied them and nothing short of confiscation ever will, so the only valid response is “&^$$ off, come take ’em”
It’s not even about trust. We could have 100% trust in this legislator who is offering the repeal. We could be certain that she means what she says, that she regrets sponsoring the bill, and that she would be the biggest and loadest opponent of any future “smart gun” mandates. There’s still the problem of a) she’s just one vote in the legislature, b) she won’t always be there, and c) there’s nothing to stop other states from doing this right now. Nothing short of a Obama signing a national law forbidding all technological safety mandates, passing with overwhelming bipartisan support, with an applauding and smiling Bloomberg standing behind Obama while he signs it, would work at this point.
“Firearm safety technology has not meaningfully advanced in the last century.” All they’ve been able to come up with were magazine disconnect safeties, combination safety/decockers for SA/DA pistols, SA/DA action itself (currently experiencing a renaissance of sorts with AIWB carriers) drop-safe pistols, transfer bars that rendered SAA revolvers and clones safe when fully loaded, striker-fired actions in which the striker is not held under tension or even aligned with the primer until the trigger is pulled . . . and on and on.
Not to mention an absolute revolution in mindset and attitudes toward gun safety that have reduced firearm accidents by leaps and bounds while the number of firearms in the U.S. grew by leaps and bounds . . . but that wasn’t “technology” and apparently it’s not “meaningful,” either.