Sometimes self-defense stories illustrate important points. We’ve all seen a lot of stories that contradict a lot of the myths out there, on both sides, about using firearms to defend your life.  This is an important one from New Jersey. Why is it important? This is why:
The woman ran to her bedroom, locked the door and grabbed her husband’s handgun and ammunition, Traina said.
The gun is legally registered to the woman’s husband, he said.
She then ran into the bathroom, locked that door and loaded the weapon while sitting on the floor.
Emphasis mine. The Garden State has decreed that, once the technology is available, all firearms sold in New Jersey will only be operable by the authorized user, except to law enforcement, who apparently didn’t want anything to do with the technology.
I suppose this woman could have thrown the smart gun at the man trying to attack her. It might be kind of heavy with all those electronic and mechanical extras in it, after all.
The whole “morally superior” line comes to mind.
These kind of laws are ridiculous. Politicians who think like this should be hanged from the nearest tree sufficient for the purpose.
“L’arbre de la liberté…croît lorsqu’il est arrosé du sang de toute espèce de tyrans.”
We moved from Chicago in part to get away from that sort of law, but in any case, my wee wifey would get her own firearm in such a situation.
Boy she and her husband are in a lot of trouble now.
They could have avoided all that if they had just obeyed the law and left her with only a very short club with which to defend herself. How dare she survive against the legislature’s wishes!
NJIT researchers say a viable smart gun prototype can be developed in about two years with $4 million to $5 million more in funding.
Well, it’s been five years and I haven’t seen anything. Either they were full of shit then, or…uh…they were full of shit.
Saw your comment at Uncle’s.
If you can’t live without google, try this:
Scroogle Scraper
They hate google much, and the engine does find things well.
I boned the hyperlink.
Sorry.
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm
They’ll continue to be a few million dollars and a few years away from it so long as the cash keeps coming from the state, and the state doesn’t keep asking too many questions.
It’s not a project New Jersey will give up on. Based only on my engineering background, and not any specific expertise in the area; there will probably never be a smart gun that works reliably based on the technology we have right now. I think politicians knew that going in, but it was an excuse to look like they cared, to send a few million bucks toward a favored institution, and put in place a back door mechanism by which they could effectively ban gun sales if they wanted to, without having to pass more legislation.
The legislation itself basically sets up the state AG as a “gun dictator” he gets to be sole determiner of what guns are considered “smart” enough to be sold in New Jersey.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some corruption involved in the whole. This is New Jersey, after all.
Thanks for the link. Unfortunatly, it’s not just the search feature I’m utterly dependent on. It’s google alerts. Google mail. And Google Talk.
Soon google will have life and death power over me. Rumor has it that there’s a mirror in the back of google headquarters, called “The Heart of Google”, and if you smash it, google will self-destruct.
Does anyone know if S&W is still involved in that research (as the “smart gun” article is almost five years old)? I had given them a pass over the HUD deal (since the new ownership has renounced the agreement), but if they’re still profiting from laws like this one in Jersey, that would mandate defenselessness for women like the one in the first article, then they haven’t seen the light after all, it would seem.
I don’t know if they are or not, but I would suspect not. You have nothing to fear from S&W at this point. Their current CEO, Mike Golden, is very pro-gun, isn’t afraid to say it, and has absolutely transformed that company into a British-owend American gun maker who was at death’s door, to an American owned gun maker that’s leaving the rest of the industry in their dust.
I would suspect Golden has probably gotten out of the smart gun business, seeing it’s a boondoggle that just not going to work with current technology. They’ve focused their efforts on putting out guns that people actually want to buy, both civilian and law enforcement.