Yesterday we looked at the history and the functioning of the Armatix iP1 “smart gun”, and today I’m taking it out to a BackUp Gun Match. How will it perform? Will it cycle reliably? Will I time out before I can actually get it authorized to fire? Let’s find out!
Conversion
German-Capture 1910 Russian Maxim in 8×57
This is a very interesting WW1 heavy machine gun. It is a Russian M1910 Maxim that was repaired at some point using the brass jacket from a 1905 Russian Maxim. This may have been done […]
Vintage photo
Vintage Saturday: Guns and Butter
He must have been an economics teacher before the war.
Prototype
Prototype Locked-Breech 9x19mm Mauser HSc
When Mauser began development of the HSc pistol, it was intended to be a pair of guns – a simple blowback gun in .32 or .380 caliber for civilian and police use and a larger […]
Very sporting of you to Make Ready on the clock. With only an 8 hour max authentication time, on a long day or a shift extension, there would come a time when you forgot to reup your activated gun time while you were out and about. Best to carry some rare earth magnets with you – hope you don’t have a pacemaker.
I’d stick with a good hammer.
Good grief, I think a Type 94 would be a better choice. At least that old gun goes bang when you pull the trigger.
Ignoring that the mechanics of the gun itself is flaky, the authenticate then shoot pause was not terrible. It was better than I expected. But it was still just long enough for an assailant to empty his entire magazine into your chest.
Imagine the authenticating time running out in the middle of a fire fight. Who among us is going to be able to ignore the adrenaline racing through your veins to calmly push a bunch of buttons on the watch in the right order before you opponent realized that you are a sitting duck?
I don’t see how this technology could ever be 100% functional. Just fail once and the wrong people get killed.
I’m wonderind, since items like a watch can be easily damaged/destroyed (Happens to me in my line of work) At what point do you render your weapon unusable? How durable is that watch? If you have to dive over the side of an embankment to avoid incoming fire, and say you roll down it, what kind of impact can that watch withstand? It’s just screaming at the basic laws of engineering that it’s the weak link in this chain.
Smart guns are the fantasies of people who have never fired a gun or been in combat. They have no concept of the mechanics of firearms, the flow of events when firearms are used or why their great ideas just won’t work.
They also think this will be a backdoor way to keep guns away from “unauthorized” people, meaning anyone not in their private goon squads. There is no recognition that the bad people in the world never obey the laws and would still have actual functioning fireams. This is the flaw in all gun control laws.
Funny how other wealthy societies seem to have so much fewer bad people, based on statistical rates of homicide. Whether or not they have gun control, they don’t buy guns for the #1 purpose of killing their fellow citizens because that’s unimaginable.
I guess that’s where we can start talking about culture.
I would say that most other countries have a more homogeneous population. This means more group cohesion and less us-versus-them. Did the American “melting pot” have a hidden cost. Does too much “diversity” causes division and social strife? Does the worldwide shift in demographics, due to the influx of outside populations into countries that previously had more homogeneous populations, mean the less violent countries you cite will become more violent?
“(…)less violent countries you cite will become more violent?”
Did they try to replicate U.S. attempt of inducing population to do opioid
https://www.opioidhelp.com/epidemic/crime-opioid-use/
In the United States in the past year, the fallout from the Opioid Epidemic has led many state and federal prosecutors to charge doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and Opioid manufacturers and distributors with crimes relating to the spread of Opioid addiction. For instance, in some Ohio towns, prescription Opioid-writers and pharmacies have come under fire for purposely over-prescribing Opioids, filling prescriptions that are known to be fraudulent, and taking money in return for medications. At the corporate level, pharmaceutical companies have deliberately misled the public about the addictiveness of their drugs and marketed them fraudulently.
?
Let’s see: Switzerland has four languages, Austria-Hungary had eight, Belgium has two, the Iberian peninsula has four or five … oh, that’s not the kind of “homogenous” you mean? Well, Britain has Caribbean, African and Asian communities, France has Algerian and African communities, Germany has Turkish and Slavic communities… It was Lithuania that had the highest murder rate in the EU in 2015 (actually higher than that of the US); what kind of “melting pot” do they have? You might have to look at some other kind of “homogenizing” factors not present in the USA: national health care, guaranteed housing, political involvement (Switzerland fines you if you don’t vote), and oddly, unionization. This last statistic might have changed since I read it a decade ago, but crime is lowest in the industrialized countries where union membership is highest. Also, the US imprisonment rate is lowest when employment rates are high. You may take your “homogenous” (and its real meaning) and eat it; it is poverty and inequality that makes peaceable societies violent.
People often overlook that USA has, in comparison to all these other quasi civilized, 10x smaller countries, 330 million people. Just by statistics of big numbers alone you have a daily occurance of unimaginable number of crimes and full time hardcore criminals.
Are you aware of the disparities in the statistics, such as the UK not counting a dead body with a dozen bullet holes as a murder until they’ve gotten a conviction?
For EU there exist normalized data by EUROSTAT, for example Intentional homicide victims in the EU per capita from 2014 can be seen here
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20180222-1
“The data come from the national records and may be affected by differences in national criminal justice systems and recording practices.”
Answer to Storm above: Please notice I said murder rate, not numbers of murders. Proportionately Europe as a whole had one third the murder rate of the United States. If I crunched the numbers correctly for 2015 then the US had just under 20,000 murders for a population of 330,000,000, and the EU had slightly over 7,500 in a population of 501,000,000.
Haha. The bad people in the world. Goon squads. Obeying the law. Good one!
Staying authenticated when the watch goes out of range disproves the notion that it would keep cops from getting shot with their own guns.
For starters, such shootings are generally at contact distance, within the range of the watch. But even if a cop lost the struggle for the gun, he couldn’t run away to stop the BG from firing a shot, as long as the grip safety (a switch, really) remained depressed.
All true!
And I can imagine cops authenticating the gun, then they themselves putting a rubber band on the grip safety, just so that they know the gun will fire when needed. So the whole system gets subverted.
Who in God’s Name would ever consider this as a defensive weapon?
This is all about another crazy Liberal idea of how to disarm the public so that the government can enslave the people without opposition. I am sure the Federal agencies would be exempt from the restriction to use smart guns.
Don’t you mean Quazy?
“This is all about another crazy Liberal idea of how to disarm the public so that the government can enslave the people without opposition.(…)”
I am unable to conclude that as logical outcome of Adam Smith writings. Can you enlighten me?
If you look at the Nazi and Communist regimes, disarming the public was a big thing. It left the people without a way to push back against totalitarian governments.
These communities basically never had wide gun ownership in first place (both coming out of Kaisers and Czars lap), so no need for wide “disarming”.
Which just made the power-mad’s job easier.
“(…)Communist regimes(…)”
Friedrich Marx proposed abolition of private property. This is direct opposite of Adam Smith proposal, which could not work without respecting right to private property.
is: “(…)Friedrich Marx(…)”
should be: “(…)Friedrich Engels(…)”
Have you ever worked in the Federal Gov’t? There are a lot of people who fit the whole Lord Acton Power Corrupts Mantra. If you trust those people NOT to abuse you, then realize Adam Smith means nothing to today’s society. Just look at all the crazy Lockdowns etc based on ever-changing “science.” If you dislike out rather Loose at times 2nd Amendment, there are many other places which will suit you just fine. Please leave us alone with our freedoms.
In the time it takes for the authenticating software to register, the user would probably get jumped by some medieval knight with an arming sword and shield. At that point, no amount of “smart” in a smart gun would matter because the knight would cut the smart gun’s owner to ribbons. Just kidding.
Look on YouTube for videos about bringing a knife to a gun fight. If a knife holder is within 21 feet (I think this is the right distance) of someone with a holstered and latched down pistol, the knife holder has an almost 100% chance that a fast charge will get them within striking distance before the gun can be brought into action.
What is the fixation about European gun/weapons laws? Europe goes to war/uprising somewhere etc., at least every thirty years. Leaving out the period before WWII – Since WWII there has been East Germany (twice), Hungary, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Ukraine, Russia etc. Tens of thousands of people were killed either by governments, cultural, religious and internecine disputes. Then there are the terrorist groups such as the Red Brigade, IRA, Basque Separatists, Bader Meinhoff – just to mention the most well known. There were other groups fighting ethnic conflicts for example the Baltic States (never hear anything about these conflicts in the MSN). These conflicts have killed hundreds of thousands of people and then some. Europe is a bad poster child for weapons/gun laws.