Smart Gun Fails During Demonstration

Despite the video being ended quickly, after the first round he kept pulling the trigger but the gun wouldn’t fire. If you listen carefully, you can even hear the trigger making a clicking sound when he continued pulling it for the second shot. You would think that if a demonstration is going to work, it should be on their big press demo day.

The point here isn’t just to focus on this one failure, though police would not take a gun that works say even 95% of the time. The US Military requires that a new pistol has an average failure rate of 0.005 percent — that is one out of 20,000 shots. So for this gun to pass, it would have to fire the next 19,999 shots without a problem. And there are lots of questions, such as what happens when the battery dies? Another big problem with these types of electronics is that the shock from the recoil of the gun can damage sensitive electronics, which limits the caliber of the gun and makes them more expensive to make. Finally, you won’t be able to wear gloves and anyone with an iPhone knows that if your hand is wet or dirty, you will have trouble getting the fingerprint reader to work.

Nor is it clear what the price of this locking device is, but the benefits are very small.

— Police and civilians rarely have guns taken and used against them. In the five years from 2013 through 2017, 7 police officers were murdered with their own guns. This is slightly more than 1 per year, out of 670,279full-time law enforcement officers. Those possible saved lives have to be balanced off against the risks from using these guns. Police have been less than thrilled about experimenting with these new types of guns.

— Accidental gun deaths by kids are extremely rare.

The reporter neither mentions the failure of the gun to work nor any of these other concerns.