By David Codrea
USA – -(Ammoland.com)- Visitors to the Consumer Electronics Show 2016 in Las Vegas had to do without a full demonstration of Sentinl’s IDENTILOCK fingerprint-scanning “smart gun lock,” inventor Omer Kiyani told AmmoLand News. Bringing a gun into the hall violated security rules.
“I never did expect that an industry defining exhibit like the consumer electronics show would not allow us to demo our product with a gun, or worse even with an imitation gun,” Kiyani remarked. “It’s like preventing Google from demoing its Self-Driving Car.”
The irony is, Senitnl was attempting to show “forward thinking” with administration goals. It had even made an announcement titled “IDENTILOCK Smart Gun Lock Answers President Obama’s Call for a Smart Gun.”
“If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull a trigger on a gun,” Obama said Tuesday to press conference applause (and that in itself is a phenomenon worth noting). “Right?”
As an aside, I was going to watch his speech but my remote control didn’t work, and when I went to go buy new batteries, wouldn’t you know it, the garage door opener couldn’t have picked a worse time to go on the fritz. But back to the president’s enthusiastically-received bright idea…
“As Harvard’s Kip Viscusi has detailed, federal laws requiring ‘childproof’ safety caps appear to have led to a documented increase in child poisonings,” author, attorney and gun rights advocate Dave Kopel has noted.
“Lulled by the presence of the federally-approved safety device on medicine bottles, many adults have been leaving dangerous medicines within easy reach of children.”
Gun owners have known about the inherent flaws in competing “smart gun” technologies for a long time now. We know the concept originated as a means of preventing ‘takeaway” incidents, where police officers were being killed with their own service weapons. And we know that greedy anti-gunners are themselves to blame for all the adamant opposition, when they showed their hand by exempting police and enacting laws requiring the technology be imposed on the “civilian” market when they deem it is ripe.
Between that and the potential for police operated locator/shutoff switches, and all the reliability issues whenever you make a mechanism unnecessarily complex and introduce additional potential for failure, well, sorry, no. Not interested.
Add to that the cost of a device many of us don’t need or want. And does anyone think for a moment the people committing the lion’s share of the “gun violence” in this country will have any use for such gadgets — aside maybe from stealing and then selling them?
Still, as long as everything is voluntary, there is a place for IDENTILOCK and the Armatix and whatever else the Smart Tech Foundation wants to promote — as long as using such products is always voluntary. I can accept that some people will choose to own guns and not put the time into training to trust themselves without relying on devices. I think that’s wrong, but I’ll not force my opinion on someone else. Which is a fundamental difference between gun rights advocates and the gun-grabbers, and what is most responsible for “smart guns” remaining an unachievable diktat.
What hampered Mr. Kiyani’s advancing of Obama’s stated goals, and what prevented demonstrating the full potential of his product, was anti-gun sentiment. Perversely, that’s the same sentiment that wants to mandate “smart guns.”
Absurdly, the premier consumer electronics technology forum in the country has allowed institutional hoplophobia to hamper the advancement of a technology “common sense gun safety advocates” say they want. As we regularly see, with “progressives,” every day is Opposite Day.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.
He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and also posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.