OBAMA PROGRESSING IN PLAN TO MAKE "SMART GUNS" OPERABLE ONLY BY OWNERS
BY BOB ADELMANN
SEE: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/23094-obama-progessing-in-plan-to-make-smart-guns-operable-only-by-owners; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
On Friday President Obama posted on his Facebook page the progress being made in his attempt to develop “smart gun” technology that would make guns inoperable unless fired only by their owners. He claimed it was all about preventing accidental shootings and tracking down stolen guns. He asserted:
These common-sense steps are not going to prevent every tragedy, but what if they prevent even one? We should be doing everything we can to save lives and spare families the pain and unimaginable loss too many Americans have endured.
In early January Obama issued several executive orders as he continued his attack on Americans’ right to keep and bear arms, including directing the Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense agencies to come up with plans on how to use the new technologies, and giving them 90 days to report back to him. He ordered them to work on a report “outlining research and development designed to expedite real-world deployment” of that technology in order, he said, “to reduce the frequency of accidental discharge or unauthorized use of firearms.”
Those departments said they are still working on it and will have a final report back to him in October, just in time to give Hillary Clinton’s presidential run a final boost going into the November elections.
Clinton declared last week on MSNBC that, once elected, she will pick up the baton from Obama on her first day in office and continue that attack: “I really support everything President Obama said he would do through regulations on guns, but we’re going to start the very first day and tackle the gun lobby to try to reduce the outrageous number of people who are dying from gun violence in our country.”
Efforts to develop that technology have been ongoing since at least 2001, when New Jersey passed its Childproof Handgun Law that would take effect “three years after it is determined that personalized handguns are available for retail purposes.” In 2006 Armatix, a Germany manufacturer, developed its Armatix iP1 (shown), a .22-caliber semi-automatic pistol containing 10 rounds with an effective firing range of 75 yards, and costing $1,800. The firearm was designed to team up with a smart watch its owner would wear containing an RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip. Only the owner could fire the weapon provided that the gun was less than 10 inches away from the watch.
It received poor reviews, and New Jersey’s attorney general finally ruled in 2014 that “after careful consideration of the iP1’s design, we have determined that it does not satisfy the statutory definition because … the pistol may be fired by a person who is not an authorized or recognized user.”
Jon Stokes, writing for TechCrunch.com, agreed, saying, "The smart gun, in all of its incarnations, is a fantasy. No electronic technology is 100% reliable, and very few people will trust a gun that can be turned into a brick by a failure of some on-board circuitry.” Besides, said Stokes, any new software will have a “whole host of brand new security and identity problems … that must be discovered and patched, and then the patches will have problems.”
Others are concerned about how the new technology, once it is sufficiently developed, can be manipulated by government agencies, using the chips to track the location of owners, and disabling firearms according to their own purposes.
If handing off the move to “smart guns” to Clinton is one of the reasons for the October release date, it has run into another stumbling block: Clinton is losing traction with the general public over the issue of guns. A survey of 1,000 American voters conducted by Harper Polling last month asking if Clinton’s demand that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) that protects the gun industry from being sued by crime victims be repealed, more than 70 percent said no. Those polled said the PLCAA “should be kept and we should punish the criminals who commit these acts, not the law-abiding manufacturers and retailers of lawful products which get misused.” Remarkably the majority of those polled agreed, including liberal Democrats residing in the northeast, along with those who voted for President Obama in the last election.
Rasmussen Reports just conducted a telephone survey of likely U.S. voters asking whom they would vote for if the national election were held today: It was a virtual tie, at 38 percent each for Trump and Clinton. This is the first national poll of Americans who say they are likely to vote in November that shows Trump tied with Cinton.
That change in point of view is also likely helped along by Trump’s support for the Second Amendment. From his website one finds this:
The Second Amendment to our Constitution is clear. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed upon. Period.
The Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right that belongs to all law-abiding Americans. The Constitution doesn’t create that right; it ensures that the government can’t take it away. Our Founding Fathers knew, and our Supreme Court has upheld, that the Second Amendment’s purpose is to guarantee our right to defend ourselves and our families. This is about self-defense, plain and simple.
If smart gun technology does eventually develop to the point where firearms can benefit from it, then Americans, under the Second Amendment, would be free to purchase such guns. Where the National Rifle Association disagrees with Obama and Clinton is government requirements “mandating” that such technology be incorporated in every firearm sold. Wrote Jennifer Baker, director of NRA-ILA Public Affairs: “President Obama’s obsession with gun control knows no boundaries. At a time when we are actively fighting terrorists at home and abroad, this administration would rather focus … on the president’s gun control agenda.”
If Rasmussen is right, that obsession, and Clinton’s determination to continue it, will be negated in November.
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POLICE REJECT BEING ‘GUINEA PIGS’
IN OBAMA’S SMART GUN PUSH
“Police officers in general, federal officers in particular, shouldn’t be asked to be the guinea pigs..."
SEE: http://www.infowars.com/police-reject-being-guinea-pigs-in-obamas-smart-gun-push/; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Rank-and-file police officers are already rallying against President Barack Obama’s scheduled push for government purchases of smart guns.
“Police officers in general, federal officers in particular, shouldn’t be asked to be the guinea pigs in evaluating a firearm that nobody’s even seen yet,” said James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. “We have some very, very serious questions,” he said, according to Politico.
Obama’s push for smart guns is expected to come as soon as Friday, and it coincides with a Department of Justice National Institute of Justice announcement concerning the formulation of “test methods to provide a basis to determine whether the addition of a smart gun technology does or does not significantly reduce the reliability of the firearm system compared to existing firearms.”
Breitbart News reported that a new push for smart gun development was part of Obama’s executive gun controls in January.
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Obama Announces Plan To “Expedite”
Smart Gun Technology
BY JOSHUA KRAUSE
SEE: http://www.activistpost.com/2016/05/obama-announces-plan-to-expedite-smart-gun-technology.html; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
America is by far, the most difficult country to push any kind of gun control legislation. The gun grabbers really have their work cut out for them here. In just about any other nation, all it takes is one tragic mass shooting, and the sheep start bleating and begging for more restrictive laws. But for a variety of reasons, it just doesn’t work here. Guns have just become far too ingrained our culture for most people to give them up.
It’s actually quite impressive when you think about it. Every other line and amendment in the US Constitution has been violated into meaninglessness. Though the spirit of the Second Amendment has been violated as well, it hasn’t been done to the same extent. It’s the last domino that just won’t fall, no matter how hard the gun grabbers blow.
Since they can’t pull off an outright ban, they have to constantly find alternative routes of gun control. They try to place onerous regulations on buying and selling firearms, they push extra taxes on ammunition, or they try to force gun owners to buy insurance for each gun. The list goes on and on. One of their alternatives to gun confiscation, is the smart gun.
In case you don’t know, a smart gun is a weapon that uses biometrics, fingerprints, RFID chips, or a magnetic device to determine if the person holding the gun is the rightful owner. If someone else handles the gun, it won’t fire. This would presumably prevent the gun from being stolen by criminals or handled by children.
This makes it the perfect Trojan horse for gun control, since a roll-out of these weapons (if you can even call these neutered toys “weapons”) be implemented under the guise of safety. The gun grabbers can make an appeal to our conscience and desires. They’ll say that we can have whatever gun we want, so long as it has smart gun technology to prevent it from falling into the hands of bad guys or unknowing children (as you’ll see in a moment, it’s a Faustian bargain).
But first, they’ll try to roll out this technology in increments, starting with law enforcement. They’ll say that we need smart guns to prevent criminals from killing cops with their own weapons. President Obama recently proposed a plan to create better smart guns for that exact purpose.
First, we’ve jump started the development of smart gun technology. Today, many gun injuries and deaths are the result of legal guns that were stolen, misused, or discharged accidentally. As long as we’ve got the technology to prevent a criminal from stealing and using your smartphone, then we should be able to prevent the wrong person from pulling a trigger on a gun. So, my Administration released a plan today to expedite the development of smart gun technology, including by identifying the requirements that smart guns would have to meet in order for law enforcement to purchase and use them effectively – and keep themselves and the public safer in the process.
However, this has nothing to do with the safety of law enforcement. The threat of a cop having his gun stolen by a suspect is a non-issue. Of all the hundreds of thousands of police officers in America, only 51 were killed when a perp overpowered them and took their weapon, between 2000 and 2010.
So what is this really about?
The government wants to normalize smart guns, so that they have more control over us. How does that give them more control? Because, when you have a firearm that is dependent on electronics to function, that firearm becomes hackable. It will be programmed with back doors that the government can exploit, just like computers and smartphones.
In the future, smart guns will be designed so that government officials can shut them off remotely whenever they want. In fact, the first smart gun that can be remotely controlled by a bureaucrat was invented about two years ago.
That’s the real endgame. At first it will be voluntary, but eventually they’ll force you to buy smart guns. It’s the best way to implement gun control without alarming gun owners, because with this technology they can trust anyone to have any gun, knowing that they can turn it off at any moment. They’ll try to trick the pro-gun crowd with promises of reduced regulations. They’ll let you buy fully automatics and other “scary” weapons, just so long as it is a smart gun.A new technology that could allow authorities and others to literally “turn off” guns by remote control has been patented.German arms maker Armatix GmbH has filed a patent for an improved smart pistol that can be shut down by a wireless signal.“Preferably, the apparatus of the invention can be controlled remotely, for example via satellite and can send information to a satellite,” the European patent application for the gun says.
But if you take that deal, then one day you’ll wake up in a country filled with smart guns that you can’t really own or control. Unfortunately for the gun grabbers, gun owners aren’t stupid enough to take that deal, are they?
