Now is the Time to Stop Smart Guns

Julie Beal, Contributor
Activist Post

Sometimes it feels like I’m talking to a brick wall – last week, I raised the alarm on the growth of the smart gun movement, and how they would lead to microchip implants.

Then Obama issued his ‘executive orders’, or rather, made a speech about guns, including measures that could further the introduction of these ‘personalized’ weapons. The mainstream has also been reporting on this issue, so I’m mystified as to why there is still no real reaction: the focus of gun rights advocates remains on the mental ‘health’ aspect.

So excuse me for shouting, but it’s high time to:

DEMAND A PLAN TO STOP SMART GUNS BECAUSE:

• THEY CAN BE REMOTELY DISABLED
• THEY WOULD LEAD TO MICROCHIP IMPLANTS
•  DUMB GUNS ARE SET TO BECOME ILLEGAL AS THEY WILL BE DEEMED UNSAFE

I am a UK researcher; people here rarely talk about guns, and it’s uncommon to see them being used or carried. However, I’m trying to inform people about smart guns because I’m opposed to all of the programs which require implantation with a microchip for security reasons, and because the police and military[1] have an alarming array of awful weapons to use against us[2].

In the UK, The Telegraph just reported that Google wants people to use a ring to have a single online sign-in (this is identity management):

 …. In a research paper, two security experts at the web giant have outlined a future in which the main way of guaranteeing we are who we say we are online will be possession of a physical token, perhaps embedded in smartphones or even jewellery.

They have added to growing claims that passwords are both inherently insecure and increasingly impractical.

We’d like your smartphone or smartcard-embedded finger ring to authorize a new computer via a tap on the computer, even in situations in which your phone might be without cellular connectivity, the Googlers wrote.

I also believe that the proposed large-scale manufacture of smart guns should be dominating the gun control debate in America, because they seem set to be regulated as a consumer product, which must therefore have safety features – so ALL guns would need to conform. This would enable ‘wide area control’, meaning any gun could be remotely disabled. When the authorities decide they don’t want you to use your gun, they can just switch it off. The White House is now poised to act, and the guns are ready to go into production. The next move is to get the approval of Congress – probably legislation to bring guns (and/or safety mechanisms) under the Consumer Product Safety Act. The issue needs a good public airing well before that. Especially since ‘Anonymous’ put out a video inciting Americans to fight their government:

American people have decided to openly declare war on the United States government. This is a call to arms. We call upon the Citizens of the United States to stand beside us in overthrowing this corrupted body and call upon a new era.

Rising up with guns is a surefire way to convince Congress to legislate the manufacture of ‘safe’ guns. A color revolution for the smart world order, for which the table has already been laid.

The GUN POLICY SUMMIT

Following Joe Biden’s round of meetings to address gun control in the country, a gun policy summit was convened by the Johns Hopkins University last week, and was attended by some of the “global leaders in gun policy and violence – representing the fields of law, medicine, public health, advocacy and public safety”. These people are said to have reached consensus on a number of issues, leading to the release of a list of recommendations, including personalized guns:

• Congress should provide financial incentives to states to mandate childproof or personalized guns.
• The Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission should be granted authority to regulate the safety of firearms and ammunition as consumer products.

All of the researchers’ recommendations have been compiled into a book which has been published in just two weeks! The book includes the above smart gun recommendations, and the back cover features praise from Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City; Martin O’Malley, Governor of Maryland; and David Satcher, 16th Surgeon General of America.

The book (Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis) is edited by Daniel Webster, the co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, and Jon Vernick, who has done a lot of research, some of it with Stephen Teret (see below), to advance the development of personalized weapons. New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is also co-chair of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition, has written the foreword.

The book includes an analysis of the constitutionality of many recommended policies and data from a national public opinion poll that reflects support among the majority of Americans—including gun owners—for stronger gun policies.

[Please note, the video takes 3.5 minutes to start, and Teret’s speech is from 46 mins and 50 secs to 1 hour and 14 mins.]

One of the speakers at the summit was Stephen P. Teret, a long-time champion of personalizing weapons, and setting safety standards for them. He gave a thirty minute speech[3] at last week’s Gun Policy Summit, in which he stressed the need to design guns responsibly, and safely. He claimed the technology is already available, and all America needs now is regulation. He described two designs – one of which, produced by Armatix, is the iP1, and is, said Teret, “… being sold in Europe now and is ready to be sold here in the U.S. … this is ready now. This is for sale now in Europe.” Teret also said that the ATF approved the iP1 personalized gun for importation in December 2011 – it uses both fingerprint sensors and RFID (it comes with a microchipped ‘wristwatch’). Teret then goes on to describe the smart gun developed by TriggerSmart, which operates on the same High Frequency band used for contactless credit cards, and is said to work in an instant. Use of a ring, wristwatch, or implant[4] is required, as with the Armatix system.

(the chip goes in at 3:30 mins!)

The CEO of Armatix, Bernd Dietel, and the founder of TriggerSmart, Robert McNamara, were both present at the summit. Teret commented that, in a conversation with Dietel, about the expected impact on prices, Dietel had asserted, “…once you get economies of scale going, it will increase the cost of a gun 10-20%.”

There was no mention by Teret of the ‘dynamic finger grip’ gun design I described in my last article – the two most likely designs both require a chip to be present either in or on the hand. The suggestion that all police forces and other gun owners should have to wear a ring or watch at all times just to fire their gun is ludicrous. Nobody could be expected never to lose or forget to wear the device, to be unable to, or to have it stolen. Implanting a chip into the hand only takes a couple of minutes, and is then ‘secure’. Hands, however, are removable.

On Christmas day, 2012, Robert McNamara posted a message to the policemag.com forum asking for advice on how to bring his gun design to the attention of the authorities in the U.S.:

Firstly, if Mrs Lanza had TriggerSmart installed in her guns then Adam could not have fired the guns without her authorization RFID tag.

Secondly, if TriggerSmart Wide Area control was installed at the school then any TriggerSmart guns could have been disabled at point of entry to safe zone.

It is my intention to licence our technology free to every school and University in the USA free of charge.… we have been GRANTED a patent in the USA and … I am just back from South Africa where they want to use our technology to prevent the gun violence there and I have had some enquiries from KSA and Egypt, UK and Norway where there were over 70 killed in a massacre last year.

On New Year’s Eve, McNamara again posted to a forum about his “childproof RFID smart guns” –

What our technology can do is create a zone to disable guns if they come within a safe zone such as a school, airport etc. We call this Wide Area Control or WAC. The guns need to have TS RFID technology installed in the first place.

In an email sent to Mitch Barker, (Executive Director, WA Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs), McNamara implied the Connecticut massacre had helped build the “momentum .. on .. our side of advocating safer guns and safer gun laws.”

Barker replied,

I believe there is a huge market for this technology. More importantly, I believe it will save many lives. The police market, as you know, has looked at smart guns for years. They will be a tough group to convince because of the concern the weapon will not fire when needed. While I believe there is much that can be done to help move this to the police/military market, it seems that the civilian market is a much better place to begin.

McNamara has just been interviewed by Fox News, looking oddly shifty and uncomfortable. In the interview, he claims his design will cause the gun to be fired by an authorised user within a quarter of a second. He dismisses biometrics as unreliable, and says a pilot program will be up and running in a short time. TriggerSmart was granted a patent in the U.S. last year, and has an international patent pending. However, the product has not yet reached production stage: McNamara says he wants to make 50-100 of the guns and give them to the police and the military for testing.

Teret is very optimistic that regulation on smart guns will be forthcoming; he is well placed to influence policy – during his speech, he recounts his meeting to discuss personalized weapons with Biden’s taskforce last week, which had concluded with Attorney General Eric Holder endorsing smart guns the technology, and saying he would walk from the meeting, straight over to the White House, to talk to the President about it. Teret certainly seemed to think he had been ‘given the nod’ by Holder with the words:

…when the President speaks …. listen closely, because the President will be saying things that you all said in the meeting…

Last September (2012), Teret received the Chairman’s Circle of Commendation Award from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in recognition of his “…exceptional contributions to consumers in the United States by reducing deaths, preventing injuries and improving consumer product safety.”

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH ON GUNS

Both Biden and Obama made their solemn speeches to the nation on the 15th of January. Part of the showmanship was to deliver each speech with the manner of a caring but authoritative father: the finale was a spectacle involving the President signing what the media had led us to believe were 23 ‘executive orders’ on measures to control guns.

However, journalists have begun to point out that Obama didn’t pass any executive orders at all – really, all he did was make his position on guns a tiny bit clearer – and go on and on about the shootings and the children, and strengthen the meme of collective responsibility. As Meredith Drake, at breitbart.com, puts it:

The President has found a winning formula to push through his extreme policy views: campaign, grow support, give the appearance of action and fund raise off pseudo-action. The President is now applying this campaign tactic to gun control, giving the appearance to America that he is taking action to protect children from madmen….. it appears that the President had his children-hugging press conference to announce action but then signed directives to his cabinet and asked them to report back in 30 days.

Biden made his speech before Obama, repeating four times that we all have a “moral responsibility” to act to stop more massacres. There was no real substantiation for action other than the emotional effect of the shooting tragedies which have occurred. There was certainly no mention of implanting microchips, or remote disabling of guns. Two of the ‘executive orders’ can be seen to relate to smart gun technology, without naming it as such:

• (no. 8) Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).
• (no. 15) Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies.

It is highly surprising that no direct reference was made to smart guns during the speeches given that day, given the massive movement now endorsing smart gun technology, and the support of key government officials. The President called for support from the nation, and from Congress, but without making it clear which specific actions he wanted them to support – the line of reasoning got lost towards the end as he just kept referring to ‘this’ and ‘it’. However, metaphors for ‘safe’ gun technology (and mental health checks) were scattered throughout –

• “ways to keep guns out of the wrong hands”
• “ keep guns out of the hands of criminals”
• “kept … the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun”
• “keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people”
• “keep guns out of the wrong hands”

This repetition helps prime the mind to accept the proposals which look set to come soon. The overall theme is to suggest that anyone who rejects the proposals clearly doesn’t care about ‘the children’; you have to show you care.

The NRA-ILA website singles out four of Obama’s ‘executive orders’ as being “the most potentially problematic”; one of these is personalized firearms:

… Obama will direct Holder to issue a report designed to promote ‘smart’ gun technologies that gun owners generally do not want, and that would raise the cost of firearms and potentially render them useless.

I cannot find any other recent statements regarding smart guns by the NRA, other than a sentence published earlier this month, as one of various ‘firearm facts’, which says the NRA opposes smart guns which “have expensive, unreliable features, such as grips that would read your fingerprints before the gun will fire”.

Obama also mentioned in his speech that he would make Minnesota U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as part of the 23-point gun control plan; this may be a controversial move, however, since, according to an article at breitbart.com:

Jones was personally a part of the high-ranking Department of Justice unit that first met on October 26, 2009, to create the new DOJ policy that was used to justify ‘gunwalking’ in Operation Fast and Furious. In Fast and Furious, the ATF ‘walked’ roughly 2,000 firearms into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels. That means through straw purchasers the agency allowed sales to happen and didn’t stop the guns from being trafficked, even though they had the legal authority to do so and were fully capable of doing so.

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexican citizens-estimates put it around at least 300-were killed with these firearms.

Guns and the Law

Two states have passed laws related to the regulation of personalized guns; New Jersey did this in 2002, when it brought in legislation mandating that within six months of personalized guns becoming easily available on the market, it would become illegal to transfer ownership of any gun which was not personalized, in any way.

Maryland stipulates a report on the technology should be made annually, and the findings must be delivered to the Governor and the General Assembly.

In Pennsylvania, several senators are trying to pass bills which seek not only to legislate on the sale of smart guns, but to enforce the forfeiture of ‘dumb’ guns once personalized firearms are available; Senator Youngblood has introduced a bill (HB1282) which has been referred to committee on House Judiciary. It proposes,

adding a chapter providing for a safety performance standard for the manufacture of handguns, for the forfeiture of certain handguns and for enforcement relating to a safety standard for handguns; imposing penalties; and conferring powers and imposing duties on the Pennsylvania State Police. The State Police are required to promulgate regulations prescribing a handgun safety performance standard, which must include:

(1) A handgun shall be personalized so that it can only be fired when operated by that handgun’s authorized users;

(2) The technology establishing personalized handguns shall be incorporated into the design of a handgun and be part of its original equipment; and

(3) No personalized handgun may be manufactured to permit the personalized characteristics to be readily deactivated.

Teret, meanwhile, has been working on smart gun legislation from a different angle; he believes guns should be regulated under the In May 2000, he co-authored, ‘A Model Handgun Safety Standard Act’ for the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

In law, products which are manufactured and sold to the public are regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). A manufacturer who sells goods which fall below the expected safety standard can be prosecuted; each company has a ‘duty of care’ to avoid committing the ‘tort of negligence’. Basically, manufacturers must take reasonable care to ensure their product is made according to safety standards; if they don’t, they are liable to be sued. Guns and ammunition are exempt from the jurisdiction of the CPSC, but Teret, and many others, believe this law should be overhauled, and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which gives gun dealers and manufacturers protection from tort liability, should be repealed. This was discussed in article at the Daily Kos:

Under standard product liability law, manufacturers are liable for defect in the design and construction of their products. Tort liability provides a powerful means by which concerned individuals or groups can gain leverage against much wealthier business interests. It is not necessary to win a suit to achieve a change in corporate business and behavior. Often, the threat of lawsuits alone provide a powerful financial incentive to an industry to make its products safer, and reduce the risks associated with the use of their products. Additionally, the liability process can force manufacturers to release internal documents regarding the known risks associated with product use – as occurred with dramatic effect with suits brought against the tobacco industry. The liability process can also create poor publicity for an industry or manufacturer. In broadly restricting civil suits against the gun industry, the federal government took away a potent tool by which consumers can lobby for their safety and well-being.

If it could be shown that smart guns were ‘safer’ than dumb guns, then “…litigation against gun makers for their failure to provide technologically feasible, inexpensive safety devices”, would force them all to fit the devices to the guns, because not fitting them would be classed as negligent.

One of the ways personalized weapons are said to be ‘safer’ is because they could prevent someone firing a gun that did not belong to them. Teret and Vernick, et al., have conducted studies which they claim to prove smart guns could prevent many unintentional deaths. If a safer alternative is available, but is not incorporated into the product, the manufacturers can be held liable in cases where a smart gun could be argued to have prevented a crime or a tragedy (such as a child firing his parent’s gun).

The issue is largely a question of foreseeability – whether or not it would have been possible to anticipate such unintended use of the product. This ties in with how the gun is stored. There are said to be “three distinct risks of negligent firearm storage: accidental shootings, adolescent suicides and the criminal misuse of stolen guns.”

Teret began his speech at the gun policy summit with the highly emotive story of a four year old child shooting his baby brother in the head while he slept in his crib. Teret notes such an incident can be classed as ‘foreseeable’; changing the design of the gun, he says, would prevent it from happening. This would then be regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Moves in this direction have also come from Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, who last week announced legislation he would like to see enacted: the Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act would “… ensure that the victims of gun violence are allowed to have their day in court and that the gun industry … is not shielded from liability when it acts with negligence and disregard for public safety.”

In an interview at TheAtlantic.com, Schiff said,

I have discussed this and other priorities with the House Task Force on Gun Violence, led by Rep. Mike Thompson and submitted this proposal to the Vice President’s working group. My legislation is just one piece of the larger conversation we’re having on how to reduce gun violence in this country, but it is an important piece and I look forward to gathering support and moving forward. We’ve already had a great response from Members and outside groups, like the Brady Campaign and the American Bar Association, who are interested in this issue.

According to the 2008 report, ‘Regulating Guns in America’, by the Legal Community Against Violence, locking devices can be any device which prevents a gun being fired by the wrong user, and can be either external to the gun, such as a gun safe, or integrated into the design, such as a personalized trigger lock. The report notes,

Locking devices themselves, however, are not exempt, and therefore the CSPC has the ability to adopt national safety standards for locking devices.

Conclusion
 
The Alton Consulting Group, LLC, a consultancy firm for small businesses, published an overview of the issues faced by a start-up looking to expand production of smart guns as part of a business plan, and noted police officers were unlikely to want to be microchipped like “the family pet”.

But the proposals to bring in technology such as that offered by TriggerSmart are only one of many applications involving implants. I have written about these applications in some of my previous articles. The key issue is identification – needed for smart guns, online commerce, health services, and payment systems. All of which could lead to microchip implants.

(watch from 6:25 to 22:45 for info on NASA’s BIO-MEMS)

Even the problem with battery life has been resolved: NASA has developed an RF Telemetry “implantable biomicroelectromechanical” system, known as ‘bio-MEMS’, which can both transmit and receive data, via a miniature inductor/antenna; the bio-MEMS are electromagnetically coupled “with a remote powering/receiving device”, so they don’t need batteries, as they are charged when they are being used.

Journalists have begun to report on a new portable device for police officers which scans people for concealed weapons. “The device …. is small enough to be placed in a police vehicle or stationed at a street corner” as a way of searching for illegal firearms. The NYPD is about to begin testing the device, “which reads terahertz radiation – the natural energy emitted by people and inanimate objects – and allows police to view concealed weapons from a distance.”

There’s even a start up challenge for someone to develop a 3D-printable smart gun!

Notes:
[1] Many guns were on display at this SOFEX weapons exhibition, none of which were ‘safe’!
[2] Such as tasers which are claimed to ‘save lives’.
[4] This is illustrated (3 MINUTES INTO THE VIDEO) in the promo for Triggersmart on YouTube. Note also

The ONE Group has made a Private Equity Offering:

TriggerSmart installed in a GSG5 – viable, patented, RFID based childproof semi-automatic rimfire rifle. Can only be used with the associated RFID ring, allowing parents, officials and others reassurance that only they can use their weapon. As featured in the New York Times and Fox News.

This article first appeared at Get Mind Smart

Julie Beal is a UK-based independent researcher who has been studying the globalist agenda for more than 20 years. Please visit her website, Get Mind Smart, for a wide range of information about Agenda 21, Communitarianism, Ethics, Bioscience, and much more.