on 8/3/01 7:20 PM, Joshua Bell at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Ooh, ooh, new idea...
>
> You may have seen tech news articles about cell-phone jammers being proposed
> and/or installed. The notion is that they would be installed in places like
> movie theaters.
>
> Combine this with the proposed electronic trigger locks and ... well, you
> see where I'm going.
>
> Let's see how this might work:
>
> - The punishment for selling, posessing or manufacturing guns without
> electronic trigger locks is incredibly high.
> - Guns issued to military and law-enforcement officers do not have these
> devices, but they are required to have the fingerprint-locks instead.
>
> - If you want a gun for home defense, great - your home won't have a gun
> jammer.
> - Conversely, you could install a home-gun-jammer if you wanted one.
> - Legitimate places for the discharge of firearms - e.g. shooting ranges,
> hunting grounds, etc. - obviously wouldn't have the jammers.
>
> Potential problems:
>
> - Can these be designed such that the lock can't be defeated without
> rendering the gun inoperable? The notion of the trigger locks is to prevent
> (e.g.) a child using the gun, not a dedicated sociopath who can disassemble
> the gun.
> - Obviously, you could smuggle a gun into the country that doesn't have one
> of these devices. But isn't the US the largest manufacturer, etc. etc.
> - This would be impossible to retrofit into existing weapons.
>
> - The "self defense" contra-argument - I break into someone's house carrying
> a portable scrambler and a baseball bat.
>
> Further thoughts?
>
You want to rule the sevagram?
This is locking the door after the horse has emigrated. The problem is the
several million weapons already in circulation. How do you persuade people
to hand those in, even with a subsidised exchange program? Even if you make
the new guns fire a different calibre ammo and ban manufacture of the old
sizes. There is plenty of old ammo floating around, and guns and ammunition
are pretty low tech and easy to make for a black market. (I remember some
documentary about Afghanistani blacksmiths crafting hand-built AK-47's etc)
It is like the high-tech security on DVD - I saw some news headline there is
a 7-line perl script to break DVD encryption (put it in your .sig and
confound the lawyers.)
America has made guns too easy to get for too long, and it will take as long
again to remedy this *even if it got public support* which it isn't likely
to.
--
William T Goodall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
