Is It Time To Put Chips In Guns? [View all]

There is an idea for a semiconductor application that has been kicked around for years, but has not yet found its market. It’s the notion of using RFID chips to prevent guns from being used by anyone except their owners.

If you look back over the past year alone you will find that a number of killings have resulted from the killer appropriating someone else’s gun. It’s not unusual for a killer to shoot a police officer with another officer’s gun, or even that officer’s own gun. The school shootings that are becoming increasingly frequent in the US are often committed by a child using a parent’s gun. Firearms stolen from homes and cars are often used in gang violence. If a gun would be useful only to its owner these deaths might be avoided.

Fellow Forbes blogger Larry Bell gives some interesting statistics from a Department of Justice survey of prison inmates in his post: Disarming Realities: As Gun Sales Soar, Gun Crimes Plummet. The survey found that 37% of inmates used a family member’s gun and another 40% obtained their weapon from an illegal source. Some of these crimes may have been avoided if firearms could be operated exclusively by their owners.

There are lots of ideas of how to prevent unauthorized gun use, and in fact there is even a Wikipedia page that describes a few of them. Of course, there’s the obvious solution of keeping guns in a safe. Gun safes do a lot to prevent theft or misappropriation by a family member. Some companies have worked out ways to add biometric sensors to weapons to prevent their unauthorized use. These are based on fingerprint recognition, grip recognition, or more exotic approaches. The trouble is: it takes time to positively identify biometric inputs, and those who buy a gun for safety worry that a delay might cost them their life.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2013/12/31/is-it-time-to-put-chips-in-guns/