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Monday, August 11, 2014

Gun Maker to Eric Holder: If You Try to Mandate My Smart-gun Technology, I’ll Burn it Down

National Review has this article today by Frank Miniter that describes an April 13, 2013 meeting between U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and W. P. Gentry, president of Kodiak Arms.  Gentry told Holder about technology his company had been working on called the Intelligun.  Gentry showed Holder how the "smart gun" technology he had been developing worked.  He told Miniter:
“This interested Eric Holder,” Gentry says. “He wondered how we might be able to control who was or wasn’t authorized. I stopped him right there. I looked right across a table at Eric Holder — yeah, the attorney general of the United States — and told him, ‘If you try to mandate my smart-gun technology, I’ll burn it down.’ The Intelligun is designed to save lives, not restrict freedom.”
Gentry told Miniter that the meeting ended after that exchange.

Something you won't here from the mainstream media, but that Miniter pointed out, manufacturers (and the NRA) aren't against the technology.  They just want the market, not the government to dictate when it is available.  The problem is that the government keeps getting in the way:
If he can keep the government out of the way, Gentry says, he sees a lot of possibilities for the technology. Theoretically, a villain couldn’t take a gun from a police officer or armed citizen and then use that gun — as the Navy Yard killer did. Also, a parent would have another safety mechanism to help prevent a child from firing a self-defense gun.
Unlike the Armatix "smart gun" the Intelligun doesn't rely on sending a signal to a bracelet or other device worn by the gun owner.  The best way to describe it, it's kind of like installing grips similar to those with Crimson Trace laser sites.  You install a conversion kit (currently on a 1911 pistol), changing out the grips and the mainspring.  It  doesn’t read a person’s fingerprints but instead takes a series of photos of a person’s fingertips and overlaps them. The sensor then looks for enough points that match an algorithm.  Gentry expects to have the technology ready for other popular models within the next year.

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