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.

Armatix Shills for Smart Guns in Washington Post Op/Ed

Yesterday, the Washington Post published this Op/Ed from Ernst Mauch, managing director of Armatix GmbH.  In the piece, he makes a pitch for why so called smart guns, or at least the ones his company manufactures, are in keeping with America's respect for the right to keep and bear arms and believes gun owners should have the ability to purchase them:

Respect for this freedom to protect your family as you see fit is a major reason I believe that gun owners in the United States should have the right to purchase personalized firearms using high-tech safety features. The reality is that firearm safety has not meaningfully advanced in the past century. Nearly every other industry has transformed its safety features — often multiple times — in that same period. Given how tragic the misuse of firearms can be, guns should be no different.

Most of the commentary I have seen from the firearms community on the subject of smart guns believe it should be a market decision too.  The problem is, New Jersey has a law on the books that mandates only "smart guns" may be sold in the state once such technology is available for sale.  It's the mandate that the firearms community opposes and we don't want to see the rights of our brothers and sisters in New Jersey infringed when one manufacturer comes to the market with one caliber of firearm that currently costs two to three times what a similar firearm without the personalized technology would cost.

But, this is also technology that is not ready for prime time.  As Sebastian pointed out last week:

The problem with smart guns are more fundamental than the shock sensitivity of electronics, and have more to do with the limits of biometric identification and radio frequency identification (RFID). The former is unreliable and slow, and the latter is prone to interference and jamming. There’s also inherent mechanical problems with the smart gun that make the technology very easy for a determined individual to defeat. I had a conversation with some of our opponents on this topic, who argued that automobile anti-theft systems became much more sophisticated, but aside from misunderstanding the problem, I thought it was a reasonable point.

Then, we learned yesterday that Armatix has also applied for a patent for a remote "kill switch." And some wonder why the firearms community is not warming up to the idea of "smart guns."