Tag: Miscellaneous Gun Stuff

Stupid Questions

The BBC has an article on so-called smart guns. Overall it’s not a bad article, it mostly covers what a smart gun is, how it works, and the political battle surrounding them. But one very stupid question is put forth:

Can it be hacked?

Yes. When the question is “Can it be hacked?” the answer is always yes. Granted the article does cover some of the ways in which radio-frequency identification (RFID) and biometric authentication systems have been hacked. But the conclusion by the BBC is that we don’t know if the iP1 authentication system can be hacked.

I’m here to tell you that it can be. We don’t know how but we do know it can be. That’s because every authentication system developed by us has been hacked because a security system can only buy time, it can’t entirely stop an unauthorized individual. Being that the RFID device used with the iP1 is new and, as the article explains, hasn’t seen much widespread use there is likely to be a plethora of bugs waiting to be discovered.

It’s likely that there will be a presentation at an upcoming security conference by a guy who figured out how to remotely enable and disable an iP1 from 100 feet away with an off the shelf RFID emulator. Authentication systems rarely survive their initial encounter with the hacker community.

Designer of Smart Gun Says Smart Guns are Safer

Ernst Mauch, the man behind the Armatix iP1 so-called smart gun (really a gun with an onboard authentication system), recently wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post where he states that smart guns are safer than regular guns:

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.

While firearm safety hasn’t meaningfully advanced in the past century it still doesn’t hold the record. Sword, for example, haven’t meaningfully advanced in regards to safety in over a millennium. Clubs also haven’t advanced in regards to safety for even longer. Why is this? Most likely because firearms, swords, and clubs are weapons and weapons are meant to cause damage. Ernst’s claim that nearly every other industry has advanced its safety features ignores most industries involving weapons.

Armatix offers market-based solutions for improving gun safety. We understand that any time a major new technology enters the market, some people will be skeptical, and that is why it is important to clarify exactly what the Armatix pistol is.

As far as I know Armatix hasn’t been lobbying in the United States for mandating that all firearms include built-in authentication systems. That being the case I have no issue with Armatix introducing its iP1. Let the market decide whether or not gun owners want such technology. So long as Ernst and Armatix rely on the market to decide whether or not people should buy their firearms I have nothing against them.

The firearm also detects the proximity of the watch, meaning that even if the gun is stolen after the code has been keyed in, it cannot be fired. If the gun and the watch are both stolen, the thief might as well throw them out because the gun won’t fire without the correct five-digit code.

This is something I didn’t know about the iP1. In addition to having the watch you also have to know a five digit code. That further complicates things will offering relatively little additional security. Five digit codes can be brute forced pretty quickly. Even if the watch itself implements mechanism to slow down a brute force attack that means little if the thief is in physical possession of the watch. Downloading a copy of the watch’s firmware will allow an attacker to bypass any watch implemented slowdown mechanisms, which will likely render the five digit code irrelevant.

The thing to take away from this article is that the author isn’t unbiased. He designed the authentication system and is therefore invested in making it sound good. On the other hand he doesn’t indicate that he wants to lobby for mandating his design be including in all handguns, which is a good. I have no objections to the technology itself although I don’t have any interest in it since its reliability hasn’t been proven. But I also cannot accept his claim that firearms like the iP1 are inherently safer since he has a direct business interest in saying so and there are a lot of scenarios where the technology could cost you your life (for example, if your arm with the watch is injured you could be unable to fire the gun with your functional hand).

Why Firearm Access Control is a Futile Effort

The issue of access control technology built into firearms (erroneously called smart gun technology by advocates of gun control) has been a hot topic as of late. Anti-gunners want it and gun owners want nothing to do with it. But the argument is irrelevant and Forbes, in an article trying to explain why gun owners should fear access control technology in their firearms, explains why:

10. Firearms must be able to be disassembled in order to be cleaned and maintained. One of the principles of information security is that someone who has physical access to a machine can undermine its security. Smartgun manufacturers need to show evidence that criminals who steal smartguns cannot modify them to work with the smart technology removed or disabled (or that preventing any components from being accessed that are accessible in conventional weapons will not impact the durability of the weapons).

Physical access is the ultimate killer of any security system. If an individual has both physical access and unlimited time they can bypass any security system. After all security systems merely buy time. An effective security system is one that takes longer to bypass than an attacker is either willing or able to invest. With access control technology on firearms both of those criteria are met since the owner necessarily has permanent physical access.

Mandating access control technology in firearms is entirely futile. The technology won’t survive even a few days once it’s introduced to market. With that said, the technology would give us something fun to play with at Defcon.

Pentagon to Destroy $1 Billion in Ammunition; Paul Krugman Applauds Its Efforts to Stimulate the Economy

Only an organization so vast, inefficient, and dumb could put itself into a position where it willingly destroys $1 billion worth of ammunition:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to destroy more than $1 billion worth of ammunition although some of those bullets and missiles could still be used by troops, according to the Pentagon and congressional sources.

It’s impossible to know what portion of the arsenal slated for destruction — valued at $1.2 billion by the Pentagon — remains viable because the Defense Department’s inventory systems can’t share data effectively, according to a Government Accountability Office report obtained by USA TODAY.

Most of this story focuses on the Pentagon’s shitty inventory system. I will save you some reading by providing you a TL;DR. The Pentagon has a shitty inventory system, it wants a fancy new inventory system, and it needs to make up claims about the potential to save billions of dollars so Congress will fund it.

I believe the more important question is why the Pentagon is destroying all of that ammunition. Obviously Stripes couldn’t be bothered to scrounge up an answer. My guess is that the ammunition is being destroyed as part of the effort to demonstrate how badly a new tax victim funded inventory system is needed.

Setting aside my cynicism I must ask if destroying all of that ammunition is necessary. If the ammunition slated for destruction is handgun and rifle cartridges then I feel the need to propose an alternative. Handgun and rifle ammunition, so long as it’s stored properly, keeps almost indefinitely. That being the case there is no reason that handgun and rifle ammunition needs to be destroyed in most cases. If the Pentagon is simply tired of having the ammunition around it could release it for sale to use mere civilians who can put the ammunition to good work at the firing range.

Don’t Let Fear Stop the Progress of Firearm Technology

After Beretta revealed its PXi4 series of sensor laden pistols I started thinking of many cool things that merging electronics and firearms could enable. Then I got to thinking of a criticism I sometimes here in regards to marrying electronics and firearms, which is that the existence of such technology would lead to it becoming legally mandatory. This criticism isn’t entirely without merit. Ed Markey, a senator from Massachusetts, recently introduce the Handgun Trigger Safety Act of 2014. The act would require all handguns manufactured three years after the passage of the act to include technology that only allows them to be used by authorized individuals. It’s a great gun control tactic since such technology isn’t widely available. In fact the Armatix iP1 is the only pistol on the market that advertises such technology and it hasn’t been widely tested yet (not to mention it’s only available in .22 Long Rifle).

Alas I don’t believe the fear of access control technology becoming mandatory in firearms should stop the firearms industry from pursuing more high-tech firearm designs. After all, the technology doesn’t even exist yet and we’re already seeing legislation mandating access control for firearms. Whether the technology exists is irrelevant as far as legislation is concerned. But more importantly the advantages of merging electronics and firearms are many.

I touched on some of them when I was fawning over the Beretta PXi4 and have touched on other advantages in an earlier post. When you look at the advantage of tying a round counter, recoil sensor, slide cycle timer, trigger pull weight recorder, chamber pressure sensor, malfunction counter, and other statistics to a heads-up display or mobile phone the possibilities become practically limitless. Imagine being able to instantly call up the number and type of failures a particular gun has suffered over the years you’ve owned it. You could see, for example, that cartridges that operated at specific pressures caused a certain error. Tuning ammunition to give a desired bullet velocity while maintaining a minimal desired amount of recoil would be trivial. If you encountered an error that you had previously encountered years ago you would be able to call up that data and see what changes you had to make to get around it (because let’s be honest, after a few years we usually forget a lot of fine details about how we fixed something). Buying a used gun would involved less guess work if you could demand the data for the total number of rounds firearm and number of errors experienced from the current owner.

As a species we are merging electronic technology with all of our other technology and it is inevitable that firearms will receive the same treatment. In a generation or two gun owners will likely be just as baffled by guns that cannot report the number of rounds fired since it was purchased as we are by flintlock rifles today (that is to say there will only be a handful of people who know how to properly operate or understand the older technology). The sooner we get underway with his merger the sooner we get all of the kinks worked out.

Fear is a terrible motivation for failing to pursue a new technology. Allowing fear to prevent us from advancing technologically only hinders our species’s potential. Yes, there are wicked people who want to use technology for nefarious things. Senators want to use technology to enact gun control. Military leads want to use technology to reign more efficient death and destruction down upon their enemies. But those wicked people won’t stop their pursuit simply because good people are afraid of the technology. We might as well reap the benefits because we will certainly be dealing with the consequences regardless of our decision.

Moving Towards Electromagnetic Guns

Firearms are considered a mature technology. The basic concept hasn’t changed in centuries. Since inception firearms have effectively been tubes designed to contain pressure and direct it out a specific direction. Inside the tube is a projectile placed in front of a chemical propellent and when the propellent is ignited it creates pressure that propels the projectile out of the tube. The need to contain and direct pressure is one of the limiting factors in firearm design.

3D printed firearms have become a buzzword as of late. While politicians and the media are making 3D printed firearms out to be the next destroyer of civilization the truth is there are currently severe limitations on what can be manufactured on an affordable printer. While this will improve over time I think it may be time to consider investing resources into improving electromagnetic guns.

The reason I say that is because electromagnetic guns don’t rely on high pressure to propel a projectile. Rail guns rely on closing a circuit between two rails with a conductive projectile, which creates Lorentz force to move the projectile. Coil guns rely on timing a series of electromagnets to pull a projectile down a barrel. Neither design involves high pressure created by burning chemical propellents. A rail gun will generate a great deal of heat as the projectile moving down the rails generates a lot of fiction. That leads me to believe a coil gun design would be a better option if one’s goal is to create a firearm that can mostly be manufactured on a 3D printer.

Obviously the electromagnets, capacitors, and other necessary electronics can’t be manufactured on an affordable 3D printer at this time. But those components are all readily available either online or an electronic hobbyist shops. And best of all buying the parts doesn’t announce to the world that you’re building a firearm or explosive (something that buying chemical propellents or components necessary to create chemical propellents can do).

There are major drawbacks to such a gun though. At this point in time traditional firearms are a known quantity. We know how to manufacture them in a way that is reliable. Coil gun designs are in their infancy and a lot of research and development would be necessary to make such weapons that could perform all of the duties of a traditional firearm can. Being able to accelerate a projectile to anywhere near the speeds of a traditional firearm isn’t easy and reliability will likely be an issue for some time. But coil guns may represent a weapon that is easier to manufacture in the home during this age where knowledge of electronics is becoming more common that knowledge of metalworking. Furthermore the components needed to build a coil gun are more difficult to control than components needed to build a traditional firearms (namely chemical propellants). In fact this is probably the most appealing aspect of electromagnetic weaponry, the components need to build a coil gun are also used in everything that our modern civilization relies on. Controlling such commonly available components is impossible (technically controlling anything is impossible but controlling commonly available components is orders of magnitude more difficult than controlling specialized components).

I think pursuing electromagnetic guns is something the gun rights movement should consider and maybe even invest resources into investigating.

Prussian Efficiency

Germany is well known for being an efficient country populated by efficient people. This is evident in many things the country does including policing:

German police officers fired a total of 85 bullets in 2011, 49 of which were warning shots, the German publication Der Spiegel reported. Officers fired 36 times at people, killing six and injuring 15. This is a slight decline from 2010, when seven people were killed and 17 injured. Ninety-six shots were fired in 2010.

Meanwhile, in the United States, The Atlantic reported that in April, 84 shots were fired at one murder suspect in Harlem, and another 90 at an unarmed man in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles police department alone requires as many rounds of ammunition to take down one suspect as the entire country of Germany requires for all of its police in an entire year. Talk about German efficiency (or American inefficiency).

But there’s more to this story than mere numbers. Those numbers indicate a potential cultural difference between German policing and American policing. German police appear to turn to the gun more as a last resort whereas American police turn to the gun whenever the magical phrase “officer safety” can be applied to a situation. One of my issues with modern policing in the United States is how quickly it usually turns to deadly force, armed no-knock raids, and general thuggery. The days when a couple of police officers would knock on your door, present a warrant, and arrest you are rapidly disappearing entirely. Instead those days are being replaced with an armed Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team kicking in your door at two in the morning, shooting whatever pets they see, and busting you up or shooting you before handcuffs are even brought out.

Other developed countries manage a less militant take on policing and haven’t fallen into chaos. Perhaps this is due to those countries still treating the police as a civilian peacekeeping force and not paramilitary forces. Either way our police could learn a thing or two from Germany’s police.

What Being a Douchebag Gets You

There is a sizable population of people who don’t like those of us who carry firearms. When one of those individuals is a business owner they often post a sign informing would-be patrons that firearms are banned on the premises. I don’t have a problem with such signs. If you don’t like me then I’m more than happy to take my business elsewhere. But one business owner in South Carolina decided to go the extra mile and insult carry permit holders:

A firestorm of backlash has been mounting against a South Carolina pub that put a derogatory sign in its store window telling gun owners to keep out.

[…]

The story first gained traction when Twitchy posted several photos of the sign from Twitter.

“NO CONCEALED WEAPONS ALLOWED,” the sign warns. “If you are such a loser that you feel a need to carry a gun with you when you go out, I do not want your business. Douchebag.”

As you can imagine this cunning plan didn’t turn out as the business owner likely expected:

Backstreets Pub Deli in Clemson has a one-star rating out of five on Yelp, with pages upon pages of negative comments and reviews by Second Amendment supporters.

Personally I’m not a fan of such antics but this type of backlash is inevitable when you throw stones. Had the owner of Backstreets Pub simply posted a sign that said the carrying of firearms was prohibited on the premises that would have likely been the end of things. People who carry firearms would eat elsewhere and nothing more would be heard about the incident. But the owner decided to stoop to childish insults, which resulted in the insults being returned.

Just because you disagree with what a person does doesn’t mean you can’t be civil. Agree to disagree, avoid each other, and leave it at that. As soon as you begin issuing insults you should expect to be insulted as well.

Assault Tattoo

Disproportionate responses are standard operating procedure for most law enforcement agencies these days. If an individual calls the police claiming that they saw a man with a gun the appropriate response would be to ask if that individual was acting in a threatening manner. That question never seems to get asked. Instead police will often toss logic to the wind, grab their toys, and head out to harass the subject of the call. That’s what happened to a man in Maine who wasn’t even carrying a gun:

NORRIDGEWOCK — Michael Smith went outside shirtless after being awakened Tuesday morning, yelling at a tree removal company to get off his property.

The workers thought they saw a gun in his waistband and called police.

Smith, who’d gone back to bed, was awakened again minutes later — this time by Maine State Police at his front door, backed up by a group of troopers with assault rifles in his driveway. They were asking him via a megaphone to come out of his house.

Smith did have a gun. It was tattooed on his stomach.

Because Smith was yelling at the tree removal service I can see where a claim of threatening behavior could be made. But even then an appropriate response would have been to send a couple of police officers to knock on Smith’s door and ask some questions. Loading up an entire group of troopers is overkill whether or not Smith had a real gun.

Officer safety has become the go to excuse for police agencies to act like paramilitary forces. Why did so many police officers have to be sent to respond to a call about a man who was merely through to be in possession of a gun? Because officer safety. Either that or I must assume that police officers think so poorly of their ability that they feel the only way they could win a potential gunfight is with overwhelming firepower.

Questions Arise Regarding Shooting on Highway 212

The situation on Highway 212 in Eden Prairie where police shot two individuals has raised some questions. Family members of the woman who was shot have hired a lawyer to investigation the officers’ claims:

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (KMSP) – The family of one of the people shot and killed by police on Highway 212 last week has hired a lawyer to learn more about why officers pulled the trigger, but law enforcement is pointing to the 21-foot rule.

The investigation is still ongoing, but depending on which experts you talk to, some already say they see the shooting that followed a high-speed chase as justified because of a guideline that police officers are trained to use when assessing a threat.

Joe Dutton, a retired Golden Valley police officer and use of force expert, told Fox 9 News studies have proven that when faced with a suspect who is making threats with a knife, an officer won’t have the time to get their gun from a hip-holster and shoot if that suspect is within 21 feet.

The 21-foot rule, also know as the Tueller Drill, cites that an attacker armed with a knife can close an unobstructed gap between himself and an individual armed with a holstered firearm before that individual can draw his firearm. Does that rule apply in this case? I think that’s a valid question that deserves to be investigated.

Setting aside the possibility of the officers lying about the reason they shoot the two we will have to ask whether or not a lesser amount of force could have safely resolved the situation. Several factors could play a part in this. First we know that police officers carry Tasers for situations where force that can be deployed at a distance is necessary. Second we know that the police already had their firearms drawn as they had just shot the first victim. Third judging by the helicopter footage it seems like the police had positioned their squad cars between themselves and the victims.

Does the 21-foot rule apply here? I don’t believe it is so cut and dry. The police already had their firearm drawn and the path between themselves and the victims was not unobstructed. It’s possible that the situation could have been resolved with less force than was deployed, which would likely open the door for a civil case. I think this investigation is warranted and do want to read any report that comes of it.