Quote of the day—Joe Nocera

The person who made me aware of the poll was Ralph Fascitelli, co-founder of LodeStar Firearms, a new smart-gun company. LodeStar has engaged the legendary German gun designer Ernst Mauch to develop a 9-millimeter smart pistol, which will use a radio frequency to connect gun to owner.

Joe Nocera
February 16, 2018
Gun Companies Need This Gun-Control Measure
[Ralph Fascitelli is a co-founder of a firearms company? Wow! He is also on the board of Washington Ceasefire.

Sorry, Ralph. I know you have been told this, I was there when John Urquhart, King County Washington Sheriff, told everyone in the room, “Smart guns aren’t ready for prime time.” The LodeStar approach doesn’t address the deficiencies pointed out by Urquhart. Your company is going to fail.

There are at least three other issues which will ensure the failure of Fascitell’s company.

The first is Fascitell has long been an advocate for limiting magazine capacity to no more than ten rounds. His company is targeting, in part, law enforcement. Even if they could get over the many reliability hurdles pointed out by Urquhart, law enforcement is not going have much interest in a low capacity handgun.

The second is gun sellers know that if they put one of these guns on the shelf for sale it will trigger New Jersey’s law that within three years any gun sold in the state will have to have “smart gun” technology before it can be sold. They claim this law will be repealed in early 2018. But that isn’t going to help. Everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that there will be several other states, probably including New Jersey, which will pass similar laws if such a gun had even a fraction of a percent of the market share

The third is that many gun control people don’t want guns to be less likely to be used by your kids or unusable if taken from you during a self-defense situation. They want people to have that fear. They want people will be less likely to purchase a gun and, if purchased, less likely to take it out of the safe. It’s the same argument used by some people against sex education. That argument goes, “It good that young people are afraid they will have unplanned pregnancy and/or catch a life threatening disease. This will help prevent them from having sex, period.”

While there are some applications where “smart guns” won’t be serious impediment to their use, the number one reason people, and the only reason law enforcement purchase guns, is for self-protection. There hasn’t been a “smart gun” design concept yet that doesn’t make the gun far less desirable than a standard gun. Building a product that is less desirable and more expensive than established competitors is not a winning strategy.

I have to conclude Fascitelli is delusional and/or has an evil plan of some sort. Being on the Board of Washington Ceasefire causes me to be inclined toward both.—Joe]

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12 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Joe Nocera

  1. Take a simple tool and load it down with an electrical power supply, electronics, actuators and sensor systems– Increase the cost and complexity while reducing the reliability and efficiency, then make it legally mandatory. No one would attempt to do any of that if they didn’t hate the Bill of Rights.

    Make any kind of piece of shit you want, and with your own resources, so long as we all have a guaranteed free market (a total ban on coercion and thus also total non-interference from government except as to enforce the total ban on coercion).

    Of course, a free market and the Bill of Rights are the main things the authoritarian mind opposes. Liberty, responsibility and rights protection shuts authoritarians and their schemes out of society altogether.

  2. Even if all technical challenges were addressed with 100% success (yeah, right), every smart gun inherently fails to address the issue of a non-authorized good guy. Firearms cannot detect evil or good.

    • Hell, human beings can’t detect good and evil in another person. Anti-liberty anti-gun people try to work around this by disarming the small, the weak, the very young, the aged, and the female, to the benefit of the young, the strong, the large, and the true believers with a stick or a rock, or even a sock with sand in it, and the element of surprise or numbers.

      • True, but what I am driving at is if I need to pick up a cop’s gun while he is being beaten to death to shoot his attacker, I will need to have his firearm to function.

        The “solutions” you noted of the Left are their typically insanity.

        As noted, the police are not interested, so it is clearly a loser.

  3. A notable red flag is that they can’t seem to sell cops on these weapons. You would THINK police would be happy to invest in weapons that can’t be turned against their users — and thus, the dog that doesn’t bark tells us it’s all horseshit 🙂

    Sigh. I remember back when ‘smartgun’ technology was something in Shadowrun that improved aiming (it projected a targeting reticle or crosshair on your field of vision). Can’t we do that instead?

    • The key here is the police are not interested. The police want retention holsters. You’d think they’d want something that would reduce the risk to the cop if the gun is wrested out of his hand, which event resulted in my Uncle retiring from the PD and walking around with a bullet fragment inoperatively close to his spine, but they’re not.
      It’s only marketed to civilians, who might have a once-in-a lifetime chance of such a situation.
      If there’s an electronic component, there’s an electronic work around, which can be misused. Remember when Kirk hacks into the Starship hijacked by Khan in “The Wrath of Khan”? Imagine every gun with this interlock, and a signal in the city from every cell tower. Subsequent door to door removal of firearms for protective storage/custody would be virtually 100% safe.

      • “virtually 100% safe.”

        *giggles*

        Oh, I agree, that’s probably what they dream of. But somehow I don’t think it’d work out the way they’d expect.

        Remember, a pack of university students demonstrated how to hack a DHS drone not that long ago. Imagine the dark situational comedy of such ‘gun deactivation’ signals being spoofed and blocked — or worse, redirected.

  4. You have to appreciate the symbolism of his last name. On the board of Washington Ceasefire, and pushing a Trojan horse as a safety device for ordinary citizens.

  5. I usually prefer to look at the object rather than at the motivations of the person creating the object. But in this case I make an exception. By considering who it is that’s pushing these devices, what their politics are, it becomes immediately obvious that their motives are dishonest and their product should be avoided at all cost, forever, no matter what excuses they concoct.

  6. “legendary gun designer Ernst Mauch”?

    Who the hell is Ernst Mauch?

    Oh, he apparently worked for HK for 30 years. That explains everything. He’s designing a smart gun because we suck, and he hates us.

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