Quote of the Day
Aside from such obvious risks and liabilities, the in-development Wi-Fi system raises all kinds of privacy and legal exposure concerns. Because the absence of metal detectors or visible cameras notwithstanding, this is hardly, as the report characterizes it, a “nonintrusive alternative.” It’s highly intrusive and overrides the entire purpose of concealed carry.
David Codrea
October 20, 2026
Wi-Fi Gun Detection Threatens Concealed Carry Privacy
Via post on X by Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras.
I don’t like this. The assumption of the tech is that people carrying a concealed gun are probably criminals. But there are lot more people carrying concealed who have no intent to commit a crime and probably will not commit a serious crime for the remainder of their lives.
I don’t like their attitude, but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily think the tech will be a serious problem.
I think we are reaching to point where concealed carry is so common and accepted* that outing concealed carry holders is about like outing gays on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Concealed carry is legal** in all states. More people have concealed carry permits than there are people in gay marriages. By the time this tech can be commercialized and deployed, the response to outing someone carrying a gun is going to be, “And your point is?”
* Look at all the positive news coverage of the father who shot the school shooter in Bend.
** Yes, there are a lot of restrictions in many places, but these are decreasing. Once the game has been fully played out the courts are ruling in our favor more than against us.
The restrictions are not decreasing. What you have is decreasing restrictions in about half the state and increasing restrictions in the other half. More than half the population lives in the bad places. In carry restrictions as in so many other areas, the country is splitting.
The AWB win next year will blow a lot of the gun restrictions away. The gun owner rights organizations will (and are) then concentrate on carry restrictions and NFA issues to cement those down with 2nd Amendment rulings in the courts.
Until the Democrats pack the court. Or Roberts and his mini-me betray us. I hope that Thomas and Alito can count votes. Put not your trust in black robe tyrants.
You know as well as I do that the game is fixed for the gun control side. While we’re doing boring court shit, they are having orgies and making continued participation in the orgies dependent on supporting confiscation.
And today we have constitution carry in 29 states, no NFA tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles or short-barreled shotguns. Those orgies must not be as effective as you think they are.
Oh! Also, orgies are readily available at your local sex clubs (in all larger cities) without adherence to any political agenda.
Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have been participating in an “orgy” of beer and tequila consumption. My hatred got the better of me.
I’m wondering if the article is fiction. It certainly sounds like it. WiFi routers detecting guns? That doesn’t make any sense. You’re dealing with radio signals that have wavelengths comparable to the size of a handgun so the diffraction limit says they can’t see more than a blob, and in any case routers are not radar systems, they don’t analyze reflections.
I think they’ll use this as they do bullet forensics, polygraphs, PCR tests, or formerly phrenology.
It’ll have a 5% success rate, “experts” will say it’s 95%, and courts will call it “probable cause”.
I don’t think we’re as far along this path to: “…the response to outing someone carrying a gun is going to be, “And your point is?”” as we’d like.
If you go to a conservative neighborhood in Seattle and shout “Outlaw gay marriage in Washington!”, you’ll be ignored at best, and possibly asked to leave or be quiet. If you go to a liberal neighborhood in Seattle and shout “Outlaw guns in Washington!”, you’ll be cheered on, celebrated, and quite possibly given your own stripe on on the 456th iteration of the pride flag.
The day that shouting down gun ownership in Seattle gets a cold reception is the day nobody will care if you’re carrying.
“the response to outing someone carrying a gun is going to be, “And your point is?””
From the general population? More and more places, yes.
But from the crazies? No. Now you are a target.
Need a Faraday holster of some kind. Or a wifi blocking device that can be carried. Someone will come up with something.
Maybe a jammer. It wouldn’t take much power.
Or, produce a small, simple and cheap “gun simulator” that reliably mimics the presence of a gun and hand them out like candy at Halloween. If everyone has a gun, then no one has a gun.
The copper filament woven clothing used to defeat tasers will likely work.
Did some quick AI research, and it turns out that iron-loaded silicone is an effective radio frequency absorbing material in the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands that Wifi uses, and it’s available in sheets.
So, if you’ve ever bought a Kydex IWB holster with a neoprene wrap to make it more comfortable, soon get yours with RAM-Neoprene combination. This Wifi imaging only works if the radio signal the imaging system uses makes it back to a receiver. It can’t see a black hole in that frequency band.
Great idea, but a black hole may be just as visible on a body as a strong reflection. I think you need something that mimics the absorption of human skin.
This tech will be met with counter tech to thwart it…and the contest will continue…and as always it’s not the technology that is the problem. It is the motivation and usage of it by evil people in power that poses the threat.
“This tech will be met with counter tech to thwart it…”
But only by actual criminals and a VERY small percentage of the law abiding (the “gun rights crazies”).
Like most of this stuff, catching criminals is not remotely the point. The point is to make exercise of the right onerous. That’s the WHOLE point.
The party that brought you the poll tax, the KKK, and Jim Crow more generally has plenty of experience trying to keep those they view as inferior from having rights, after all.
Does it indicate based on a reflective surface or a mass of metal? Either way, several ways to flood such a system with false positives come to mind,
It would take a team working together to research, with several testers and several people documenting results.
Also interesting would be how motivated the staff are to confront someone the system flags.