Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
The setting was a behind-closed-doors meeting at the National Institute of Justice, the research, development, and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. The place was Washington, D.C. The time was April 2013. It was months after the Sandy Hook massacre, and Attorney General Eric Holder was quietly meeting with some gun manufacturers.
"I then had the biggest development in smart-gun technology coming together at my facility in Utah — the Intelligun" says W. P. Gentry, president of Kodiak Arms. The Intelligun uses scanners on a pistol's grips. If a person's biometrics — essentially, the patterns of his fingerprints — have been added to the gun's software, the pistol will activate within one second of being touched.
"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."
That ended the meeting, but not the fight for freedom. Anti-gun groups are now spreading the narrative that gun-rights advocates are preventing the development of these guns. The Washington Post's Michael S. Rosenwald wrote that American gun owners see the German gun designer Ernst Mauch — formally with Heckler and Koch — as a "traitor" for joining a German company called Armatix and developing a .22-caliber smart gun called the iP1. Rosenwald also wrote: "The National Rifle Association and other gun groups fiercely oppose smart guns."
The truth is the NRA hasn't presented an official position on smart guns in general, and that's not unusual. The NRA typically lets the market determine the viability of gun technology. The group has, however, officially opposed "requiring guns to be made with electronic equipment that would allow the guns to be deactivated remotely, or with other features that gun owners do not want." Similarly, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, is opposed only to making such technology mandatory. The NSSF's president, Larry Keane, recognizes that "most firearms manufacturers have been reluctant to invest RandD dollars in smart-gun technology because gun-control advocates want to make the technology mandatory. If that happens, new guns will become prohibitively expensive, which is part of what these groups want."
The idea that the federal or a state government could make this technology mandatory is what has a lot of gun owners — however unfairly — voicing opposition to companies like Armatix and the stores that sell smart guns. They're concerned for good reason. A 2002 New Jersey law states that when there is a proven smart-gun on the U.S. market — the New Jersey attorney general must decide when this is the case — then within three years, all new handguns sold in New Jersey must incorporate this (likely patented) technology. Meanwhile, many anti-gun groups are publicly salivating over what such restrictions could do to the gun market.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/385109/smart-gun-maker-who-told-holder-frank-miniter