We all know the big ones - Columbine, Virginia Tech, and the Dark Knight Massacre, but every year especially in the U.S. it seems people fly off the handle and aren't content to just off themselves. With each one, comes a flurry of discussion about gun control followed by the NRA backlash and finally the inevitable acceptance of action impotence. However, with four major shootings in just the last month, I think it's worth a bit more of a palaver.
Imagine for a moment a world in which you could halt mass shootings without impinging on anyone's right to bear arms. Imagine that you could program a gun to not fire under any circumstances you desire. Could we as a society agree upon anything if this were possible? There has already been talk of "smart guns" that only fire for their rightful owner. This would certainly reduce accidental shootings and thus gun owner liability, but this certainly does not solve the mass shooter scenario to say nothing of creating a potential false sense of security, resulting in storage carelessness.
Now imagine a gun that doesn't fire on innocent people. Is this possible? How would innocent be defined? In order for it to be engineered it has to be defined. I can't completely answer that, but how about we start with one first small step - No gun shall ever fire on a child. So what's a child? Let's say 12 and under. What if the child is threatening you or someone with a gun? Okay, any child with a loaded gun does not qualify. But I'm not even completely comfortable with this. I can't imagine a child of 3 or under knowingly threatening and endangering another in such a way that required deadly force. So how about this rule: No gun shall ever fire on a child of 12 years or younger, unless that child possesses a loaded gun, unless that child is 3 or under.
So how do we implement this? Imagine guns with facial recognition capabilities as well as the ability to broadcast their loaded status while in motion. With facial recognition, the gun software could quickly create a facial features fingerprint, go to a database to find a match and then return an age all in the blink of an eye. Since some guns are stored loaded, it's not practical to require a power source to advertise its loaded status. However, once the gun is in motion (micro gyroscopes), the kinetic energy of that motion could effectively ping its effective capacity status to some reasonable distance (100 feet?). There are problems with this, but it is a glimpse of the possible, and as technology improves more solutions are found. For example, how is it that humans can recognize a child without knowing their exact age? Once machines can recognize patterns as efficiently as people, there may not be a need for cached databases and online connectivity. There may also be a way to expand the definition of innocent to that beyond children. All this can be done without infringing on people's rights to own a gun. After all, the constitution says nothing of the capabilities of arms, and if fully automatic weapons can be restricted, so can dumb firearms.
Until this technology becomes a reality we have to live with wackos and guns. So in the meantime, let's send a message to these crazies. If you're having any inclinations to take out innocent people in some twisted fantasy that gets you off every time your thoughts turn dark, do the world a favor and suck on the business end of your favorite glock right now. Yes, right now.
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