Smart Guns

Just suppose that smart guns were safer than ordinary guns.

For example, if someone grabbed your gun and tried to point it at you. If it was a smart gun you'd be perfectly safe because there is a fool-proof mechanism that prevents its use by an unauthorized person.

As with any technological advance, some people are sceptical. How much do you trust new technology? Suppose the gun doesn't work when you need it. Maybe an electromagnetic pulse (triggered by terrorists or natural solar activity) might take out all weapons in the area. Or maybe the bad guys (or the FBI) can hack into this mechanism and disable your gun before they attack you.

Meanwhile, like many technological advances, there are political implications. In the USA, the key question is whether such a mechanism might help reduce gun violence. Some gun control activists think such a mechanism would be pretty irrelevant.

But that doesn't stop the gun rights activists freaking out at the prospect of any damn technology on their precious weaponry. A shop owner in the US claims to have received death threats from pro-gun lobbyists for offering to sell the weapons. Meanwhile, as Joseph Steinberg suggests, an obsession with smart guns may inhibit other technological innovations that could make guns and gun-owning safer.

The belief here is that once these smart guns are available, by a process of technological determinism, they will become irresistible to legislators. Before long, they fear, you won't be able to buy regular guns.

Obviously that's a cause worth killing for.

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David Kopel, Brady Center lawsuit to use “smart” gun mandate to trigger handgun ban in New Jersey (Washington Post 22 May 2014)

Karen McVeigh, Gun control groups accuse New Jersey of ignoring 'smart gun' law (Guardian 21 May 2014)

Michael S. Rosenwald, Maryland dealer, under pressure from gun-rights activists, drops plan to sell smart gun (Washington Post, 1 May 2014)

Joseph Steinberg, Why You Should Be Concerned About The New 'Smart Guns' (Whether You Love Or Hate Guns) (Forbes 4 May 2014)

Nicholas Tufnell, Smart guns: How smart are they? (BBC News, 23 May 2014)

Eugene Volokh, Smart guns, electromagnetic pulse, and planning for unknown-probability dangers (Washington Post 23 May 2014)


See also Batman/Catwoman: Trail of the Gun (hat tip @ChBrain).

Related post Technological Determism (December 2020)

Nuclear Disarmament

Why does Britain need to invest in a new generation of nuclear weapons? There is no conceivable circumstance in which these weapons will ever be used, even in self-defence.

The old argument was that the possessors of nuclear weaponry would use their power wisely to deter other nations from developing such weapons. This has clearly failed. There is no credible threat of ever using nuclear weapons against Iran or North Korea, let alone any non-state terrorist organization; the fact of proliferation is therefore completely uninfluenced by the fact that the Western powers have some expensive and untested nuclear warheads corroding in a bunker somewhere.

The supporters of multi-lateral disarmament say that it would be an excellent thing if everyone were to abandon nuclear weapons at the same time. But they don't believe that Britain's taking a unilateral move away from the possession of nuclear weapons will persuade any other country to disarm. Therefore we must continue to develop ever more advanced nuclear weapons. I heard the Foreign Secretary David Miliband putting this argument on the BBC News this evening.

Unilateral disarmament is traditionally associated with liberal philosophers and left-wing Christians - from Bertrand Russell to Bruce Kent. However, an increasing number of military top brass are openly questioning the acquisition of nuclear weapons that can never be used. [Generals in 'scrap Trident' call BBC News 16 January 2009. General calls for Trident rethink, BBC News 29 January 2009]

In the past, some supporters of unilateral disarmament have put forward the view that we don't have to wait for others to disarm, we can set a moral example. Once we lay down our arms, other countries will be shamed into doing the same.

Supporters of multilateral disarmament believe this is unlikely, and perhaps they are right. But they go on to draw a fallacious conclusion - that because our abandoning the bomb would have no effect on other countries, therefore there is no purpose in our abandoning the bomb, therefore we should keep it.

In other words, they are still hoping to use the bomb - not as a way of killing millions of innocent citizens but as a bargaining chip in some game of international politics. Keeping the bomb allows us a seat at a diplomatic table at which no meaningful agreement is ever going to be reached. What a wonderful way of spending $20bn of taxpayers' money.

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See also

Jeremy Bernstein, Is Nuclear Deterrence Obsolete? (NYR Blogs, April 2010)

Nuclear Weapons 2

It appears that Iran may not have nuclear weapons after all. According to some commentators, this is bad news for the Bush administration, and for the America it represents.

• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that a US report on Tehran's nuclear programme is a "great victory". [BBC News, December 5th, 2007]
  
• "a massive body blow for the United States" [Ulterior Motive, December 5th, 2007]
• "this is a bombshell" [Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly, December 3rd, 2007]
  

So Iran's not having the bomb is a "bombshell" is it? This illustrates the strange rhetoric of nuclear weaponry I commented on before. A bomb that doesn't work, or a bomb that doesn't even exist, can still produce interesting and powerful effects.

Previous post: Nuclear Weapons

Nuclear Weapons

What is the purpose of the atomic bomb (or any other weapon)? Can a weapon be regarded as successful if it is never used? Some people might think that a weapon can ONLY be regarded as successful if it is never used.

Umberto Eco argued that the bomb was an act of communication.

“Until the middle of the century the force, the power, still resided in guns and in weapons. After the middle of the century the real power is in information. Even the atomic bomb is used today not as a weapon but as a message. The fact, the happy fact, that it is not used means that it is not the bomb in itself which works: it is the continuous exchange of messages between powers.” [Umberto Eco, interviewed by Christopher Frayling, The Listener, 11th Oct 1984]

More recently, in a post entitled Weapons and Weapons Technology as Rhetorical Devices, Michael Goldhaber identifies Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative as one of the most powerful weapons of modern times. It never really worked properly (in the engineering sense), but it brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Goldhaber also quotes Anton Chekhov:

“If a gun is on the table in the first act, it will go off by the third act.”

Chekhov understood that a weapon possessed a tragic aura of inevitability, its destiny. A weapon is also an attractor - it draws (however reluctant) our attention. It is this combination of forced attraction and apparent inevitability that makes it all the more likely that any weapon will be used sooner or later. If it works.


Technorati tags: POSIWID rhetoric weapons

WiFi Minefield

Bruce Schneier blogs about Wi-Fi Minefield (April 2005).

"Put aside arguments about the ethics and efficacy of landmines. Assume they exist and are being used. Given that, the question is whether radio-controlled landmines are better or worse than regular landmines."

Is an intelligent landmine better than a dumb one? At one level perhaps it is, because it might be more discriminating about whose legs it blows off.

But then military planners may judge that this technology makes it okay to have a greater number of more powerful landmines (on both ethical and efficacy grounds). Furthermore, it makes it harder for the good guys to clear landmines. So now the landmine situation has escalated.

As an anonymous comment to Bruce's post puts it:

"I don't think arguments about the ethics and efficacy of landmines *can* be put aside here, because surely the "smartness" of these mines will be used to justify laying more of them."

The problem here isn't the intelligent technology itself, it's the stupid (man-made) judgements that the intelligent technology supports.

A levelling law seems to operate in many systems, by which a local increase in intelligence is compensated by a loss of intelligence elsewhere. So what's the purpose of intelligence here?