You all know I think guns suck. I know I can’t make them go away but I hate them. And any gun rights trolls reading this, don’t tell me I’d be grateful for a good guy with a gun if I ever come across a bad guy with a gun. The only armed good guy I want to meet is a cop or a soldier, ok? Thanks.
Anyway, the more I read about gun violence in America, the more horrified I am about all the accidental shootings, particularly the ones that involve kids. Stopping crime, stopping mass shootings, stopping the basic urge of man to harm man is a giant problem and one that requires a multi-faceted approach. But stopping incidents where a child gains access to a family member’s gun and discharges it, killing another child? We should be able to stop that. As I’m saying about it at Babble today:
That there are children who can gain access to unsecured weapons and kill or injure themselves or other children is unacceptable. Not only should adults know better than to leave guns loaded and accessible to kids, you would think that in an era where your phone can activate your home security system while you’re 30,000 above the planet on a plane, we should have guns that don’t accidentally fire.
As it turns out, that technology is emerging. According to the Huffington Post:
The new Yardarm Technologies LLC system would trigger an alarm on an owner’s cellphone if a gun is moved, and the owner could then hit a button to activate the safety and disable the weapon. New guns would come with a microchip on the body and antennas winding around the grip. It would add about $50 to the cost of a gun, and about $12 a year for the service.
I don’t know a lot about guns but it seems to me that the additional cost for that is worth it if it means that the owner can lock down a gun with a swipe of a touch screen. If a kid were to show a friend a gun, a parent could know and prevent tragedy no matter where they were. It also lets a gun owner shut down a stolen weapon so that it can’t be used in a crime.
Of course, the NRA is spewing some derp about the cost od smart guns amounting to a “luxury tax” on self defense but honestly? I don’t give a shit about them anymore. We’ve let them do it their way for a few decades and the result is daily gun deaths. So they can take their itchy-trigger-finger concern trolling and stick it up the muzzle of a trigger-lcoked gun, thank you very much. Anyway, read the whole piece over on Babble!
Photo credit: phtoo stock
