-By Warner Todd Huston
As he looks to the exit as the last year of his last term winds down, Barack Obama is about to take one more stab at curtailing the Second Amendment with yet another push to force so-called “smart gun” technology on the firearms industry and it’s a plan even police officers stand against.
Obama has failed to limit the Second Amendment like he had hoped to do when he came into office, but that isn’t for lack of trying and as his last term comes to an end he is once again trying to force the nation’s law enforcement community to set aside their proven, usable firearms and instead begin using problematic “smart gun” technology.
With his latest anti-gun policy, the President is urging federal and local policing agencies to purchase so-called “smart guns” quite despite that there is no current technology reliable enough for law enforcement use. And police say they don’t want to be Obama’s guinea pigs.
According to Politico, already sick and tired of how badly the Obama administration has treated them with years of backbiting since the Ferguson, Missouri riots, the nation’s law enforcement community (both federal and local) are not much interested in helping Obama prove the so far unworkable smart gun technology as a viable option.
“Police officers in general, federal officers in particular, shouldn’t be asked to be the guinea pigs in evaluating a firearm that nobody’s even seen yet,” James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, told Politico. “We have some very, very serious questions.”
Pasco went on to criticize how upper echelon law enforcement officials and the Obama administration arrive at their policing ideas saying, “They sit down among themselves and decide what is best for law enforcement, but from a political standpoint, and then tell officers they’re doing it for their benefit.”
Louis Dekmar, the police chief of LaGrange, Georgia, agreed the whole policy is dicey. “The more complicated you make the weapon, the more likely you are to have a failure,” the chief said.
But proponents of the unproven and still nascent technology say the smart gun industry will never grow unless the huge purchasing power of the federal government’s law enforcement sector is brought to bear. So, Obama hopes to help smart gun tech along by insisting that federal gun purchases include the ineffective technology.
Thus far there are serious drawbacks to all the various attempts at smart gun tech, not the least of which is the problem with a power source. Supporters of smart gun tech point to the ease with which we power cell phones and insist that a smart gun could be easily powered the same way. But guns are not something the average person uses on a daily basis. Guns are usually set aside until the moment of emergency when they are needed and in the case of dead batteries it would be too late for emergency use if a gun was laying around in a safe or even a holster for days or weeks and ended up with a dead battery just when it was needed most.
A recent article at Tech Crunch neatly lays out the problems of so-called smart gun technology and concludes that the concept is not only a “fantasy” but would “actually make us all less safe” because the technology is fragile and if using software even open to being hacked.
Obama has not yet decided to mandate that all federal agencies must buy smart guns for use in the field. Thus far his orders are only that federal agencies give the technology a try. But detractors say even giving the tech a try is a fantasy and a waste of taxpayer dollars and, in the long run, will only put federal law enforcement officers using this technology at risk every time they leave the office.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Follow Warner Todd Huston on:
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Federalist Papers, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
NOTE: If you want to comment, for some reason our Facebook comments section takes a bit of time to load. It’ll pop up soon. Thanks