White House Seeks To Jumpstart Smart Gun Technology

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Washington is putting serious effort into pushing smart gun technology forward. The White House has just released a joint report by the Defence, Justice, and Homeland Security departments how to encourage rapid development of smart gun technology that can restrict who can operate a weapon.

Smart gun technology frequently relies on RFID chips or biometric ID systems (grip recognition, fingerprint scanners) to release the locking mechanism and allow the weapon to fire. Its origins come from attempts to safeguard police officers’ weapons against use by criminals who managed to snatch them during an altercation, but development has been slow over the last two decades.

In January President Obama instigated a new push of development in order to prevent accidental deaths and injuries that have consistently grown in numbers in recent years. Obama directed law enforcement and defence agencies to “review the availability of smart-gun technology on a regular basis, and to explore potential ways to further its use and development to more broadly improve gun safety.”

This new study, Report to the President Outlining a Strategy to Expedite Deployment of Gun Safety Technology, comes as part of this initiative, and concludes that smart gun technology “holds great promise.”

“By incorporating electronic systems into a firearm’s design, manufacturers can give gun owners greater control over how a weapon is used, both by limiting who can fire the gun (‘user-authorization technology’) and by making a gun easier to retrieve if it is lost or stolen (‘electronic recovery technology’),” the report states.

Both the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have began defining parameters and standards for the technology that manufacturers would have to meet in the future for government buying schemes. This review process should be completed by October.

The same review process will identify branches and agencies that will participate in a pilot-programme testing out the new crop of smart gun technologies.

“Together, these actions have the potential to jump-start the development of proven gun safety technologies that can save lives and preserve the effectiveness of our firearms,” said senior adviser to the president, Valerie Jarrett.