Safety and Common Sense is Making Them Crazy

Since so many killings – serial and otherwise – are perpetrated with stolen or “borrowed” weapons, with way too many weapons thus winding up in the hands of convicted felons and those with unstable mental capacity, wouldn’t it be terrific if a weapon could only be fired by an authorized person, one who may actually have been subjected to a background check? Seems like a pretty terrific idea, if only there could be a well-priced technology that could implement this little safety scheme. No more children playing with daddy’s or mommy’s gun accidentally killing a playmate or sibling. No more burglars selling their purloined guns into the local gangland. A huge limitation on gun-coyotes buying weapons here on behalf of cartels south of the border.

Enter a famous gun designer with a dream to make owning guns safer. “In nearly 30 years at Heckler & Koch, a legendary German gunmaker, Ernst Mauch designed some of the world’s most lethal weapons, including the one that reportedly killed Osama bin Laden. A state regulator once called him a ‘rock star’ in the industry… [But he has been haunted by visions of the misuse of weapons he designed]  ‘It hurts my heart,’ the 58-year-old gun designer said. ‘It’s life. It’s the lives of people who never thought they’d get killed by a gun. You have a nice family at home, and then you get killed. It’s crazy.’” Washington Post, August 6^th.

So Mauch followed his dream, and implemented his mandate. It’s a tad awkward, lacking the elegance of a pure biometric recognition system, but it works. He designed a safety system for a small weapons start-up (Armatix) near Munich. Called the iP1, it requires the shooter to wear a “watch” that engages and releases the gun wirelessly. Theoretically, if one were to sell the weapon to a third party, one would also transfer the watch, and while that might not stop transferring weapons to those without background checks, it certainly makes the gun less attractive to gangsters and gun traffickers and adds a layer of safety in the home.

Mauch was also probably thinking about all those gun buyers in the United States who might actually want a weapon only they and those they authorize can use. Perhaps he was even running sales estimates that made him smile. Doing what he loved without the haunting vision.

Well, as one gun expert observed under the generally misinterpreted understanding of our Constitution, “Germany doesn’t have a Second Amendment.” The NRA and irate gun owners began to fume at the very concept of a permission-based gun, loaded with safety as well as bullets. OK, they’ve actually been fuming at the concept for quite a while.

Mauch’s U.S. marketing result? “It has not been the hit he imagined for the multibillion-dollar U.S. market. Second Amendment advocates, fearing the technology will be mandated, launched angry protests this year against stores in Maryland and California that tried to sell it. The industry that once revered him now looks at him with suspicion.

“‘I love Ernst, and his contributions to firearms are incredible,’ said Jim Schatz, a gun industry consultant who worked for Mauch at Heckler & Koch. ‘But he doesn’t understand that the anti-gunners will use this to infringe on a constitutional right…”

“In Mauch’s office, hanging on a wall by his desk, there is an article from a German newspaper with a headline that translates to ‘Fire among friends.’ The story is about Andy Raymond, the owner of Engage Armament, a Rockville, Md., gun store, who faced death threats from gun rights activists after announcing plans to carry the iP1.

“The National Rifle Association and other gun groups fiercely oppose smart guns, in part because of a New Jersey law mandating that all firearms sold in the state be smart guns within three years of such weapons being sold in the United States. Mauch said that he does not support the law, that the market should decide, but he’s puzzled that gun advocates are opposed to more guns, especially safer ones… ‘I would ask them to give us a chance to tell them about the potential for a modern gun,’ Mauch said. ‘I don’t know why they are scared of this.’

“He is not anti-gun, he wants them to know. Told that there were more than 300 million guns in the United States, Mauch smiled and said, ‘I like that.’” The Post. Let me explain this to you Ernst; American gun owners on the far right in this country have taken an organization (the NRA) that once focused on training people to use guns safely into a lean (but very well-funded), mean marketing machine for the entire gun industry. Once there were almost an average of one gun per person in the United States, there needed to be a mechanism to turn those households into multiple gun-owning venues. The gun industry needed them to BUY MORE GUNS!

Anything that threatens to limit or control the flow of guns is thus bad. The NRA has been so effective in spreading its rather wild misinterpretation of the Second Amendment that millions of Americans believe its misplaced credo with religious and self-righteous fervor once reserved for extremists and crazies. The NRA’s mission to allow the free flow of guns has turned into a religious war, where owning guns is more sacred to many gun owners than protecting their own children. They actually believe, despite thousands and thousands of lethal events to the contrary, that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” How that bad guy got the gun is irrelevant.

The rest of the world looks at this pervasive attitude of too many U.S. gun advocates, making sure they avoid the United States in their travel plans, and dismisses us as cowboy crazies. And when they think about American foreign policy and that we have by far the largest military on earth, they wince… and think twice about aligning themselves with our vision of… almost anything. Among our seeming attitude toward guns, NSA spying, secret CIA prisons, a willingness to use torture and our propensity to deploy troops and military at the drop of a hat – even as we back away from some of those practices – we don’t actually look a whole lot better than Mr. Putin in the eyes of many. But you and I both know, Americans aren’t really all like that. We’re actually a pretty kind and generous people. But it is time we brought our gun laws in line with who most of us really are.

 I’m Peter Dekom, and in a world where we want to take the moral high ground, we really need to act like people who really hold higher moral values.