Someone reportedly threatened to burn down his gun store and to hurt his dog, too.
One of the angry callers who flooded his phone lines told him, “You’re gonna get what’s coming to you.”
Raymond took that as a death threat.
Shaken by the backlash, he decided not to sell the gun after all. He wrote in a Facebook message: “You call me and email me and threaten my life? You come at me, my girlfriend, or my ... DOG I will put one in your dome. I promise you.”
The first appearance of these new-tech firearms last year in the United States fired a loud shot across the bow in the controversial debate about gun violence, an issue bound to come up during the presidential campaign.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which just wrapped up its annual conference this week in Washington, D.C., has long pushed the gun industry to make its products safer and has been frustrated that “smart” or “childproof” guns are not on the market.
Last weekend, smart-gun proponents protested, and some were arrested, outside the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago. The gathering of more than 14,000 law enforcement officials, the largest of its kind each year, spent several days learning new policing techniques and seeing new equipment presented by gunmakers exhibiting at the event.
NBC Chicago reported that about 80 police chiefs at the conference indicated they were interested in testing smart gun technology.
By its design a smart gun — also known as a personalized, or authorized-user-recognition weapon or childproof gun — can only be fired by its owner or rightful user, be it a police officer or citizen Joe.
Proponents believe these guns can help curb violence caused by stolen guns, for one thing, and avert tragedies like the one Tuesday night in which a 2-year-old boy in Georgia died after he accidentally shot himself with a handgun his father left on a bed.
The technology has been in development for decades, but many gun buyers remain skeptical of how well it works.
Another major cause of angst lies in a gun safety law New Jersey passed 13 years ago. The law mandates that all firearms sold in the state be smart guns if just one such gun is sold anywhere in the United States.
Gun-rights advocates who have historically bristled at government regulations see that law as a slippery-slope threat to their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
New Jersey legislators, including the bill’s sponsor who has since changed her mind about it, are trying to modify the law with some action expected next week.
How do they work?
Technology to make firearms safer has been in development for decades. Even big-name gunmaker Smith & Wesson has researched safe guns.
One of the first so-called smart guns, the Magna-Trigger, came on the scene in the mid-1970s. It could only be used if the owner wore a magnetic ring on the firing hand.
Twenty years later the technology had become more sophisticated, according to EndGadget.
The most highly publicized smart gun over the last year, the .22-caliber Armatix iP1 pistol, has been tested and certified for sale in the United States, but you still can’t walk into a store in America and buy a smart gun.
The Armatix gun will only shoot if the user is wearing a special PIN-code-activated watch that unblocks the firing pin via a wireless signal.
Armatix introduced the gun in the United States last year, partnering with the Oak Tree Gun Club in California to market and sell it. But after angry protests similar to the ones later aimed at Raymond in Maryland, the store owners backed down.
A company called Kodiak Industries has also developed the Intelligun, a fingerprint locking system designed to fit the 1911, one of the most popular handguns sold by gun shops.
Another more futuristic prototype, the Dynamic Grip Recognition developed at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, uses dozens of tiny sensors in the grip that identify the pressure pattern unique to the owner. The research team is looking for investors and partners.
“I know, had it been readily available for me back in the day, I would’ve been using it,” William Marshall, a former police officer and brigadier general in the National Guard and now an NJIT assistant vice president, told NPR.
Silicon Valley titan Ron Conway has also jumped into smart gun development, last year funding a $1 million prize for inventors. “We need the iPhone of guns,” Conway, an early investor in Google and Facebook, has said.
A Florida company founded by two police officers who developed a trigger operated by fingerprints or access code is one of 15 projects that have received Conway funding so far. Some developers asked that their names not be made public because of the controversy surrounding smart guns.
Proponents have armed themselves with statistics to show that thousands of lives could be saved by smart guns. For instance, nearly 20,000 suicides every year are carried out with guns that belong to other people, often a parent or grandparent.
But some, including law enforcement officials, remain uncertain of the technology. Can the bad guys figure out a way to hack the guns and work around the safety features?
How accurate and reliable is the technology? That’s a huge concern for police officers on the street whose lives depend on their guns working every time.
Some smart guns rely on battery-powered safety systems. What if the batteries fail?
Can fingerprint sensors work if your hands are damp with, say, sweat if you’re in a panic?
“If there’s something that’s taking this fingerprint and changing it from what this scanner reads, this scanner won’t work,” St. Louis gun shop owner and former police officer Steve King told KSDK earlier this year.
“If you cut yourself, you have a scar there, or you hit yourself with a hammer, these are all these things happening to our body the touchpad doesn’t understand.”
Intelligun inventor Bill Gentry of Kodiak Industries said his system allows for a 20 percent discrepancy from the original scan to accommodate something like a scar.
Gentry said that twins “can have very similar fingerprints but the 20 percent is not enough for one twin to authorize another’s firearm. If we drop below 60 percent recognition then there is a statistical chance that other people in the population could match your print.”
Smart gun makers are convinced that consumer concerns will abate once the guns hit the market and “respected professionals” including law enforcement and military begin to use the firearms.
The National Rifle Association does not appear to have taken an official position on smart guns, though it has declined to comment to news organizations when approached about the subject.
On the other hand, the group has been clear that it opposes any mandate “requiring guns to be made with electronic equipment that would allow the guns to be deactivated remotely, or with other features that gun owners do not want.”
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for firearms manufacturers, and many gun-rights advocates and groups have long opposed mandates such as the New Jersey law. But the group’s leaders have said the foundation is not opposed to the technology itself.
In 2013 the foundation polled more than 1,200 people, 81 percent of whom said they wouldn’t buy a smart gun.
The NRA cites that poll in its critique of the new guns, saying it “recognizes that the ‘smart guns’ issue clearly has the potential to mesh with the anti-gunner’s agenda, opening the door to a ban on all guns that do not possess the government-required technology.”
Many people equate smart guns with gun control. Dealers across the country have been reluctant to sell them for fear of triggering the New Jersey mandate, legislation passed in 2002.
Thirteen years ago, legislators wanting to encourage research and development of smart gun technology mandated that gun dealers convert their stock of traditional firearms as soon as one of the high-tech guns was sold anywhere in the United States.
“The law has become a landmine for manufacturers and retailers. Rather than incentivize all the parties to get on board, it gives everyone involved an excuse to avoid the technology and provides an easy rallying point for gun rights advocates opposed to it,” wrote EndGadget.
The law’s principal sponsor, New Jersey state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, hoped the law would encourage people to start making smart guns. But given the harsh backlash to the two stores that tried to sell the first smart guns last year, she has conceded that the law has actually hurt the technology’s development.
“That’s the exact opposite of what we really intended to do,” Weinberg told NPR. “If I’m willing to say, well, maybe we made a mistake here, we need to remove this, then I would expect that those who think we made a mistake will join in to say, hey, you’re right, and now let’s see the marketplace move ahead.”
Weinberg told “60 Minutes” in an episode airing on Sunday that she will ask the New Jersey legislature as early as next week to repeal the law and replace it with one mandating at least one smart gun be offered for sale wherever weapons are sold in her state.
That would be welcome news for Ralph Fascitelli, president of Washington CeaseFire, a Seattle group working to reduce gun violence.
“No private investor is going to touch something as politically toxic as this,” Fascitelli told the Daily Beast. “If you take away that cloud, it’s a great new business opportunity.”
©2015 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
