60 Minutes… of Gun Propaganda

Written for and originally posted at Single Dude Travel

CBS, in their 60 Minutes program, recently released another piece of propaganda, a follow-on to one from late last year, advocating for US civilians to be marketed and sold “smart guns”. If you watch the segment, you’ll see that they spend all of approximately 7 seconds mentioning how little of a difference smart guns would make. They did grant a minuscule amount of deference to the New Jersey legislation that has held up smart gun development, as well as the hypocrisy of the proposed replacement, even though they made almost no mention of the stupid demands of both the old and new Weinberg bills. The whole piece was focused upon forcing the NRA and gun manufacturers to fund smart gun technology, despite dearth of demand for such guns among US consumers.

They did mention that the fictional British spy, James Bond, had a “smart gun” in his latest movie. However, they conveniently excluded from the piece any mention of smart gun technology for military or law enforcement. Despite the fact that the military has been pivotal in the development and innovation of many products we use today, perhaps most notably the internet, satellites communications and GPS, apparently the gun control movement believes that the military doesn’t need to be involved at all in the development of smart gun technologies. Even more importantly, despite their massive budgets which dwarf the entire gun industry, the gun control movement believes they don’t need to contribute a dollar to smart gun development.

If there is any organization that could truly benefit from smart weapons, the US military would have to be number one on the list. They’re armed with the deadliest weapons on the planet, and are so reckless with them that you should not be surprised when they often wind up in enemy hands. ISIS, of all groups, is so well armed with American weapons that they could be fairly considered as a standing army, even without any additional arms.

A short list of “smart weapons” the US Military never developed that are now used by our enemies:

• Armored Humvees – Shouldn’t these have some sort of fingerprint ignition?
• M1A1 Abrams Tanks – No personalized key for the world’s most advanced tank.
• M198 Howitzers – No RFID chip to fire heavy artillery.
• M240, M249 and M2 Machine Guns – The best guns to use for “mass shootings” don’t have any security devices whatsoever.

If it’s not important to the military to put smart technology in any of these far more deadly weapons, which they also export to other militaries all over the globe, why is it so important for US civilians to have smart guns?

Turning to law enforcement, their need for smart gun technology is also far more dire than that of the everyday US civilian. Despite having to manage perpetrators who will try to use their own weapons against them, the police themselves are highly skeptical of implementing the technology. And they are skeptical for very good reason, the last time the Feds tried to use new firearms technology to their advantage, several Feds ended up murdered with those same weapons. You should already know this, but US authorities were so incompetent with technology that they could not even attach functioning GPS tracking to firearms, yet they still continued trafficking firearms to Mexican drug cartels. It should be of absolutely no surprise that the Feds are not eager to try again with “smart” firing mechanisms for their guns.

However, there is one police department in the country that could actually have smart gun technology mandated upon them, without any real guarantees the technology even works. None other than… the NYPD:

“We want to create that market. We demand a smart gun. And the company that produces the smart gun will get our business,” Stringer said. “These gun manufacturers, they don’t want to introduce smart guns because they’ve got to take on their friends at the NRA. We’re now going to say to the NRA, we’re bigger than you, we’re stronger than you. Because we’ve got the money.”

You can’t make this stuff up. Scott Stringer believes that a police force of about 35,000 is going to be able to influence a market that had over 23 million background checks in one year alone. Scott Stringer has clearly never taken an economics class.

And yet, that doesn’t even factor into account that the NYPD has already tried to change the firearms market, albeit inadvertently. Sometime in the 1990s, the NYPD, in its bid to reduce accidental discharges, mandated that all its officers’ firearms have a 12lb trigger. Even the most basic knowledge of handguns and firearms in general would expose how asinine that move was. A move which was primarily designed to mask the department’s deficient firearms training, it has also exposed the fact that the department actively discourages its officers from practicing on their own time. The result of the heavier trigger is that their officers are unable to place repeated accurate shots at any distance beyond a couple yards.

So instead of teaching NYC cops how to shoot, along with proper trigger discipline, they overload the trigger. Obviously, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that when the cops actually have to use their weapons, they often hit everything except the perpetrator they are targeting.

Comparison of a professional marksman shooting an NYPD trigger vs a stock trigger

Not surprisingly, no other police department in the nation has followed suit. And while there are no numbers on NYPD modified triggers being sold in the open market, I imagine their sales are likely limited to those NYPD officers required to carry such guns by law. I encourage you to do more research on this topic on your own. Mike McDaniel has done an excellent job of exposing the NYPD’s backwards and misguided firearms culture.

Perhaps there actually is a market for smart guns somewhere. Honestly, if there weren’t so many stupid laws governing their implementation on the books like Loretta Weinberg’s dumbass bill, more smart guns would likely be developed. If I find a good one available at a gun store one day, I might even consider buying it. But until you get the government out of the business of influencing the firearms market, you will likely never see development and manufacturer of a truly effective smart gun.

Today’s gun owners rely on old-school mechanical safeties, trigger discipline, and the four rules of gun safety, when it comes to safely handling guns, not technology.  Like any other product, people want to be given the choice of what to buy, not a mandate. Most importantly, the American military and law enforcement agencies obviously do not think smart gun technology is worth the investment. If it’s not important to them, with their much more powerful and deadly weapons, why should it be important to civilians?

UPDATE: After writing this article, I watched a segment from the most recent 60 Minutes, detailing the manhunt and re-capture of El Chapo. While describing a firefight between El Chapo’s henchmen and the government forces seeking to capture him, a great deal of bravado was used to describe the weapons El Chapo’s men were using. Noting that they were “high-caliber” firearms and “grenades”, they failed to mention where El Chapo sourced those weapons given the strict gun laws in Mexico, and that many are illegal even in the US.

Why would any of this be important to mention? Around 7 minutes into the segment, you can clearly see it laying on the ground, a Barrett M82 .50 BMG rifle, definitely one of the “high-caliber” weapons 60 Minutes was referring to. Completely absent from 60 Minutes’ reporting was how El Chapo procured the weapon in question because he obtained it via Obama and Eric Holder’s “Fast and Furious” weapons trafficking program. You’d think that it would be pertinent for 60 Minutes to mention that US and Mexican authorities were being shot at with weapons sourced driectly from the US government, wouldn’t you? 60 Minutes: giving you one side of the story; the propaganda and misinformation side.

UPDATE 2: Apparently the whole scene with the smart gun in the newest Bond movie referenced above had to be digitally edited, to save millions on a re-shoot. Why? Daniel Craig wore gloves during the filming of the scene, and his “smart gun” would not have fired if he had gloves on, due to its safety being a fingerprint scanner. Even the movies can’t get smart guns right!