‘Smart’ Weapon Shoots Holes in Gun Rift
In his pudgy hands, engineer and business executive Steven Sliwa holds the design prototype of a special gun. When manufactured, it could fire 12 rounds in a few seconds, propel a bullet 1,400 feet per second--faster than the speed of sound--and use a laser-targeting device for pinpoint accuracy.
What makes this gun special, though, is that it will not fire at all unless it is in the hands of Sliwa--or someone wearing his gold signet ring, which contains a computer chip the size of an eraser head in its crown. Held within eight inches of the gun, that chip transmits a unique electronic message that allows the weapon to fire. Separated from it, the gun is useless.
Variously known as the smart gun, the childproof gun or the personalized gun, this weapon will not go off in the hands of a curious child or a depressed, impulsive teenager. It will not go off in the hands of an intruder or a violent suspect who wrestles the weapon away from a homeowner or a police officer. It will not go off in the hands of an outlaw buying it from the trunk of a car. No one can use it without that chip.
Hailed by the people who have long loathed the gun industry, the smart weapon held by Sliwa, president of Colt’s Manufacturing Inc., may be years from reaching the market. Sliwa, intent on heading off overexuberance, cautions that the weapon is “still kind of science fiction.”
But before sketches of the weapon are even off the drawing boards, the gun has spawned legislation in several states--California among them--that would require safer designs for all new guns sold.
It has served as Exhibit A in a mounting pile of pending and threatened lawsuits against gun manufacturers, including a trial that opened Oct. 19 in California’s Alameda County. And it is being cheered by emergency room doctors in California and five other states who now handle more deaths from gunshot wounds than from car accidents.
In political circles, the prospect of a smart gun is quickly turning the gun policy debate on its head. Gun-control advocates find themselves supporting a weapon that promises to make gun owners of millions more Americans. The gun lobby is ready to endorse the development of a weapon whose very design could be seen as indicting the safety of existing handguns. And gun industry executives like Sliwa are hoping that the gun will protect his industry from its enemies.
Like the tobacco industry less than a decade ago, the firearms industry today is surrounded by mounting legal and financial danger, by market stagnation and by diminishing public support for its political stances. In the midst of this extraordinary ferment, the smart weapon has given the debate over gun policy something it has never had before: a patch of common ground--and some pragmatic, if novel, questions:
Should guns, their essential design unchanged since the 19th century, be made safer? If so, what institution--the market or government--should be the agent of that change?
These are the kinds of questions that could turn “the gun debate”--a sterile exchange from which most Americans have grown increasingly distant--into something more like a discussion among neighbors.
Today, when gun cognoscenti discuss the prospect of a smart weapon, gun owners find it hard to wrap themselves in the 2nd Amendment. In the end, their right “to keep and bear arms” is hardly threatened by the introduction of a new high-tech gun. At the same time, gun-control advocates who support the new concept must abandon their own hard-line stance to ban handguns by agreeing to add a new one to the market.
According to a survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine in September, the two sides in the gun policy debate are meeting on ground that is already occupied by most Americans--including a majority of gun owners. The poll found that 88% of all Americans--and 80% of gun owners--would favor legislation requiring all new handguns to be childproof. Slightly smaller majorities--71% of all Americans and 59% of gun owners--would favor laws requiring gun makers to produce guns that could be used only by their owners.
Not surprisingly, it is concern for children’s safety that fuels much of the support for safer guns. Of the nearly 36,000 U.S. gun deaths in 1995--the last year for which such statistics were available--440 children died in accidental shootings and 1,430 between the ages of 10 and 19 used an adult’s gun to commit suicide. Public health experts believe that many thousands of children were maimed or injured in that time.
But the first steps toward the design of a smart gun were prompted not by concern for children but for cops and crime. Each year, about 16 police officers die when their own guns are wrested away and used against them. And no one yet knows how many Americans--police and civilian--die at the hands of someone packing one of the roughly 500,000 guns stolen every year. When Colt’s smart weapon is ready for the market, Sliwa says its first users most likely will be police officers.
Not Your Typical Gun-Company CEO
In mid-September, Sliwa took the reins of Colt’s, the venerable gun manufacturer based here that probably will be the first to market a high-technology personalized gun.
The nation’s fourth-largest gun maker, Colt’s is said to have built “the gun that won the West.” But its new president looks and talks more like Microsoft’s Bill Gates than Charlton Heston, the chiseled public face of the National Rifle Assn.
Until just last month, Sliwa did not even belong to the NRA. He and his wife decided that they would not have a handgun in the house while their daughter was young and living at home. His highest priority is to deliver the smart gun to what he hopes will be a waiting market of gun owners and would-be gun owners.
A doctor of engineering who until September was president of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, Sliwa has little stake in the old moorings of the gun debate. In discussing the smart weapon, he is careful to make a perfunctory bow to the 2nd Amendment. But he is a disciple of high technology, first and foremost, and he crafts his arguments accordingly.
“American culture today looks for solutions through government and regulation or through technology,” Sliwa said. “We’ve kind of exhausted the government route. Here’s a technology that offers a solution.”
To gun controllers who would require all new handguns to use the technology, Sliwa invokes his previous experience as a project engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. “Mandating technologies just doesn’t work,” he insisted.
To furious gun owners who charge that Colt’s is just encouraging gun controllers with its new product, Sliwa counters pragmatically: “I believe more people will own a gun if this technology is available. And the more people who own a gun, the more people who feel comfortable with a gun, the less likely you are to have your 2nd Amendment rights trampled or amended.”
Indeed, its work on the smart gun has made Colt’s the object of sporadic boycotts and much grousing from the most politically strident wing of the gun-rights community. But Sliwa reports that 30% of the company’s customers have expressed interest in owning the high-tech weapon. Beyond that, a survey conducted by the University of Chicago found recently that one third of Americans who do not own a gun said they would consider buying a smart weapon.
Assessing the gun’s potential market, Sliwa said: “We believe it’s measured in the millions.”
An Innovation Born of Tragedy
If anyone sits squarely on the middle ground created by the smart gun, it is Sliwa. But in his zeal to bring the weapon to market, he has plenty of company. And these are odd bedfellows, indeed.
Steve Teret, a trial lawyer turned public health professor, has made the smart gun his personal crusade for the last 15 years. In some ways, the gun was conceived in Teret’s cramped office at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, after the 1-year-old child of a family friend was shot dead by his caregiver’s 4-year-old son. The older child had found his father’s loaded gun in a night stand.
“It was unspeakable, to think about the pain that incidents like this have caused so many people,” Teret said.
Teret began to push the idea that guns--like aspirin bottles and cigarette lighters--could be designed to be more childproof. And he found an early backer in then-Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), a liberal congresswoman from a gun-loving state who quietly slipped funds into the Pentagon’s budget to develop such a weapon. In 1995, using a $500,000 federal grant and its own money, Colt’s began marrying steel with electronics to design Teret’s dream.
As work progressed, legislators and state officials in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts launched initiatives that would mandate safer guns. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, gun-control activists like Bryan Miller, whose FBI-agent brother was ambushed by an assailant with an assault weapon in 1994, convinced state legislatures to consider bills requiring all new weapons sold to be designed to prevent unauthorized use.
At the same time, in several threatened and pending lawsuits, lawyers have warned gun manufacturers that, if they don’t move ahead with the development of safer guns, they could face steep liability assessments.
The most active of those suits opened last week in Oakland, where the parents of Kenzo Dix, a 15-year-old killed in an accidental shooting by his best friend in 1994, are suing Baretta USA, the American subsidiary of the Italian gun giant.
Nancy Hersh, a San Francisco-based attorney who successfully tried the nation’s first liability case against the makers of breast implants, hopes the Dix case will establish that gun makers, like those who produce table saws and other inherently dangerous equipment, must design safety features that decrease the likelihood of injury.
“Our case is solid on product-liability doctrine,” said Hersh, who is trying the case alongside an attorney from the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the legal arm of Handgun Control Inc. “I was amazed, when we filed this [in 1995], that no one had done this before.” If damages are awarded, Hersh predicted, “it’ll open the floodgates” for similar cases.
By October 1997, gun-industry leaders like Richard Feldman began to perceive that urging gun owners to be more responsible might not shield the industry from legal danger forever. Feldman, an affable attorney who heads the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the American Shooting Sports Council, led 10 gun executives to the White House, where they promised President Clinton that they would ship child-safe locks with all of their guns.
Concept Is a Favorite in Emergency Rooms
While support for the high-tech weapon is slowly being forged in courtrooms and boardrooms, some of the gun’s most compelling advocates are in places where guns and gun violence are everyday stuff: in precinct offices and emergency rooms.
As an emergency room physician at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Dr. Stephen Hargarten began noticing in the late 1980s that he was seeing more deaths attributable to gunfire than car accidents--a significant turnaround that came as cars incorporated more safety features like seat belts and impact-absorbing designs. Hargarten, who is trained in public health, began to wonder why. He turned to the Fatal Accident Reporting System, a nationwide database of automobile fatalities and how they happened.
This database, Hargarten knew, had been key in helping identify--for car makers, litigators and product-safety experts--which safety improvements would be of greatest help in reducing car crash deaths and injuries. Why, he asked, was no such database available for the increasing epidemic of firearms-related deaths?
In 1993, Hargarten started the painstaking work of collecting gun-death data, and the Firearms Injury Reporting System was born. His compendium of facts eventually could point the way to safety improvements by painting a detailed picture of deaths by firearm.
But if the smart gun is to become a reality, it will be because people like Concord, N.C., Police Chief Robert E. Cansler have accepted it.
Cansler called guns “a tool of my profession, of course.” They are also a source of pleasure, he added. He collects them, target-shoots for relaxation and hunts. And he has been a member of the NRA for 20 years. But he is also the father of a 15-year-old and, like most cops with families, he fears that a tool of his profession--so difficult to hide from kids--could shatter his home life.
As president of the North Carolina Assn. of Police Chiefs, Cansler has taken the case for the smart gun to other officers across the nation. “I’m not gonna beat around the bush: This technology’s got a ways to go yet,” Cansler said. “But I think we need to be the first people to try it out.”
