Are Smart Guns a Viable Solution to Gun Violence?

A gradual popularization of smart guns could help change the culture substantially

By: Dru Stevenson, J.D., LL.M.

“Smart guns” — a phrase that usually refers to firearms that feature personalized safety technology so that only the owner or designated users can fire the weapon — have been around, at least in prototype form, since the early 1990’s. 

News outlets showed a renewed interest in smart guns recently when a company named Biofire became the first manufacturer in many years to bring a smart gun to market in the United States.

By way of definitions, it is worth noting that a number of different firearm-related technologies could be called smart guns — not only personalized firearms, but also high-tech devices for improved accuracy/aim (mostly in the gun’s scope), guns that connect to the Internet (for posting video of the shots to the owner’s social media page), and even guns that utilize blockchain technology for tracking ammunition inventory, location, number of shots fired, and so forth.

Most frequently, however, smart guns use one of three basic technologies to restrict who can fire the gun: biometric readers (usually a thumbprint reader); RFID signals that link to a key pendant, bracelet, or ring; or a keypad for entering a PIN. Some manufacturers have tried to combine two or more of these security features, and some products in development (not yet on the market) would be an add-on accessory to an existing traditional firearm, rather than being integrated into the gun itself. 

Advocates of smart guns claim that they would prevent many accidental shootings by children who play unsupervised with a parent’s gun, and would reduce teenage gun suicides which often involve a teen using a parent’s gun. 

In addition, personalized smart guns would thwart the use of stolen guns to commit crimes (assuming it was not easy to bypass the security feature) and “grabaway” shootings of police (in which a suspect grabs a service weapon from a law enforcement officer and turns it on the officer). 

However, some violence-prevention advocates worry that the guns will appeal only to consumers who would otherwise store their guns safely anyway (locked up and unloaded), and might even make guns more popular by appealing to customers who currently forego gun ownership due to safety concerns.

Many gun rights advocates object to smart guns, and those objections today are essentially the same as those raised when the technology first began to emerge in the 1990’s.

First, they speculate that the technology will not be reliable. The gun may not fire in an emergency (an imagined self-defense scenario where the gun is the only possible way to stop an assailant), perhaps due to a technological malfunction, a dead battery, or in the case of thumbprint readers, because the owner’s hands are dirty or sweaty. A common argument is, “I need a gun that is 100% reliable.”

Of course, no traditional firearms are 100% dependable. Guns sometimes fail to fire, either due to a jam (various mechanical malfunctions can occur) or a misfire (various cartridge malfunctions). And assumptions that the new technology will be less dependable are just that — assumptions. Because no smart guns have been widely sold or used, there is no mass of statistical data yet to know if the guns will be extremely reliable, mostly reliable, or unreliable.

Unsurprisingly, Biofire claims that their gun is completely dependable. In theory, there is no reason that the technology could not be perfected to be as reliable as computerized devices used every day in hospitals, research laboratories, financial institutions, missile launch systems for national defense, and so on. 

A second major objection to smart guns has been that they will be vulnerable to either criminals or tyrannical government hackers from a remote location. This assumes that the guns will somehow have constant wireless Internet connection, and currently none of the personalized guns do, so they are no more vulnerable to hacking than a traditional microwave or coffeemaker.

This fear that hackers will remotely hijack or disable guns receives reinforcement from Hollywood scriptwriters, as evidenced in the 2019 comedy-action film, Hobbs & Shaw. In one scene, a hacker disables all the guns of a group of commandos as they commence an attack. Similarly, in the 2023 ABC television series, The Company You Keep, a major plot point in episode seven was that smart guns were the “next big thing” for international arms dealers. They called it “end-use monitoring” throughout the episode, meaning that a national military would want to disable (remotely) any of its weapons that fall into enemy hands. 

The third major objection to smart guns is that the availability of the technology will prompt lawmakers to ban all traditional firearms, either by requiring all new guns sold to be smart guns, or even confiscating the 450 million traditional guns in circulation, which would be a massive undertaking.

This fear — that smart guns will usher in laws prohibiting the types of guns that are currently popular — has some basis in history. In the late 1990s, the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research drafted and published the Model Handgun Safety Standard Act. It proposed a statutory mandate that licensed firearm dealers could sell only personalized smart guns once such guns were available on the retail market. The motivation behind this was the concern that smart guns could not effectively reduce gun violence unless they replaced the hundreds of millions of existing guns in circulation.

Based on the Model Handgun Safety Standard Act, the New Jersey state legislature enacted the New Jersey Childproof Handgun Law. This statute mandated that smart guns were the only guns that could be sold legally in the state starting three years from the date of enactment. The New Jersey law confirmed the fears of many gun-rights groups that the availability of smart gun technology would result in state and federal mandates prohibiting the sale, and eventually the ownership, of traditional guns.

The NRA organized a coordinated boycott of the only U.S. manufacturer that had a smart gun in development at the time, Smith & Wesson, that financially crippled the company. That effectively deterred other gun companies from introducing any product lines of smart guns for the last two decades.

In the years since the New Jersey enactment and the resulting NRA boycott, rulings by the United States Supreme Court have made it almost inconceivable that such a restrictive mandate would survive a court challenge. This makes the third main objection to smart guns a moot point, at least from a legal standpoint, though it also resurrects the concern that originally animated the New Jersey law that backfired: with hundreds of millions of guns already in circulation, even the sale of a few thousand smart guns would not make a discernible difference in reducing gun violence or even teen suicides.

Moreover, if customers who buy smart guns are self-selected to be exceptionally cautious and safety-conscious, those customers would have used other safe-storage practices even in the absence of smart guns.  

Gun violence, however, is not just a public health crisis, it is also intertwined with the gun culture in our society. In the long term, even a gradual popularization of smart guns could help change the culture substantially.

For example, law enforcement and the military are often the trendsetters for adopting new styles or types of firearms. Gun companies market some of their products as the “same guns” used by the Army, Marines, or major urban police departments. If the military, border patrol, air marshals, courthouse security, TSA, FBI, and big city police departments were to switch to smart guns for their agency-issued service weapons, this would generate consumer appeal for smart guns, and help allay misplaced or overblown fears about smart guns’ reliability or vulnerability to hacking.

In fact, it is hard to imagine that personalized gun technology would catch on unless the military and police first switch over to it. This would be an easier policy move, from a legal standpoint, than forcing the consumer market to switch first. Elected officials have a lot of control over military and police equipment purchases and upgrade policies.

In addition, a recently published academic paper in the field of Economics demonstrated that there is a significant “crowding-in” phenomenon for defense spending on research and development. Increases in government spending on research and development for a specific industry or item result in significant corresponding R&D in the private sector for the same industry or item. Government-funded research and development, especially for defense technologies, have the effect of raising a country’s total expenditures on innovation in a given industry.

Eventually, I expect that personalized gun technology will be miniaturized and repurposed as an accessory attachment for existing firearms, rather than solely producing new guns with the technology integrated. A smart gun conversion kit, if it were marketed effectively and became popular, would help address the persistent problem of the guns already in circulation.

Dru Stevenson is Wayne Fischer Research Professor, Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law

Image of Biofire gun by Ryan Lucas/NPR