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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Since the parent mentioned weapons, I would add:

7) FaceID for guns.

Imho, it should be mandatory, and it could be a solution in the gun control discussion.

Gun making companies would love that. As resale would be practically impossible. No cheap guns to satiate your love of variation. Markets for new guns would increase.

Police would probably hate it, because having your side arm malfunction in dark alley in life and death situation is probably something you want to avoid.

Organized crime would probably love it. Manufacture of unmarked firearms is not that tricky. Fresh market for illegal goods is suddenly created, as now it's not only the criminals who want these, but also survivalists and all kinds of paranoid people. If you run the numbers of murders with illegal guns/ amount of illegal guns vs. murders with legal guns / amount legal guns, you will find that illegal firearms are roughly 10X or 20X more likely to be used in homicide.

Police could be exempted from using the technique (just like they have special gun-carrying status in e.g. EU countries).

Regarding the other points (companies and organized crime loving this), you can also look at other countries where guns are illegal. Practice shows there are less fatal incidents there.

I'm from a country with very strict gun laws. That's why I know the data on illegal guns, there is apparently no such thing as "illegal gun" in U.S.A.

The only thing that facial recognition would help in my country would be those cases when licensed gun collector gets robbed and his guns taken by organized criminals. In that situation it would only slow down the illegal use of those guns. Therefore it would possibly ramp the price up to a point where manufacture of illegal guns becomes profitable.

There are whole classes of firearms that are illegal in the U.S. Fully automatic weapons require a class 2 license which is very hard to get. No rocket launchers, RPG, missiles, cannons, and even tanks! What is a guy supposed to do for fun on the weekend!

You do not need a Federal Firearms License nor registration as a Special Occupation Taxpayer to purchase fully automatic weapons that had been registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record prior to 1986. All of the other items you mentioned are legal to purchase or privately manufacture as long as you comply with the National Firearms Act by registering and paying a tax on them (usually $200). I don't think there is any weapon which is outright illegal for a civilian to own federally in the United States except a nuclear weapon as plutonium and enriched uranium are restricted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

There may not be a formal list of civilian-prohibited weapons but I'd be astonished if you can find someone who has a Title II license to own a MANPADS or even an ATGM.

Yes, but consider also that FaceID can be used in conjunction with a license. So the government could issue a license for one FaceID per gun-owner.

Problems this would solve e.g.:

- Children using their parents' gun at schools

- People using multiple guns (e.g. Las Vegas shooting)

So you could own several guns, but only use one of them? I can't see anybody voting for that.

Children using their parents guns is pretty neatly tackled here in my country by mandatory gun safes.

What exactly is wrong with owning "only" one gun?

Obviously this doesn't work for people who fire and care for guns as a hobby.

Solution: Double FaceID.

A person at the shooting ground unlocks your guns with their FaceID. Then you can shoot with them using your own FaceID for, say, 30 minutes. If time runs out, you ask the guy at the shooting range to unlock them again.

It's an application of the two-man rule, [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule

What if you want to go hunting? What if you just wanna shoot skeet on your property? I predict that you are going to make zero progress on any attempt to get FaceID for guns in America.

Your suggestions are great for restricting cases in which guns could actually be used and thereby increasing safety, but not terribly practical (in the sense that there's not a chance in hell of getting national legislation passed without a massive shift in the country's culture).

Same thing that's wrong with owning "only" one knife.

Have you ever tried to go duck hunting with a revolver?

Aren't sports supposed to be challenging?

Elephant hunters should be required to use low caliber revolvers, so the elephant has a better chance of killing them.

People are missing the fact that FR is nearly 20 years old. Smart Triggers were one of the first first abandoned applications. It is simply not practical. The very last thing a person who understands firearms needs is something between them and the trigger.

Any "smart gun" component is an additional point of failure in an application where failure to function can easily mean death or serious bodily harm for the user.

I wouldn't be surprised if most proponents of this tech have no real-world firearms training or experience.

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