Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kon-Peki | Hacker News Reader

If such a thing can be scaled and made reliable, the implications are staggering.

Imagine ammunition that fits in existing firearms and is fully self-contained, mixing into a viable round only when entering the chamber. And then made “smart”, such that it can be geofenced and therefore refuse to mix near schools or stadiums or government buildings, etc.

If this becomes possible, then all traditional ammunition may become legislated or litigated out of existence.

View on HN

Liquid propellant could be useful in varying the amount used per shot. In some large guns (ship guns mainly) you put bags of propellant in the gun and you're limited to whole bags. If you need a half bag you have to vary your aim to get the desired target. It sounds very difficult but might be worth it for space savings and for not having explosive ammo laying around.

As for making guns stop working in certain places, why wouldn't crime just target those places? My walk home passes malls, a school, government buildings, and two stadiums. Why would I accept a defensive tool that didn't work most of the time?

If we make gun ownership too onerous we risk people ignoring the law altogether - after all the risk of being injured is more serious than being caught defending yourself - which would increase the black market and aid criminals.

It's a little surprising to see all these replies with none of them mentioning that this discovery applies to high explosives, which aren't used in small arms ammunition. Ammunition uses propellants, which burn quickly (deflagration) but not as quickly as high explosives (detonation); the latter would burst the firearm. Therefore this discovery is unlikely to have any relevance to small arms ammunition.

There was at one point some research done on seeing if artillery could replace propellants with high explosive. From what I understand it concluded that is was completely impractical.

Ammo is really really safe as it is. Ammo doesn’t accidentally go off. The modifications you’re talking about would go on the gun, not the ammo.

That "gun digitally safed" concept was tried before and pretty roundly rejected. Even electrically ignited primers were a market failure. Gun people are more paranoid than even InfoSec researchers when it comes to tech in their toys. If you truly believe your guns are for self defense, it makes a little more sense.

I haven't heard of any electrically ignited primers that made it to market, but every attempt that's gone through military trials have had abysmal reliability.

See Remington EtronX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qP6Q9ZEsEo (but it obviously was a commercial failure)

Interesting. I missed that one.

The M61 Vulcan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M61_Vulcan) in common use by the US Military for many years is electrically fired.

Forgotten Weapons on YouTube has a video on the Armatix iP1 "smart" pistol, the technology behind it, it's development and why it was a commercial failure.

1. Why would you install all this into the ammo, rather than the gun? Any mechanically-inclined idiot with a garage workshop can make his own ammo.

2. Guns are a political problem, not a technological problem. If you want to reduce gun violence, ban handguns. If you want to reduce mass shootings, ban handguns and semi-automatic long guns. If you want to stop a dedicated idiot with a garage workshop from building his own pipe shotgun that he will use to execute an MLM cult leader, you can't, he's going to do that regardless.

I'm not sure banning semi-automatic weapons is an effective way to stop mass shootings. California has one of the most restrictive semi-automatic weapon bans in the country and it has one of the higher rates of mass shootings. That seems to be pretty good evidence that this policy is restricting people who care about the law from possessing these weapons and not the people actually committing the crimes.

California's surrounded by 49 other states, most of which have no such restrictions, and does not have any border controls with any of them.

The formula of access changes substantially when you don't have opportunities for jurisdictional arbitrage.

Criminals don't sit in a pentagram and magick weapons up out of thin air, they source them (legally and otherwise) from legitimate owners. A few of them are also legitimate owners, who choose to use them for crime.

It would seem, then, that those surrounding states should have even higher per-capita mass shooting rates than California, given they have a higher concentration of those sorts of weapons. They don't. In fact the states surrounding California are substantially lower.

It seems apparent that this strategy is both misguided and ineffective.

You played a sleight-of-hand, by conflating mass shootings with gun homicides in general. I'm talking about both, with a bigger emphasis on homicides overall.

California is #44 for gun homicide rates, and is significantly lower both on this metric, and on gun ownership than than its immediate neighbours.

Speaking of firearm homicide rates, #1, #2, and #3 are Mississippi, Wyoming, and Louisiana, [1] all of which have gun ownership rates that are double-to-triple that of Cali.

'Immediate neighbour' isn't a relevant term to this. There are no border checkpoints anywhere between the lower 48. Practically speaking, access to firearms is set by the availability of firearms in the most permissible state. Illegal guns don't appear into existence on their own, they start life as legally purchased guns, that are then sold to criminals, or are stolen by them. This is especially prevalent on the East Coast, where 3/4 guns used in New Jersey and New York crimes come from out of state.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...

I'm not the one playing sleight of hand here, this whole comment chain is talking about mass shootings. You're moving the goalposts to a subject nobody but you is talking about.

If you really want to do something good, don't ban semi-autos, or long guns at all.

Make it way harder to get a pistol. That's what's used in the vast majority of murders.

Those two mass shootings in California earlier this year? Both pistols.

I also think that concealed carry should generally be banned for most civilians, and open carry legal.

My views on guns tend to generally annoy both sides...

I won't go so far as to say I'm on your side, but it's a valid way of looking at the issue. It's the statistical approach - target the biggest part of the problem.

IIRC handguns are used in 75% of firearm deaths from all causes (homicide, suicide, accidents).

> IIRC handguns are used in 75% of firearm deaths from all causes (homicide, suicide, accidents).

kind of a distorted figure there because suicide dominates by a wide margin, and gun availablity doesn't change the suicide rate. e.g. when controlling for latitude you get similar suicide rates in places without guns, people just use different means.

Guns have by far the highest success rate.

Yet the suicide rate in the US and UK-- where there is more or less zero access to guns-- are essentially the same, especially after correcting for age and latitude.

It's not that wide of a margin, and different aggregations (geographic region, year, etc.) see a more even 50/50ish split;

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

Interestingly enough, this was the original intent of the NFA - banning pistols. Eventually we ended up carving out an exception for allowing pistols but kept the restrictions on short barrel rifles, which were included only so people wouldn't turn rifles into pistols after they were banned. The law is a funny thing sometimes.

Generally, I agree on pistols. The whole point of the second amendment is that people should be free to defend themselves from tyrannical governments and other threats. Handguns are much less useful in that capacity than long guns. Handguns are excellent if you need to conceal a weapon but I'm not sure there is a constitutional case for that.

My concern about banning pistols is that it won't stop there, though - see current Canadian gun legislation.

That would require a battery, a GPS chipset, and either a sizable database or a cellular radio, in the base of every cartridge.

I'm pretty sure ammo makers aren't shaking in their boots on this one.

You could probably do it with something like Bluetooth LE in the bullet. You'd need some sort of base station, worn on a belt loop or something.

Binary explosives certainly exist so it should be in theory possible. Not sure how well they "scale down" though, and I don't know if any have a blast velocity low enough to be workable. I'm not a gun guy, really, outside of my interest in naval warfare. 16" shells have slightly different design params though.

Actually, thinking about it more would the barrel act like a faraday cage?

It would make considerably more sense to use standard ammunition and conditionally release the firing pin based on logic in the firearm, but to be clear this is all still well within the realm of flagrant silliness, to the point where if n-gate (pbuh) were still around this thread would probably qualify as bait.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com