Smart Guns: Oregon Should Accept the 'Ohio Challenge' to Reduce Gun Deaths

For decades, it has been technologically possible to build ‘smart guns’: guns that use fingerprint recognition or other technology to ensure that only the legal, original buyer of the gun can fire it.

Steve Novick is an environmental lawyer, former Sizemore fighter, former Portland City Commissioner, believer in taxing the rich and letting people know where tax dollars go.

Courtesy EO Media Group

Gun regulation is notoriously politically difficult. But what if there were a way for politicians to reduce the number of gun deaths with no regulation at all?

For decades, it has been technologically possible to build “smart guns” — guns that use fingerprint recognition or other technology to ensure that only the legal, original buyer of the gun can physically fire it. So, if you steal, borrow or stumble on a smart gun, or buy it from a ‘straw purchaser’ — you can’t use it. If, when that toddler grabbed his mother’s gun in a Walmart parking lot, her gun had been a smart gun, his mother would be alive today.

Studies indicate that a move to smart guns could make a big difference. A study of teen gun suicides, using data from the National Violent Injury Statistics System, showed that “82 percent used a firearm belonging to a family member, usually a parent.” Another study, published in the Injury Prevention journal, showed that 10 percent of police officers shot dead on the job were killed by their own guns. A University of Chicago Crime Lab review of 99 people in jail for gun crimes showed that only two of the guns were purchased from dealers by the person who committed the crime. That study stated that “60 percent of the guns involved in violent crimes were either bought or traded underground; the remainder were shared, borrowed, or being held for others.”

But when any gun manufacture has started to manufacture smart guns, the NRA has threatened to call for a boycott of that manufacturer (of all of its guns, not just the smart ones).  The manufacturers have been cowed even though surveys indicate a market for such guns. Mother Jones reported a 2015 poll showing that “54 percent of gun owners under the age of 45 are willing to consider swapping out their conventional pistols for smart guns. And 83 percent of gun owners, it found, want gun dealers to be able to sell the weapons.”

Three years ago, I wrote a piece for the Portland Tribune suggesting that cities, counties and states should band together and announce that as of a date certain in the not too distant future, they plan to buy only smart guns for law enforcement officers, and will buy from whoever first makes reliable smart guns commercially available. Having a guaranteed market, as opposed to a hypothetical market, might lead at least one manufacturer to overcome its fear of the NRA.

As far as I know, no Oregon legislators or mayors adopted that idea. I guess I wasn’t very persuasive. But I figured I’d give it another try … now that the same general idea has been adopted by farsighted political leaders in places like Toledo and Cincinnati. Now, Oregon politicians don’t have to take the lead; they just need to take up what you might call the “Ohio Challenge.”

Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley put it this way: "Smart gun technology is a consumer option that doesn't exist now and needs to exist," Cranley said. "When you combine military and law enforcement, it made sense that we could have a consumer revolution. A public sector's buyers ought to organize and leverage our buying power." And it’s a lot of buying power: Cranley said that governments buy four out of every 10 guns sold in the United States. (When I wrote that Portland Tribune article, I had no idea the number was that high.)

Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz adds: “you add Toledo's buying power to that of Dayton, Ohio, and ... Boston and Buffalo, and then you start bringing in the truly large cities like New York and Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, then you are talking about tens of billions of dollars of buying power. And that can get their [producers'] attention, that can make a difference." 

Cranley and Kapszukiewicz are part of the Gun Safety Consortium, a group of cities that also includes Dayton, Ohio; New Haven, Conn.; and Pittsburgh, Pa. The Consortium is interested in and soliciting examples of a number of gun safety technologies, including quick-access gun locks.

Meanwhile, inventors are working on new versions of smart guns. A guy named Kai Kloepfer has invented a fingerprint-activated 9 mm handgun called Biofire. An engineer named Ehren Achee is developing a gun that doesn’t use a fingerprint scanner; instead, it uses technology like the employee badge that opens locked doors in your office. The owner would have a ring or a watch with a chip in it that would unlock the gun.

Now, of course, I personally have no objection to gun regulation. I’d be happy if Oregon adopted a law like New Jersey’s, which says that once smart guns are commercially available, sale of non-smart guns would be banned. (Oregon and New Jersey already have a special bond: we’re the only states to ban self-serve gas.)

But the fact is that simply the existence of smart guns, with no regulation at all, would make a difference.

So it’s time for people like Gov. Brown, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis, and Pendleton Mayor John Turner to take up the Ohio Challenge, join the Gun Safety Consortium, and give people like Kloepfer and Achee a chance to start saving lives.

Steve Novick thanks the Portland Tribune for its permission to re-use, in this article, much of the material from the piece they published on March 7, 2018.