Smart Gun?

Armed with $2 million in federal grants, researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) are close to perfecting the first commercially viable "smart gun." The prototype pistol, unveiled last month, is designed to recognize specific people's grips. When seized by an unauthorized hand—say, that of a child or a criminal—the gun locks its shooting mechanism.

Gun-safety advocates hail the device as a way to significantly reduce the estimated 29,000 firearm deaths in the U.S. each year, although some gun-rights advocates worry that the technology could prove more error-prone than traditional guns. Sebastian says the NJIT prototype currently has a failure rate of 1 in 100 trigger pulls, but his team aims to improve that rate to 1 in 10,000—the Pentagon's standard for military weapons—by increasing the number of grip sensors from 32 to "hundreds" and further refining the pattern-recognition software. If all goes well, Sebastian expects a commercial version by 2008.

Check out the article at Popular Science.

I like the way this is going, but they're not there yet. Look for the gun rights opponents to call for legislation to make this mandatory in all weapons.

I really only have one concern... Let's say you are in a gunfight with an intruder in your home. You are shot in the shoulder, but are still alive and aware enough to switch hands and defend yourself before the intruder comes to finish you off. But, you are no longer gripping the weapon as it was programmed to be gripped. Too bad, you're SOL!