Well. I guess this is more of that “conversation” they wanted to have.

(This got very long. Sorry. It could have been much longer.)

Really, why would we ever doubt their good will?

He thought the NRA was a harmless gun trade/lobby outfit, and didn’t seem to realize that it was much more than that: a cultural nexus for some of the most toxic politics in America: rabid xenophobia, racism, longing for a purer past, the glorification of extrajudicial justice against a creeping threat from within… tendencies that are not all that different than the bile that brought Hitler to power, I might have pointed out.

But I didn’t press the point. I wasn’t there to preach or educate. I was there to report.

Uh huh.

Yeah. Well, we’re off to a good start for a fellow who claims to be at the NRA convention looking for information on the burgeoning “smart gun” market. Our writer, Yasha Levine, has no dog in this fight at all, no sir. He’s looking for the truth.

At a press conference that announced the launch of the smart gun challenge, Conway said, “We’re going to be able to point to the Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page innovator for gun safety, who made their fame by inventing around gun safety.”
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“We need the iPhone of guns,” Conway told the Washington Post. “The entrepreneur who does this right could be the Mark Zuckerberg of guns.”

Levine is shocked, shocked that that mean ol’ NRA is stomping on clear-eyed, forward-thinking smart gun entrepreneurs wherever they appear. Just can’t understand it.

[The NRA] called attention to a plan by US Attorney General Eric Holder to budget $2 million for smart gun technology research — a federal government program similar to Conway’s private sector smart gun challenge. The NRA-ILA described it as underhanded strategy to enact tech-based gun control. Of particular concern to lobbyists at the NRA-ILA was legislation that would mandate smart guns once they hit the market: “There are surely those who would be happy to adapt this technology to firearms, and to legally mandate its use, fundamental human liberties be damned.”

Levine claims to see no difference between a private entity that encourages a technical development and a government bureaucrat that mandates it with force of law. He wanders the convention floor in mounting perplexity, asking one person after another what they’ve got against smart guns. One person after another tells him there’s nothing wrong with the idea at all – the actual product isn’t ready for prime time, but get it to work reliably in a serious caliber and there might be some market for it. But why oh why do all the gun control organizations and several government entities insist on mandating the things?

That’s just the ol’ NRA paranoia at work, of course, and it rolls off his back as it would that of any right-thinking American. He wanders into the stadium where LaPierre is giving his speech. Surely there’ll be lots of content about such an important topic as smart guns. But again Levine is disappointed…

LaPierre also talked about the need to buy more guns and more ammo so that people could protect themselves. It was all generic and lukewarm stuff compared to the racist bile that has spewed from the NRA’s leadership of old — folks like Harlon Carter, a convicted murderer and onetime US Border Guards chief, who transformed a sleepier NRA into the fanatical far-right crazy NRA we all know today. (Read Mark Ames’ “From “Operation Wetback” To Newtown: Tracing The Hick Fascism Of The NRA“)

Yes, that fanatical, fascist, far-right crazy NRA. It just doesn’t get it. And the convention-goers are no better…

As I climbed the bleacher stairs to get out of the stadium, I noticed that the people I passed glared back at me with open malice. It took me a while to understand why: I had a giant PRESS PASS hanging around my neck. I was a member of the sniveling and lying liberal media elite that LaPierre blamed for ruining America. Out here, I might as well have been wearing antlers.
—
I scanned the crowd gathered in front of the banner. There were only about a dozen people there — and half of them were armed to the teeth. There were at least four individuals armed with multiple weapons: fully loaded rifles, shotguns and AR-15s slung over their shoulders, backup handguns hanging off their belts and spare mags sticking out their pockets. One of the guys, with a mean face pitted by harsh weather and years of working outdoors, had a rifle with a powerful scope. Was he here to hunt deer? Or assassinate someone?

Through many such terrifying adventures he trudges. On all sides there are horrors to misinterpret and demonize, thrills and chills, and Levine does his best to keep up.

While all this was going on, I made my way around and asked a couple of rifle-moms what they thought about smart gun technology. As moms, wouldn’t they want a gun that would protect their children against accidental discharges?

The answer was a unanimous: “No!”

“I don’t want anything that’s gonna fail. So guns don’t have to be so technically, you know. My kids know. I’d rather teach them than to have something that’s gonna fail,” said Jill Trammell, a mom from somewhere around Atlanta who runs a PR outfit called “Patriot Promotions.”

This sentiment was repeated by several other mothers I talked to at the convention: they don’t want a gun that would fail at the moment they needed it most to protect your family against armed invaders.

I’m sure you’ll be shocked, as Levine was, by such unreasonable thinking. Why wouldn’t anyone want a bunch of electronic bells and whistles on a piece of equipment that must work perfectly, with no advance notice, in a situation that’s bound to be adrenalin-soaked? Especially when all the frills are designed specifically to keep the equipment from working? What a bunch of hicks.

Levine actually runs into Alan Gottlieb, a man I’d love to spend an hour with and whom Levine wastes no time slandering:

Small, with a bald pate, a tiny mustache, and a bow tie, Gottlieb sat perched on a barstool. He didn’t look like he belonged at the NRA convention. But his appearance was deceptive. A longtime Republican activist and rightwing operator who runs a lucrative direct mailing business, Gottlieb’s been tied up with the Moonies, the anti-environmental movement, and Young Americans for Liberty. His gun politics are to the right of even people like Wayne LaPierre. “I am the premiere anti-communist, free-enterprise, laissez-faire capitalist,” is how he’s described himself in the past.

And at this point Levine can’t help rhapsodizing about the wonders of the impending new smart gun mandates, and the enormous opportunities they offer any gun maker smart enough to get in on the ground floor…

These laws are one of the reasons why the first company to put cheap, commercial smart gun technology on the market stands to make a killing. And it might explain why Conway is so excited about pushing for smart guns.

A free market investment into a technology that will be government-mandated. Brilliant. You can’t ask for a better business prospect than a mandated market. Imagine how much richer Conway would have been if the government had laws forcing everyone on the Internet to use Facebook?

I stopped and read that paragraph again. Was he joking? Was this an attempt to be ironic? No, as far as I could tell he was being absolutely straight. Imagine how wonderful it would be if you could get the government to force everybody to buy your product. Why, the money would just roll in.

What a brilliant free market investment that would be!

What a staggering lack of self-awareness is on display.

At last, thousands of words later, our intrepid journalist finds his smart gun.

A burly rep from Bushmaster — the gun company that makes dirty cheap AR-15 that are particularly popular with younger rampage shooters — pointed me to a booth on the other side of the convention hall. It was called the “Intelligun,” put out in partnership with a gun distributor called Kodiak. “They have one of those guns you looking for. With a finger scanner in the grip…”

Sure enough, next to a booth selling low grade jewelry and necklaces, there it was: a single 1911 pistol revolving in a glass case, with a rectangular fingerprint scanner unmistakably built into its grip. Behind it, a flat screen replayed images of the gun and a reenactment of a cop getting his gun taken away from him, showing how it couldn’t be fired by unauthorized users…

“It’s a great technology. Faster than an iPhone,” said Kodiak rep Eric Lichtenberg. “You can program 20 different users, and you can unlock it in less than a second. The battery is a lithium ion, it will last about a year. Recharge it with a micro USB.”

At last, right? Forget the “low grade jewelry,” here is the product Levine says he has been looking for all day.

But he’s in for a final shock.

Turns out the purpose of the Intelligun, as the Kodiak people saw it, wasn’t to make guns safer or prevent gun deaths. It was to expand gun use and bring universal gun rights to every nook and cranny of America: schools, work, stores, hospitals, prisons, airplanes…
—
I was too shocked to respond. Lichtenberg kept talking, excitedly outlining their vision.

“If you really want to think about it…If you can take away the argument that people won’t allow guns in certain cases…Why did everyone fight pilots getting guns? It’s what happens if they get taken away…”

Smart gun locking technology takes away those concern and fears — and not just for pilots.

And the one thing you must never do is take away people’s concerns and fears. Right, Yasha?

As a coda to all this, it turns out that well-known gun writer Bob Owens spent quite a bit of time with our hero, a fact that somehow escaped mention in Levine’s very long piece.

You wanted to talk about “smart guns,” and how in your view, the industry and the NRA are against them.

I explained that very few of people who I know in the industry (and being the editor of an industry news site, I know a few) are against the concept of so-called “smart guns.” What we are against is the mandating of the technology, especially when it is still incredibly new and dangerously unreliable.

I recall mentioning, in great detail, the shortcomings of the current “best of breed” smart-gun, the Armatix iP1, and the separate watch required to make it function, the iW1.

I recall explaining, in great detail, that the pistol fails 100% of the time for the authorized user if he or she must use the hand without the watch on it, and I gave you several examples of why someone might need to do so. I recall explain how that the pistol is reported to have a failure rate of 10% when used with the “authorized hand,” which means that over the course of a 10-round magazine, the failure rate approaches 100%.
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I explained that the technology used in the pistol is so fragile that chambering anything more a low-recoiling .22LR would shake the gun’s electronic brains apart in short order.

I tried to tie it all up as succinctly as I could, summarizing that a firearm that fails repeatedly, doesn’t use an adequate defensive cartridge, and cost three times as much as the best of breed pistol has no natural market… only a political one.

There’s much more and it’s all good, but I mustn’t quote too much and this is far too long as it is.

I’m not an activist but I am a shooter from my boyhood and so have been involved in this sort of thing for so very long. And yet the level of straight-faced mendaciousness can still stagger me. This piece of filth in print lies with every paragraph, it just drips with contempt for something the writer clearly not only doesn’t understand but has no wish to understand. I find myself wondering: Am I any better than this creature? I have nothing but contempt for him, as he has for me. He’s arguing – lying! – against his own interest but you would never ever convince him of it. And I don’t understand him any more than he understands me. I would say the difference between us is that I’m not trying to do anything to him, but he would blandly insist the opposite is true.

This is really going to come to war, isn’t it? We’re that far apart. We threaten one another that much.

It makes me sad. It frightens me.