Why the NRA hates smart guns.

With yet another push from President Obama to revive initiatives to develop “smart gun” technology, it looks like it’s time to revisit the issue once again.

The most common question I got in response to myprevious piece on smart guns is, “why is the NRA so opposed to them?”

The NRA’s official position is that they don’t care one way or the other about smart gun tech, and that the market should decide, but we all know that’s baloney. The NRA, along with the vast majority of rank-and-file pro-gun people, hate smart guns, and will do everything in their power to sabotage smart gun efforts.

So the question is, why?

The simple answer to this question is widely known, but also widely misunderstood.

Most who follow this issue know that the NRA hates smart guns because they’re afraid that once a seemingly viable smart gun technology exists, anti-gun legislators at the state and federal levels will attempt to mandate it in all future guns by comparing it to seat belts, air bags, and other product safety features.

If you read my previous piece on the problems with smart guns, then you hopefully understand the differences between a seat belt and smart gun tech, and why the prospect of having smart technology forcibly included in all new firearms drives gun nuts into apoplectic fits.

But maybe you’re thinking, “that’s fine, then. We just won’t mandate it. There will be no mandate. There, you happy now? Can we just get on with the smart gun innovation and let this play out in the market?”

Here’s the thing, though: the NRA is actually right, in this case. If smart guns get any traction, then non-smart-guns will come under legislative assault.

I realize some of you went into shock and stopped reading after you saw the phrase “NRA is actually right” appear on TechCrunch, but if you’re still with me then give me a moment to explain.

The Series of Tubes

Guns are a technology, and, like most members of the general public, gun control advocates arethoroughly confused about how guns operate outside of Hollywood — as in, “the Internet is a series of tubes“-level confused. It’s hard for me to overstate just how bad it is out there, even among much of the gun-owning public.

But maybe you grew up on a farm, you had a little hunting rifle, you went to the range a few times and shot a pistol, and so on. And you’ve seen lots and lots of movies with guns in them. Even so, unless you have a background in the military, law enforcement, or executive protection, or have undergone a decent amount of civilian training in real-world defensive use of firearms, then you know as much about guns as a teen with a brand new learner’s permit knows about steering an 18-wheeler through downtown Chicago in rush-hour traffic.

It’s bad that the general public — including the majority of casual gun owners — are so confused about guns that they don’t know how much they don’t know. But what’s worse, at least if you’re a gun person, is that lawmakers and activists who know less than nothing about guns often find themselves in a position to confidently enshrine their technological ignorance into law.

This, then, is what the NRA is terrified of: that lawmakers who don’t even know how to begin to evaluate the impact of the smallest, most random-seeming feature of a given firearm on that firearm’s effectiveness and functionality for different types of users with different training backgrounds under different circumstances will get into the business of gun design.

And they’re right to be afraid, because it has happened before.

The Vertical Foregrip: A Case Study in Well-Intentioned Insanity

To understand how gun control advocates’ high-handed indifference to basic gun knowlege feeds into to the visceral reaction that pro-gun folks have to smart gun tech, you have to go back to the original, Clinton-era Assault Weapon Ban. Whatever you think of the merits of the AWB, you have to admit that this ban put legislators in the business of gun design. And I don’t mean this metaphorically — legislators were literally doing gun design.

Before they could ban “assault weapons” as a category, lawmakers (or lobbyists and interns, more likely) had to compile a list of cosmetic, ergonomic, and functional features that, when they appear on a firearm either singly or in certain combinations, turn that gun from an ordinary rifle into a deadly assault weapon.

This process of looking at features and combinations of features and deciding what stays and what goes is pretty much what you’d do if you worked in product design at a Remington or a Smith & Wesson. But the people who put together the AWB’s feature lists not only were not professional gun designers, but they didn’t even appear to know anything at all about the guns they were designing for the public’s use.

This article isn’t the place to catalog the insanity of the Clinton-era AWB, or the recently proposed AWB that seeks to take its place, but I do want to offer to the uninitiated one concrete example of what I’m talking about, so you can get a feel for just how mad and maddening the results of this design-by-lawyer process are.

Consider the lowly vertical foregrip (VFG), a simple handle that hangs down from the front of a rifle and gives the weapon’s operator a place to put their off-hand.

No End In Sight

As long as we live in a world where a millimeter of barrel length separates a highly restricted “short-barreled rifle” from a regular rifle, and where a plastic gun handle is willfully misidentified as a dangerous aid for mass killers — in other words, where people who know zero about firearms nonetheless continue to design them through legislation — smart gun technology will be a bona fideexistential threat to non-smart-guns, and people who don’t want to buy smart guns will do everything they can to strangle the technology in the cradle.

If gun control advocates were to swear off gun design for a generation, and instead focus on the “who” instead of on the “what”, there might be hope. I’m not holding my breath, though. To someone who knows so little about guns that they don’t think they have anything more to learn, the “what” probably looks like the easiest thing to legislate. But the deeper you dig into this issue, the more you realize that, as with any constantly evolving technology, the “what” is a moving target, and the “who” starts to look like the more viable avenue.

My guess is that a lot of gun people would be willing to compromise more than you’d realize on various aspects of the “who” question, in exchange for tossing most of the “what” restrictions out the window. But we’re a long way from that on both sides. And in the meantime, we’ll spin our collective wheels as one camp keeps trying to “patch” a technology that they fundamentally don’t understand, and the other side tries to block potentially threatening innovations.