Spent some time going down the smart gun rabbit hole this week — not because I'm a convert, but because the history is genuinely more interesting than the headlines suggest. The politics buried the engineering story for a long time.

The statute was written as an incentive: once any smart gun became commercially available anywhere in the United States, New Jersey dealers would eventually be required to sell only smart guns. The intent was to push the market forward. The effect was the opposite.

This is the part most people arguing about smart guns don't know. The New Jersey law didn't mandate smart guns — it mandated that someone else's product decision would mandate them. That's why Armatix couldn't get shelf space. The California and Maryland dealers who stocked the iP1 pulled it under pressure, and honestly, can you blame them? Nobody wanted to be the domino.

A presenter at Defcon demonstrated that the iP1's RFID security could be spoofed to fire the gun from as far as 20 feet from the watch — and then showed the system could be defeated using nothing more than magnets, a piece of wood, and a screw.

That's not a software patch — that's a fundamental architecture problem. If your home defense gun can be defeated with hardware store materials, it's not a security device, it's a liability. I don't care what the price point is.

Biofire's system is notable for its fire-by-wire firing mechanism — the trigger has no mechanical connection to the striker.

This is where my range-day instincts kick in hard. Every malfunction drill I've ever run assumes a mechanical system behaving mechanically — tap, rack, done. Fire-by-wire means you're troubleshooting an electronic signal chain under stress, in the dark, with your hands dirty, when it matters most. That's a different category of problem. I'm not saying it can't work, but "designed from the ground up" and "first commercial shipments 2024" in the same sentence means someone is running the live beta test.

The 30 years of DOJ funding, failed prototypes, and bankruptcies aren't an argument against the technology ever working — they're an argument for skepticism about the gap between "it functioned in testing" and "you can stake your life on it." That gap is where all the interesting conversations happen.

What's your line — is there a version of this technology, done right, that you'd actually carry? And if so, what would it have to prove first?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team