Posted on Mon, May. 29, 2006
`Smart gun' shows promise - and promises controversy
BY TOM AVRIL
Knight Ridder Newspapers
PHILADELPHIA - As police in Philadelphia struggle to stop a scourge of shootings, some New Jersey engineers say they are closing in on a "smart" solution: a gun that can be fired only by its owner.
The prototype, developed at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, has pressure sensors embedded in the gun handle that recognize a person's unique grip.
The team says a commercial model is up to five years away, but if it works, it will trigger a singular - and controversial - state law. Within three years, all handguns sold in New Jersey would have to be personalized, with this or some other recognition technology.
Michael Recce, who dreamed up the grip-recognition concept in 1999, said the only obstacles are time and money.
"It's an engineering problem, not a scientific problem," he said.
However long it takes, it's safe to say the university has embarked on a product-development quest like no other - wading into a contentious issue on the fault line between red and blue America.
Various smart-gun efforts have flamed out in the past, amid vocal skepticism by the National Rifle Association. Many gun owners chafe at the notion of any restrictions on their Second Amendment right to bear arms, and warn that any such modifications would make guns more expensive.
Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, are split, with some warning that personalized firearms would give owners a false sense of security.
Most see New Jersey's 2002 law as a commonsense safety measure, but they are starting to run out of patience.
"These guns should have been developed 20 years ago," said Bryan Miller, executive director of Ceasefire New Jersey.
Duke University economist Philip J. Cook estimates that if all handguns were personalized, more than 4,000 lives would be saved each year from fewer murders, accidents and teen suicides.
Though the New Jersey law exempts law enforcement, police might also benefit from the technology. According to FBI statistics, as many as one in six officers killed each year is slain with his or her weapon.
In the last few months, Recce's team has crammed the necessary electronics into the handle of a prototype, so the firearm no longer must be tethered to a computer.
Inside the grip, 16 ceramic discs generate a charge when pressed. They are called piezoelectric sensors, from the Greek piezo, for "pressure." Barbecue lighters use a similar feature.
Once the shooter squeezes the trigger, the grip sensors spring into action, recording the pressure for one-tenth of a second. In that moment, the pressure applied by each finger varies enough that engineers can distinguish between shooters with a high degree of reliability. A grip's signature does not vary significantly from firing to firing, even in stressful situations, researchers have found.
A year and a half ago, a prototype recognized authorized users nine out of 10 times. Now, the rate lies between 95 and 99 percent, said Michael Cody, a computer science engineer on the team.
The goal: at least 99.95 percent - or good enough that the recognition process fails less often than a regular gun would jam or fail. A higher success rate will require better placement of the 16 sensors; currently, four or five do most of the work.
The latest prototype still holds just one 9mm round, and while it recognizes its user most of the time, it cannot prevent others from firing it. Both problems are surmountable, Recce said.
Solving the first problem means creating more room in the handle by designing small, custom batteries and circuits to replace the clunky, off-the-shelf parts, team member Timothy Chang said.
The second problem - preventing a gun from being fired - has already been studied by other manufacturers.
The most sensible approach may be to marry Recce's recognition technology with a gun that fires electronically - without mechanical, moving parts such as a hammer. If an authorized user were recognized, it would be a simple matter to turn on the firing circuitry.
Recce estimated that his revolving team of graduate students and postdocs could develop a market-ready product in five years, and that a private company could do so in three.
Estimated cost: an additional $5 million. To date, the school has received $4.4 million in state and federal funds, said Donald H. Sebastian, a university senior vice president who oversees the research.
A 2005 study by a committee of the National Academy of Engineering was less optimistic, predicting that any of the various smart guns would need five to 10 years and $30 million.
That kind of money would likely have to come from government, as gun makers don't have big research budgets, committee chair Lance Davis said.
"They manufacture new models," Davis said. "It amounts to incremental changes."
Yet several gun makers have developed smart-gun prototypes. Some identified a physical characteristic, such as a fingerprint. One required the user to wear a special ring that the gun identified with a radio frequency signal.
In a 1999 memo, Colt's Manufacturing Co. told investors that a police model could be introduced in two or three years.
But Carlton Chen, vice president and general counsel for the Connecticut company, said in an interview that the technology didn't work well enough and that the company "ran out of money."
Even if technology works, there is some question how much it could reduce violence in a city such as Philadelphia. Most of the city's gun crimes are committed by people who obtain weapons from a "straw" buyer - people who buy guns legally and then sell them to someone with a criminal record.
Recce said his grip-recognition technology could solve that problem if the rightful owner had to get the firearm programmed by a dealer or at a police station. If someone else wanted to buy the gun, he or she would have to go back to get it reprogrammed.
At the very least, the technology would cut down on violence committed with the 500,000 handguns that are stolen each year, said Stephen Teret, public health professor at Johns Hopkins University.
"If all those guns had been personalized guns," Teret said, "they would be useless when they were stolen."
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