Eventually, all American gun control advocacy descends into science fiction. "If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint," Barack Obama asked last Tuesday, "why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?” For this reasonable-sounding inquiry, the president was applauded throughout the media.
As it happens, though, there is a good answer to this question, and it's not that the supposedly nefarious "gun lobby" is standing in the way. That answer is that there is no market for guns that work just some of the time. Guns are simple things, all told, designed to operate as easily and reliably as possible. The introduction of electronics undermines this simplicity, and to a degree that is flatly unacceptable to the consumer. As President Obama well knows, the fingerprint software on his phone works rather erratically: Often it takes a user two or three tries to log in; occasionally, it flakes out entirely and defers to the password. When this happens on an iPhone, the user is mildly inconvenienced. If this were to happen on a Glock, the user would be dead. There is a reason that modern smartphones put the camera function outside of the authentication process.
Read the complete article: New York Times