`Smart' guns are market's response to safety issue

Thomas Wales was a federal prosecutor — and a well-known gun safety advocate. Late in the evening on Oct. 11, 2001, he was working at his computer in his Seattle basement. Shots rang out, shattering the bare basement window, piercing Wales' neck and upper body and killing him.

His shooting remains unsolved more than 20 years later.

Ralph Fascitelli, now of San Juan Capistrano, lived in Washington then. He was friends with Wales. Columbine's horror was still fresh in his mind, he had two kids in school and his days of serious activism began. But after Sacramento, after Laguna Woods, after Buffalo, after Uvalde, Texas — there actually were 15 mass shootings in the first five days of June alone — Fascitelli is adamant that gun safety advocates must take a different approach.

“It's a futile dance on national gun legislation and everyone's going to be disappointed,” he said. “Senators can't budge — even if they want to. Even the effect of state gun safety legislation is limited — in Washington and Oregon, you have rural sheriffs who refuse to enforce gun laws. You want to pull your hair out.”

But blocking meaningful strides toward gun safety isn't just due to intransigence on the right — it's also a function of intransigence on the left, he said.

Fascitelli is an evangelist for smart guns — personalized weapons that will only fire for their owners, thanks to fancy biometric technology or a simple chip embedded in the gun that responds to a chip in the owner's ring or bracelet. They're a “nonpolitical tool” that could save thousands of lives every year, he said: Children who couldn't steal and fire their parents' guns. Arrestees or prisoners who couldn't commandeer and fire the cop's or prison guard's weapon. Stolen guns that couldn't be used to commit crimes.

On one end of the spectrum, the guns-or-die camp fears government tracking and control and rejects smart guns as an infringement of their rights. On the other end of the spectrum, the far left rejects smart guns because it doesn't want to embrace any gun as a way to address the bloodshed.

But smart guns are the market's answer, he maintains. Folks on the fringes will never buy them, but polling has found that 85% of the 5-plus million gun owners with children in the home would, he said.

Smart guns are not magic bullets. But, he said, in combination with other commonsense measures under discussion — limiting magazine capacity, requiring people who want to buy assault weapons to be at least 21 (but, ideally, banning assault weapons altogether), expanding background checks and adopting red flag laws to get guns out of the hands of unstable people — they could make a real difference, especially in suicides.

Gun suicides accounted for nearly 25,000 of America's 45,000 gun deaths in 2020, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Orange County, 3,352 people died from firearms between 1999 and 2020, according to CDC data. The vast majority of them — 2,168 — were by suicide.

Imagine how much heartache could be avoided if just a fraction of them were stymied by smart guns.

The tech has been difficult, but it's coming of age. LodeStar Works recently unveiled a 9mm handgun for shareholders and investors, and SmartGunz said law enforcement agents are testing its products.

“The SmartGunz, LLC patent-pending lockout technology integrates with an RFID chip contained in a ring worn by the shooter,” the company's website says. “The shooter MUST be firmly gripping the firearm for the gun to fire. This solution ensures each SmartGunz, LLC firearm fires each and every time when it is supposed to AND ONLY when it is supposed to fire.”

LodeStar arguably has better copywriters. “Every American has the right to bear arms. Just not your firearms. Because your gun is only in the right hands when it's in your hands. With LodeStar's personalized authentication technology, where hand meets gun is no longer just a grip. It's a bond. Helping you hold on to what matters, when it matters most.”

Fascitelli, a retired advertising guy, worked with LodeStar for a time. He's not convinced that we've got the tech right just yet, but he's committed to pushing until we do. He'd like to see tax breaks for research and development of smart guns. He'd like to see the bickering — and bloodshed — ebb.

It's easier to change a product than to change people's behavior, public health officials have long said.

“We want the free market to drive this, not a political mandate,” Fascitelli said. “This is my MobyDick. We have to get this right.”