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Session 1: Technology for Owner-Authorized Handguns
Pages 7-24

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From page 7...
... Workshop Summary
From page 9...
... The workshop would help NAE frame a future study of the state of research and technology for smart guns. FIRST KEYNOTE SPEAKER The first of the two keynote speakers, Don Sebastian of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)
From page 10...
... The WIT researchers concluded that a typical gun owner could not be depended on to adhere to rigorous standards of gun safety. Owners often do not use locking devices or maintain the integrity of the ones they do use.
From page 11...
... , which designs sidearms for the armed services. ISSAP tested 18 commercially available lock-on, bolt-on handgun safety devices and concluded that all of the products manufactured for home use could be compromised with relative ease.
From page 12...
... In addition, there was no apparent technological growth path for any of the sensor technologies that would bring the failure rate down to the ideal rate. This does not mean that fingerprint technology should be discarded, but it does suggest fingerprint technology might be more effective if it were integrated into a multisensory approach to user .
From page 13...
... He estimated that total annual revenues for the gun industry are about $500 million and a reasonable investment in research of 1 percent or $5 million per year would not be enough to bring a smart handgun to the marketplace. In fact, he said, neither public entities nor private firms will be able to create smart guns on their own.
From page 14...
... In the second report, keys and discriminators were examined from the perspective r ot access control. The term smart gun has become such a catchall phrase that the Sandia researchers felt it essential to establish categories to distinguish the types of smart-gun technology.
From page 15...
... Another company is producing a fingerprint reader that uses sound waves that can actually penetrate gloves, which might resolve some of the problems associated with fingerprint scans. The ideal solution for law enforcement is a truly personalized weapon, which will almost certainly be an evolution of a self-locking weapon.
From page 16...
... It will be essential that any new technology be proved as reliable in everyday use as the technolo~v the police have now. -A ~ r Another very complex issue is training handguns to recognize their authorized users.
From page 17...
... In addition, when a biometric device is not used for an extended period of time six months, perhaps the false rejection rate recurs. The biometrics community is not sure whether this is a function of an aging templatethat a person's biometrics change over time or whether it is a function of user training.
From page 18...
... The company acted in an advisory capacity during the 1996 study by Sandia National Laboratory (Weiss, 19961. Once the study was completed, he said, Smith & Wesson became more active in researching the technology.
From page 19...
... Transponders, which are essentially electronic keys, also turned out to be unsatisfactory. When Smith & Wesson researchers compared transponders with the key locks the weapons industry had been providing for some time, they concluded that transponders offered no additional benefit.
From page 20...
... If one channel or component fails, the other channels recognize that, shut the system off, and then continue to operate in a reduced mode, while issuing warnings about the failure. Training is vital to using the system, and it will be vital that handgun users be trained to use biometric weapons.
From page 21...
... A lot of work is being done to create trustworthy electronic weapons. Nacem Zafar of Viridicom, a spinoff of Bell Labs located in Silicon Valley, noted that his company is working on fingerprint-sensor technology and fingerprint-sensing algorithms.
From page 22...
... Vericlicom's testing with the 1.2 million registered users in the South Africa database has reduced the failure rate to 1 in 100,000. Fingerprint-recognition technology is being cleployocl more widely than .
From page 23...
... The 1996 Sandia report found that one of the most critical feature to law-enforcement officers was that, if the power source in the smart weapon failed, the weapon would revert to a normal sidearm; in other words, it must "fail live." Thus, the officer could still use the weapon, but in the event of a take-away, so could the assailant. Another important concern is related to multiple authorized users.
From page 24...
... The proposals used various approaches, including additional biometric recognition systems, chemical compounds and radio-frequency technologies. Two of the four projectsone using ultrasonic technology together with a transponder, and one using biometric identification in an electronically fired weapon are moving forward very well and have gone through independent peer reviews with lawenforcement agencies to determine the functionality of the firearms in controlled operational settings.


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