OSD 217: A fire control API — the bull case for smart guns

Also see the followup to this piece, “OSD 218: The off switch — the bear case for smart guns”.

Software has a set of cool properties. Flexible. Forkable. Hard to track, and hard to stop. Viral, both in its spread and its rapid mutation.

One of its weirder properties is that it has a different kind of virality, more like a zombie movie — anything that software touches will itself start to take on the properties of software. Even objects in the visible world are exposed to this effect. For example, the control systems of modern cars, from the infotainment to the steering and the throttle, have a software intermediary between them and the driver. Cars are physical objects, sure. But each year, their properties become less and less like those of a car in the traditional sense, and more like those of a suite of software whose purpose happens to be moving humans through physical space at 85 mph. (More on that in “OSD 203: Siri, brick my target’s car”.)

Ok, put all that on the shelf for a second.

Biofire opened up presales for their smart gun last week. The sales pitch, and the controversy, centers on the biometrics. It uses a fingerprint scanner and facial recognition to allow only owner-authorized users to fire the gun. If someone else pulls the trigger, nothing happens. They’re pitching it as the home defense gun that’s fine to leave out on your nightstand, and the target market is people who’ve been stopped from buying a gun by fears about unauthorized access (especially with kids). The pitch is that this is the lowest-mental-overhead for those folks to manage gun safety.

Ian McCollum reviewed the gun, and the biggest takeaway was that this might be the first smart gun that actually works as advertised. Responses naturally covered everything from interest in the tech to reasonable concerns about this inviting a future ban of dumb guns.

In all the discussion of the details and implications (both technical and legal) of a biometric-locked gun, folks missed the tech development here that, if it’s pursued, is actually going to have the biggest impact on the future of guns. To make the authentication more robust to someone simply opening the gun up and removing a physical lock, Biofire implemented a fire-by-wire system. The gun has no mechanical link between the trigger and the sear. When you pull the trigger, three things happen:

1. An onboard computer detects that the trigger has been pressed.

2. The computer runs some code and decides what to do.

3. The gun fires.

Pay attention to step 2. Guns just became software.

In this particular case, Biofire has built a piece of software whose job it is to fire a bullet if and only if an authorized user says to. Yeah, biometrics are controversial, etc etc. That’s beside the point. Remember the properties of software — it’s flexible. Once fire-by-wire works, sure you can use it to do biometric auth. But you don’t have to use it for that. Alternatively or additionally, you can use it to do, oh, anything you want.

People pay a lot of money for fancy triggers today. How about a trigger that can be programmed to have any weight, any number of stages, any feel to the break? And the ability to change all of that anytime you want, or even from shot to shot.

You could do built-in round counters. A built-in shot timer that can show you millisecond analytics on every step of your firing sequence. Strava for guns. Target lock, where the gun only lets a round fly when the sights have settled back onto the target. And the most important thing: the stuff we can’t think of today. The real power of decentralized innovation is in the uses of it that can’t be anticipated. Fire-by-wire makes guns — the literal physical objects — programmable, so for the first time it allows innovation in how guns work to move at the speed of software.

That goes way beyond Biofire. You can imagine a bunch of gun companies making fire-by-wire systems, and then an entire ecosystem of fire control software (both open- and closed-source) on top of that. (Side note: the first prosecution for machine gun software is going to be an interesting test case, and in a facts-on-the-ground sense, widespread fire-by-wire will be the end of machine gun regulation. Get ready for a court case about whether possession of a machine gun download is a felony.)

If fire-by-wire takes hold, it’s going to change the industry. Literally — it’ll be a different set of companies. History tells us that when an industry’s foundational technology changes, most of the incumbent companies don’t survive the shift. This is textbook innovator’s dilemma stuff. If your core competency needs to change from selling pistol contracts to the government to writing consumer software that integrates with the top 2-3 most popular fire control APIs, it’s probably not going to go well for you.

But it’s going to go great for consumers, because it means they’re benefitting from competition. We’re not sure if fire-by-wire is going to spread. But if it does, it’s already pretty certain what that scenario is going to look like: tons of new companies popping up to innovate in guns at the speed of software; guns becoming increasingly personalized, easy to use, and hard to restrict; and consumers benefitting from the booming ecosystem.

Let’s talk next week about the bear case.

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This week’s links

Bulletproof briefcase deployed by Japanese PM’s bodyguard

Interesting piece of kit.

Washington Post story about Sig P320s going off by themselves

Not sure what the real story is here. But the fact that Sig in the article is still denying the existence of the original drop safety problem from 2017 makes it hard to trust them.

This redditor’s explanation of the problem is clear and plausible.

U.S. gun ownership by state

Vermont coming in strong.

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