This is a followup to last week’s essay “OSD 217: A fire control API — the bull case for smart guns”. The gist of the bull case is that smart guns turn firearms (static, hard to modify the internals of, high marginal cost of changes) into software (dynamic, easy and almost-free to modify).
A possible clarification on the Hoover-Ervin situation,
AFAIK, the Auto Keycard didn't have a lightning link drawing etched on it, it had a deliberately off-size drawing that more or less resembled a lightning link. Anyone with the skill to make one of these work would have to modify it based on the knowledge of the actual lightning link, and it would in fact be quicker and easier to make a lightning link using a downloaded and freely available template. Indeed if it took the ATF "Expert" A half hour to dremel out the Auto Keycard, that's at BEST no less time than it would take to carve an actually working lightning link out of sheet stock with a template that can be found online and printed out in 10 seconds.
This in my eyes puts the "readily convertible" clause of the rule into serious question.
A possible clarification on the Hoover-Ervin situation,
AFAIK, the Auto Keycard didn't have a lightning link drawing etched on it, it had a deliberately off-size drawing that more or less resembled a lightning link. Anyone with the skill to make one of these work would have to modify it based on the knowledge of the actual lightning link, and it would in fact be quicker and easier to make a lightning link using a downloaded and freely available template. Indeed if it took the ATF "Expert" A half hour to dremel out the Auto Keycard, that's at BEST no less time than it would take to carve an actually working lightning link out of sheet stock with a template that can be found online and printed out in 10 seconds.
This in my eyes puts the "readily convertible" clause of the rule into serious question.