E.J. Dionne puts forward an idea which, I’m sure, he hopes the President will hear
The time has come to recast this battle as a fight to hold those who make billions of dollars from the sale of firearms accountable for what their products do to individuals and communities. We must call for corporate responsibility, and enforce it by law if it’s not forthcoming. And President Obama, whose outrage about guns many of us share, must be willing to go well beyond what he has done so far.
As is their way, the community organizers and activists at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) are pushing the president to use the federal government’s purchasing power to promote safer guns. To do business with the government, companies would have to be willing to “remove the barriers to getting smart guns and gun safety technologies to market” and cooperate with law enforcement to “identify and isolate dealers that provide large numbers of guns used in crimes.”
Governments at all levels account for roughly 40 percent of gun industry revenues. The federal government alone accounts for about 25 percent. Taxpayers have a right to demand responsibility from an industry that gets so much of our money.
So, if his idea gets passed, if a manufacturer doesn’t put “smart gun technology” into their products, the government won’t buy it.
Since there is no actual, working “smart gun technology”, the feds and any other gun toter muni will eventually either have no firearms or old firearms in need of repair.
How is that a loss, exactly?
So, some low-life snake-oil company will create and market a “smart-gun” with horrible technology, and a crappy regular gun with very high margins, but because they are the only company that has “smart-gun tech” out there, they get the contracts.
Everyone else (among the major gun companies) jumps on board, ponying up a crappy “smart-gun” in order to stay in or get into the government contract market. The pols then declare “smart-guns” to be “readily available,” don’t require their cops or armed guards or soldiers to use or by them, mandate them for everyone else, then prohibit sales of existing guns so they can be replaced with “safer” smart-guns.
Nope, not going there.