quote:

German gun designer’s quest for a smarter weapon infuriates U.S. gun rights advocates
By Michael S. Rosenwald August 6 at 8:27 PM

UNTERFÖHRING, Germany — In nearly 30 years at Heckler & Koch, a legendary German gunmaker, Ernst Mauch designed some of the world’s most lethal weapons, including the one that reportedly killed Osama bin Laden. A state regulator once called him a “rock star” in the industry.

Now the gun world sees him a different way: as a traitor. The target of their fury is the smart gun Mauch designed at Armatix, a start-up near Munich. The very concept of the weapon has been attacked by U.S. gun rights advocates even as it has helped Mauch resolve a sense of guilt that has haunted him his entire career. He knows children have killed each other with his guns. Crimes have been committed with them.

“It hurts my heart,” the 58-year-old gun designer said. “It’s life. It’s the lives of people who never thought they’d get killed by a gun. You have a nice family at home, and then you get killed. It’s crazy.”

Mauch’s solution, the iP1, can be personalized so it only fires if the gun’s rightful owner is wearing a special watch connected wirelessly to the weapon. It has not been the hit he imagined for the multibillion-dollar U.S. market. Second Amendment advocates, fearing the technology will be mandated, launched angry protests this year against stores in Maryland and California that tried to sell it. The industry that once revered him now looks at him with suspicion.

“I love Ernst, and his contributions to firearms are incredible,” said Jim Schatz, a gun industry consultant who worked for Mauch at Heckler & Koch. “But he doesn’t understand that the anti-gunners will use this to infringe on a constitutional right. They don’t have a Second Amendment in Germany.”

Mauch realizes that many people in the gun world oppose what he’s doing. But he sees himself as a Steve Jobs-like figure, someone with the know-how and stubbornness — “no compromises” is a phrase he uses repeatedly — to bring “dumb guns,” as he calls them, into the digital age.

“This is the beginning of a new generation of weapons, which makes people think I am crazy,” he said. “Anyone can make a gun or a pistol. But if the potential is here to make it safer, we have to do it. We absolutely must.”


Mauch grew up a farmer’s son in Dunningen, a small village at the edge of Germany’s Black Forest, where he still lives today, raising bees and growing wheat. He tinkered. He fixed things. As a teenager, he took up watchmaking. He loved the intricate parts, the sequence of small movements that led to time.

In college, he studied mechanical engineering, and two of his required internships were at Heckler & Koch. He immediately took to the preciseness of the work, impressing his superiors with a design for an antitank weapon site system. The idea of spending a lifetime in weapons did not occur to him.

“At the time, I did not think,” he said. “I just learned.”

The company asked Mauch to return after his graduation in 1978. He quickly rose up the corporate ladder, earning a reputation for designing inventive weapons systems and cracking complicated problems, often walking down to assembly lines to examine issues and offer solutions.

Mauch’s assault rifles and grenade launchers become coveted by armed forces­ around the world, including the United States. He was the first foreign-born winner of the Chinn Award, an annual prize from the National Defense Industrial Association honoring achievement in small-arms weaponry. He still consults regularly with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

“He understood where the end-user was coming from and how to meet those needs on the engineering side,” said Larry Vickers, a former Delta Force member who collaborated on weapons projects with Mauch. “He had a grasp on the issues that was very unique and remains so this day.”

One of the weapons they worked on together was the HK416, a powerful assault rifle with a special gas system that took on the M4 Carbine in the early 1990s. The rifle is used by U.S. special forces, and it was apparently the weapon of choice for the SEAL Team 6 members who killed bin Laden in a covert raid in Pakistan in 2011.

“I was happy for your soldiers that they could do this without getting injured,” Mauch said. “I don’t think about this a lot, though. I really have no feelings about this.”

But Mauch is not a gun designer without a conscience. Early in his career, working on a new sniper rifle, he lay awake one night thinking, “What are you doing? Is it right to develop these kinds of products?” His life, he knew, was being defined by killing, a career at odds with his deep faith in God.

He found a justification in his head: This rifle will one day be used by a sniper trying to kill a kidnapper holding a child in his arms. “This weapon must do its job,” Mauch said. He has found comfort in that rationale throughout his career. He thinks God is on his side.

“My best partner is our Lord,” he said. “More or less, I think He is supporting my life.” The proof: “I am still alive, and He has blessed me with a beautiful wife and family.”


Mauch came home to that family one day in the 1990s following four hours of questioning by authorities after a boy accidentally killed a friend with one of Heckler & Koch’s handguns. “Why did the boy not know the gun was loaded?” Mauch was asked. “Why did the boy not know there was a round in the chamber?”

He told his wife, “My dear, I will never forget these last four hours.”

The questions, Mauch said, were good ones. “It was a good gun,” he said. “A good gun, but a dumb gun.” The idea of making guns smarter took hold.

Several years later, while running Heckler & Koch, Mauch awarded a research and development contract to a German electrical lock company interested in smart-gun technology. But in 2005, Mauch left Heckler & Koch in a dispute with the investment firms behind the company, a painful moment in his life.

Mauch said he received lucrative job offers from many of his competitors, but he wanted to pursue smart guns. His wife told him: “Now you have to do this other mission. This is why you aren’t at H&K anymore. You have to make guns safer.”

In 2006, Mauch joined Armatix, a spin out from the lock firm, investing his own money and leading the development of the .22-caliber iP1, targeted specifically for the U.S. market, where interest in the technology has increased in recent years. He recruited electrical engineers, gunsmiths and a few old contacts in the industry who didn’t think he was certifiable.

“I wanted to make sure that smart guns are the next generation of weapons,” Mauch said.


The question that torments him now: Does anyone agree?

In Mauch’s office, hanging on a wall by his desk, there is an article from a German newspaper with a headline that translates to “Fire among friends.” The story is about Andy Raymond, the owner of Engage Armament, a Rockville, Md., gun store, who faced death threats from gun rights activists after announcing plans to carry the iP1.

The National Rifle Association and other gun groups fiercely oppose smart guns, in part because of a New Jersey law mandating that all firearms sold in the state be smart guns within three years of such weapons being sold in the United States. Mauch said that he does not support the law, that the market should decide, but he’s puzzled that gun advocates are opposed to more guns, especially safer ones.

“I would ask them to give us a chance to tell them about the potential for a modern gun,” Mauch said. “I don’t know why they are scared of this.”

He is not anti-gun, he wants them to know. Told that there were more than 300 million guns in the United States, Mauch smiled and said, “I like that.”

The smart gun adds parts that Mauch never used in the past: batteries, wires, capacitors and microchips, all scattered on a desk near his office. “You would never see these things,” he said, looking at the electronics.

Gun rights advocates have raised questions about the reliability of any smart gun, noting that smartphones often need to be rebooted. Mauch said they should look at who made the weapon. The man who made the HK416. The man who has spent his adult life making guns with the mantra, “No compromises.”


His contacts at the Army Research Laboratory back him up. “He has come up with a design that’s reliable, it provides safety, and it provides security,” said Sam Wansack, a lab engineer at Aberdeen Proving Ground. “I can’t think of a way of defeating it without destroying the gun.”

Gun safety groups think Mauch’s acclaimed career can convince skeptics.

The Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, a group pushing manufacturers for better gun safety, recently met with Mauch in Germany and hope to bring him to the United States to persuade police chiefs to buy his company’s guns. The idea: If the technology is good enough for police officers, it should be good enough for consumers. Armatix is developing a 9mm smart gun targeted at the law enforcement market. The company hopes to offer other controls besides a watch, including a version that responds to voices.

“The idea of a smart-gun maker who has lots of experience making guns is intriguing because he’s not just some fly-by-night guy trying to do this,” said Rabbi Joel Mosbacher, a member of the group that met with Mauch. “Law enforcement officials have been quietly saying that if he comes over, they’d be willing to meet with him.”

Mauch hopes to meet with U.S. police officials in September. Under no circumstances, he said, will he back away from the technology, even though he acknowledges the backlash has sometimes led him to ponder quitting. “You are responsible for all the lives you could save,” his wife tells him.

“That motivates me back,” he said. “When it comes to the end, you are responsible for what you did. There will be one question asked of you: What did you do to help others? I cannot sit still. There are tragedies that could be eliminated. Bingo. End of story.”

quote:

I would like to have a gun for home defense that i don't have to ever worry about somebody accidentally shooting themselves with

quote:

And how many of us wear our watch or ring all night?

quote:

The technology of these are far from perfect yet. any thing that used batteries is not something I want in a life and death situation.

quote:

What battery powered device do you use everyday that is often critical to saving your or other's lives????? Try a car or truck.

quote:

It seems hardly a day goes by that I don't hear on the local news about a child being shot by another child using a "found" gun.

quote:

Originally posted by p dog shooter:

quote:

It seems hardly a day goes by that I don't hear on the local news about a child being shot by another child using a "found" gun.

That's because it is media driven campaign to make you think it is happening all the time.

Buckets, swimming pools and vehicles are far more dangerous to the children in your life.

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2...ren-five-gallon.html

Which are more dangerous for young children, five gallon buckets or guns?

Five gallon buckets result in a small number of fatal accidents for young children; about 27 a year. The accidents are not tracked as rigorously as those with firearms are. I found a study that tracked them for six years. From a pediatrics study:

Analysis of Consumer Product Safety Commission data revealed 160 bucket-related drownings for the years 1984 through 1989, representing a mortality rate of 0.367 per 100 000 persons (younger than 2 years old) per year in the United States.
I have not found numbers for bucket drownings for later years, but the total drownings have dropped slightly from 1990 to 2005-2009. In 1990 there were 3,979 total drownings. In 2005-2009 the average was 3,533. In 2011 there were 3,556. From 1990, the total number has dropped about 11 percent.

Drownings of children under five were fairly consistent from 1999 to 2010, so it seems reasonable to believe that drowning in buckets have dropped about as much as the general figures. That would put five gallon bucket drownings at .89 x 27, or 24 per year. The number is small enough that no one seems to track exactly how many child drownings occur with five gallon buckets. It is a rare event, but it happens.



Unintentional Drownings of boys and girls 1-4, compared to motor vehicle traffic.
Bucket drownings are a small fraction of these numbers.


The number of children under the age of five that die in gun accidents is tracked more rigorously. This is in part because gun accidents are tracked as a separate number, and part because bucket drownings are counted as part of total drownings. The latest number of fatal firearms accidents per year for children under the age of five was 19, recorded in 2007. Again, this is a very rare event. So while both firearms and five gallon buckets are involved in fatal accidents for young children, and the numbers are tiny, five gallon buckets seem to be more likely to be involved in a fatal accident.

To be fair, both numbers are so small as to be statistically insignificant. In a country of over 300 million people, these fall into the "noise" category. That does not help if it is your child that is injured or dies. In nearly all of these cases, it is adults who made the bad decisions. The vast majority of the children drowned in buckets were left unattended; the vast majority of the young children killed in firearms accidents were shot by an adult firing the gun.

In comparison, for 2007, all fatal firearm accidents for children 0-14 totaled 65, and all drownings for children 0-14 totaled 739. Fatal firearm accidents for children 1-14 have been fairly flat since 2001, averaging 61 per year.

Drownings account for over 11 times as many accidental deaths as firearms do for children 14 and under.

Swimming pools, considered by themselves, are six times as likely as firearms to be involved in a fatal accident for children under the age of 15. There are 30 times as many guns in the United States as there are swimming pools.

Update: I found numbers from John Lott showing the number of children under 10 who shot themselves or another accidentaly from 1995 to 1999 varied from 5 to 9 per year. From an archived article:


Data I have collected show that accidental shooters over-whelmingly are adults with long histories of arrests for violent crimes, alcoholism, suspended or revoked drivers licenses, and involvement in car crashes. Meanwhile, the annual number of accidental gun deaths involving children under ten — most of these being cases where someone older shoots the child — is consistently a single digit number. It is a kind of media archetype story, to report on "naturally curious" children shooting themselves or other children — though from 1995 to 1999 the entire United States saw only between five and nine cases a year where a child under ten either accidentally shot themselves or another child.

©2014 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included. Link to Gun Watch


Posted by Dean Weingarten at 7/18/2014 04:46:00 AM No comments: Links to this post

quote:

I see no one responded to or even acknowledged my comment about micro technology being developed (and available CHEAP)to override the safe gun micro-technology any "safe gun" would rely on.

To me that's important for a couple of reasons. One, if some criminally-intended person was in one's home uninvited, it would nmake it possible for the intruder to make their gun unusable even by the homeowner, no matter what he wore or didn't. Two, if they stole onis gun at anytime, it would make it possible for he thief to still use it to threaten or commit felony assault on others. No safety gain in either of those circumstances.

quote:

Which do you think is more likely, that one may need the weapon for home o personal defense, or that a child will get hold of it and accidentally fire it?

quote:

Originally posted by Gatogordo:

Personally, at this point, even assuming they worked perfectly, etc etc I would not buy one because my kids are grown or near-grown, we live in a rural area with almost zero chance of a young child entering our house while we are not there so the usefulness of the "smart" feature would not really help my situation. OTOH urban parents, who might not educate their kids to gun safety as well as they should, or have other kids who might never have seen a gun in the house, etc could find them very worthwhile.

quote:

Originally posted by p dog shooter:

quote:

What battery powered device do you use everyday that is often critical to saving your or other's lives????? Try a car or truck.

And they all have fail one time or another. I just had to replace a trk battery after only 10 months. I carry jumper cables in all my vehicles

Batteries fail all the time and need replacement.

Just a couple of weeks ago on a week long wilderness trip my tripping partners watch battery failed no replacement for who knows all far.

quote:

If someone wants a truly safe gun, they need to take the steps necessary to keep others (including their kids)from getting to them. A portable biometric handgun safe is only about $250-300 depending on the brand....some are even cheaper, but I never recommend cheap stuff sold by bottom-line-oriented corporations.

quote:

Originally posted by Alberta Canuck:

quote:

Originally posted by p dog shooter:

quote:

What battery powered device do you use everyday that is often critical to saving your or other's lives????? Try a car or truck.

And they all have fail one time or another. I just had to replace a trk battery after only 10 months. I carry jumper cables in all my vehicles

Batteries fail all the time and need replacement.

Just a couple of weeks ago on a week long wilderness trip my tripping partners watch battery failed no replacement for who knows all far.

To add this... pacemakers have a life span generally considered to be no more than 3-to-5 years. Then they or their batteries have to be replaced. Almost every professional in medicine knows that. Pacemaker manufacturers don't advertise THAT aspect of them, for their own reasons.

\Pacemakers are surgically placed under the skin in an "out-patient" surgical procedure and two wires run into a cardiac blood vessel. That's why patients with severe diabetes (who don't heal easily and quickly) often do not get them. They may not mind undergoing the surgery and healing from it ONCE, but the prospects of dealing with that every three years or so may make it not compute for them.

As to the "if you don't like it don't buy it blowing off of the subject, If you live in NJ and they become available, that will be the only kind you CAN buy. How log will it take for that to become Federal law applying to the whole U.S.?

quote:

Originally posted by Gatogordo:

The really frightening aspect is that the ones opposed are taking the exact position of socialist/centrist planners saying they know what is better for someone else than the individual does. Stand up for freedom, let the market decide if smart guns are a smart idea or not. Like I said earlier, don't like it, don't buy one.

quote:

Remington's Electric rifle took the gun world by storm didn't it.

All other handgun manufactures went by the way side after Glock came into the world.

quote:

Originally posted by Beretta682E:
http://kodiakarms.com/product/intelligun/

I may have to buy a full size 1911.

Mike

quote:

Life span of pacemaker batteries is generally between 5 and 15 years, depends on how busy the device has to be.

on.

quote:

Originally posted by Texas Killartist:
Market forces are one thing, politicians are another.
IF the 'smart gun' technology gets perfected, the outcry to ban dumb guns will get louder than it Already is.gov't will claim that it is a 'reasonable, narrowly defined, restriction' and that your 2nd Amendment rights are not being violated b/c you can have a smart gun.
The technology may be smart, but giving politicians and the dumb masses more power is not.