The leaders of a national gun safety effort led by interfaith religious leaders in the United States has called for a gun industry trade group to drop opposition to “smart guns” using biometric or other additional authentication methods.The Do Not Stand Idly By campaign say the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) could have intervened when a backlash from gun-rights activists previously forced a withdrawal of products featuring authentication.”We have never heard the NSSF utter a word of condemnation or even mild opposition to these efforts to shut down competition in their industry,” said Rabbi James Prosnit, a Reform rabbi in Fairfield, CT, in a statement.The group wants the NSSF to support smart guns at its major trade show, the SHOT show, in Las Vegas this week.The campaigners say technology such as fingerprint, palm readers or RFID transmitters could prevent tragic killings where children accidently fire their parents' guns, as well the use of stolen guns.Past efforts to release guns featuring “personalisation” have been blocked by a New Jersey law which states that once personalized handguns are available anywhere in the country – that all handguns in the US must be smart guns within 30 months.Critics say the New Jersey law is an infringement of the Second Amendment's right to bear arms. A survey produced by the National Shooting Sports Foundation last year also found that 74% of 1,200 respondents would not buy, or would not be very likely to buy, a smart gun.However, last September, a 17-year-old inventor in Colorado was awarded a $50,000 grant to help develop a biometric sensor that uses stored fingerprints to tell which authorized user is holding a gun and to prevent unauthorized users from firing it.Kai Kloepfer says trials with his smart gun have shown 99.999 percent accuracy – it can store more than 1,000 fingerprints.In a New York Times article this month, influential US commenter Nicholas Kristof wrote: “Something is amiss when we protect our children from toys that they might swallow, but not from firearms.”
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