Community Corner

Preventing Brandon Holt's Death

Smart gun technology could eliminate accidental shootings, but implementation of the technology faces and uphill battle.

 

On an early spring Monday night on McCormick Drive in Toms River, an unidentified 4-year-old child emerged from his house carrying a loaded hunting rifle.

Details about the incident have been sparse. The two children were playmates, neighbors said, and were likely playing at the time. How the incident unfolded remains uncertain, but at some point, a 4-year-old child shot his 6-year-old playmate in the head from a distance of about 15 yards.

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Parents were nearby, Toms River Police Chief Michael Mastronardy said, and the younger child’s mother called 911 to report the accidental shooting. Holt was airlifted to Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune and was listed in serious condition as of Tuesday morning. A Tuesday afternoon police press conference to provide an update about the incident and Holt’s medical status was canceled. Holt had died.

The shooting remains under investigation with the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office after being moved out of Ocean County due to possible conflicts in the law enforcement community.

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But, to some, this much may be certain: Brandon Holt’s death at the hands of a 4-year-old neighbor, with access to a loaded .22 caliber rifle, may not have happened with personalized weapon technology.

More than a decade ago, the state set about developing and instituting the technology in every single handgun, and potentially every firearm, sold in the state without exception.

Millions in grant funding was awarded to the New Jersey Institute of Technology over the course of several years, prototypes were created – the first handguns tethered to a computer by wire – and laws were passed. Eventually the program stalled, shelved and nearly forgotten along with everything else that remains good, but only in theory.

The school’s senior vice president of research and development Donald Sebastian has been overseeing its progress since development first began in earnest in 1999. As it currently exists, the system, known as Dynamic Grip Recognition, is reliable 99 percent of the time

That’s in adults alone. It’s an especially high number, but one that will need seven additional tenths of percentage point until it can be accepted as a real solution.

False positives among adults are a possibility, rare as they might be, but when it comes to children the effective rate of Dynamic Grip Recognition is a different story. Sebastian said he estimates the system has the potential to fail just once in 10,000 trigger pulls.

Ready for distribution or not, smart gun technology, even as it exists today, a prototype deemed unready, has the ability to effectively eliminate accidental shootings and suicides among children and teenagers, some say.

Still, research into developing personalized gun technology has been limited. Gun manufacturers have been warned off of the practice, and should public money be used to fund this kind of research, questions of Second Amendment violations will undoubtedly come up.

“As long as we polarize the (personalized weapon) argument we’re going to be stuck,” Sebastian said. “I can’t think of any analogs in my lifetime that have been like that. People argued against seatbelts, but you never had the AAA fighting against it or citizens groups campaigning against it. It was simply car manufacturers not wanting to add to their expense.

 “This is more a debate about national liberty.”

The Smart Gun's History

The idea of personalized weapon technology isn’t new. Nearly 40 years ago, a gun manufacturer developed a safety system based on magnets. A magnetic barrier was installed behind the gun’s trigger, blocking it from being fired. The only way to dislodge the magnetic device from behind the trigger was with another repelling magnetic device in the form of a ring or bracelet worn by the shooter.

Radio-frequency identification, or RFID, has also been developed and utilized to some degree with firearms. The technology is sound and already in widespread use in everyday life, most notably in electronic toll devices, like E-ZPass, and in most mall clothing stores – think of those pesky white tags that have already put a hole through your clothing before you’ve even purchased it.

Like personalized weapon technology incorporating magnets, RFID-enabled firearms would also require close proximity of radio devices to function. 

Criticisms of both magnet and RFID-based gun safety methods range widely.

Requiring a gun owner to wear a device to fire their weapon is seen by some as impractical, especially in unanticipated instances of home defense. Then there’s the reliability of the two. Batteries in RFID devices can and will die. Personalized gun technology has been considered as perfect tool for law enforcement, the theory being that the technology will protect an officer from his own weapon should he be disarmed during a struggle. But there’s no guarantee that the devices will operate correctly 100 percent of the time.

On the other end of the spectrum, concerns have been raised that RFID technology can be disrupted easily by anyone, from the lowly common criminal to a Constitution-thrashing fascist government, with an electromagnetic pulse delivering device, rendering a firearm with such technology installed inoperable.

Nothing seems to fit. Nothing except biometrics, of course.

Developing Dynamic Grip Recognition 

“One of our faculty had the brilliant idea and I still think it’s brilliant now, what, 13 years later?” Sebastian said. “It’s called Dynamic Grip Recognition. The image it produces is a combination of the size and strength of your hand and how your brain is wired to do something reflexively. It’s turns out that it’s something that can be replicated, over and over again.”

The technology was invented by then NJIT Associate Professor Michael Recee, for which he received a patent. The concept was simple and in trials accuracy is something that’s been easy to replicate. Nearly every pattern is unique to the individual user and the rate of success continues to grow every time a new prototype is revealed.

Developing the system hasn’t been easy. Sebastian said recently the program has been in its final vapors. Currently, the development the DGR program is being handled by two people: Recee and a single graduate student.

NJIT’s initial involvement in gun safety was a fact-finding mission. The school had been tasked with compiling data and conducting a survey, to follow up on an earlier national report commissioned to determine how to better protect law enforcement personnel. Sebastian said it was around this time that Recee came up with his proposed system. Soon, the school set about making it a reality.

Early support for DGR came from U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who helped secure appropriations to fund its development. A couple of years later. in the early 2000s, then-U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine threw his support behind the project. Though the project wasn’t funded each year, NJIT saw several million dollars in federal funding come through its doors to help make personalized gun safety a reality.

The project even earned legislative support from New Jersey when in late 2002 the State passed a law that required only guns with personalized weapon technology be sold three years after the technology became viable.   

The Smart Gun was well on its way. Over the years, prototypes went from having to be plugged into a computer to fire to being wireless and operable at the same time, all of the sensors and DGR gadgetry tucked away neatly into the grip of the pistol.

“We were at the last, literally the last drop in the gas tank of federal funding,” Sebastian said of a 2008 demo. “We were about to declare victory and show it off. We had an entrepreneur who was interested.”

But, things just never seemed to work out. Gun manufacturers, some say, weren’t willing to take the risk of investing money to push it to the next level and available government funding was shifted to other destinations. Though interest in smart gun technology overall has been rekindled following the massacre of 26 people, 20 of them children, in Newtown, Conn. it’s hard for Sebastian to expect it to last, given the project’s history.

Sebastian thinks NJIT is on the verge of a breakthrough, despite not having the funding, or interest, from gun manufacturers. He said he believes the school will have 25 handguns equipped with DGR ready for field-testing as early as this year. It works and will work when tested outside of a controlled environment, but what DGR needs is a face.

“My personal opinion is the only way this technology will be adopted is if it’s placed in the hands of people who will be icons (for personalized weapon technology), the military, police, Secret Service,” he said.  

Short Memories, NRA Pressure Impede Smart Gun Tech, Some Say

Count Carole Stiller among those whose recollection of smart guns in New Jersey has clouded over a mostly fruitless decade. The president of the state’s chapter of the Million Mom March, an organization aimed at promoting stricter gun control measures, Stiller remembers great initial support for smart gun technology that eventually waned along with financial support for its development.

She said she’s still hopeful that the technology will be implemented in the near future, but noted that the development process seems to be hampered by the public’s short attention span. Whenever an accidental shooting, especially one involving children, is reported, there’s an outcry for more stringent gun safety measures. Soon, unfortunately, it’s all forgotten. Groundswells fade.

The next time a child picks up a loaded weapon and accidently fires it we’ll have the same discussion, she said, wonder why nothing’s been done to prevent it from happening again.

“People will say it was an accident. No, it was an accident waiting to happen,” Stiller said of the shooting death of Holt. “People need to have common sense. If you can lock your iPhone, don’t tell me you can’t do the same to your gun.”

It’s not that the same can’t be done, Sebastian said, it’s that there are forces at work ensuring that it won’t happen. When manufacturers unveil new personalized weapon technology or announce their intention to develop smart guns they’re met with immediate criticism and threats from the National Rifle Association, Sebastian said. The argument is that any restrictive technology renders guns unreliable, unaffordable, and, most dauntingly, under government control.

Colt and Smith & Wesson have attempted to produce Smart Guns, with the latter being granted $3 million from the National Institute of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs to develop prototypes, according to a report commissioned by Connecticut’s Office of Legislative Research. Mossberg & Sons even developed a shut gun with personalized weapon technology.

No smart guns are commercially available, currently. Sebastian blames much of the delay in on the NRA and the pressure it exerts on gun manufacturers and legislators. The result is gun companies who have no incentive to make their weapons more safe and elected officials who won’t ask.

“Gun safety and gun control have been wrapped around the same axel and we can’t untwine them,” he said.

Legislation, meanwhile, hasn’t centered on personalized weapon technology.

When Holt was shot much of the discussion centered – like it probably has for investigators – on why a child even had access to a firearm to begin with.

State Sen. Jim Holzapfel, R-Ocean, plans on introducing legislation that would increase penalties for knowingly allowing a minor to gain access to a loaded, unlocked firearm at a legal gun owner’s premises. The legislation mirrors the recommendation made by NJ SAFE task force, a committee commissioned by Gov. Chris Christie to examine the state’s gun laws, which said gun owners should face more severe penalties should they fail to take reasonable precautions to keep guns out of the hands of children.

Friends of the Holt family have started a petition for a piece of legislation called the More Safes for Brandon Act. The law would require prospective gun owners to show proof that they own a gun safe before being allowed to purchase a firearm. Current gun owners would be forced to purchase a gun safe within a year or face a fine as well as the loss their firearms.

But still, the penalties are almost only administrable after an incident, after it’s too late. Holzapfel said, despite the legislation he’ll soon present, throwing around new bills can have unintended consequences. Gun control measures need to be made with a level head, after lengthy consideration. Where New Jersey needs to start is by enforcing laws already on its books.

“You want to do something, but I think the number one thing is education. Education has got to be continuous. It needs to be brought home. Often times it’s the kind of thing where it’s difficult to gauge how successful you are. It’s very difficult to quantify, but it works,” he said. “Most people, when these tragedies to occur, my goodness, this is that last thing they would want to happen. But people forget. Some people don’t take care of business like they should.”      

Personalized weapon technology, specifically Dynamic Grip Recognition, is something Holzapfel is ready to embrace, should be prove effective, of course, and it’s the kind of ingenuity the suspects can serve dual purposes: making guns safer and making someone a lot of money.

“If the technology comes along and is able to work as designed, there’s money to made in this country,” he said.

Money vs. Gun Safety

So far, money has worked against the development of Smart Gun technology.

With RFID and magnet devices proving lackluster, firearms that come equipped with that technology haven’t been accepted by law enforcement, and thus haven’t been made widely available to the public. Fingerprint technology exists, but that’s likely one of the most unreliable gun safety measures being discussed. The financial incentive just doesn’t exist.

It’s not that the technology is expensive, Sebastian said, it’s the research and development that will get you. A gun manufacturer might have to spend $100 million to develop a Smart Gun that works 99.7 percent of the time. That cost gets passed along to the customer. Developing working technology is almost assuredly more cost-effective through public funding, Sebastian said.

NJIT’s DGR system is close, almost there. Sebastian said the cost of parts for a conversion kit, including the sensors and 10-year-old microprocessor is somewhere in the range of $50. Though the technology is being developed for handguns, he wouldn’t rule out its use in rifle and shotguns. Though you’d certainly have to recalibrate the sensors based on where the hands rest and how you grip a shoulder weapon, there’s more room to store the additional electronics.

With interest, if not funding, renewed, NJIT will continue working towards making its Dynamic Grip Recognition system viable. But even as it currently exists it’s effective. In a home application, where the primary goal is to keep firearms from accidentally being used by children or teenagers, the technology is sound.

Now, it’s a matter of seeing how many accidental shooting deaths we can tolerate before something should be done.

“If we don’t do something to address the safety issue, we’ll be having this discussion again and again,” Sebastian said.


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