There’s a great article on Slate about technology to make safer guns, and how deregulation of the gun industry has caused gunmakers to be less responsible than their regulated counterparts. But it’s not just regulation–gun lobbyists hate some of the tech, and although the article doesn’t say this directly, there doesn’t appear to be any commercial interest.

From the article:

There’s a singular exception to this general advancement: guns. Research shows that it’s possible to make safer firearms. There are a slew of sensible technologies that gunmakers could add to their products that might prevent hundreds or thousands of deaths per year. One area of active research is known as the “smart gun”—a trigger-identification system that prevents a gun from being fired by anyone other than its authorized user. (James Bond carries one in Skyfall.)

But we aren’t likely to see smart guns on the market anytime soon. Even though the idea is technologically sound—researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have created a working prototype of a gun that determines whether or not to fire based on a user’s “grip pattern”—gun makers aren’t taking it up. They’ve been slow to add other safety technologies, too, including indicators that show whether a gun is loaded and “magazine safeties” that prevent weapons from being fired when their ammunition magazine is removed. (The magazine’s removal might lead some users to assume the gun isn’t loaded when there may in fact be a round in the chamber.)

Why aren’t gunmakers making safer guns? Because guns are exempt from most of the consumer safety laws that improved the rest of American life. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which was established in 1972, is charged with looking over thousands of different kinds of products. If you search its database for “guns,” you’ll find lots of recalls of defective air pistols and lead-covered toy guns but nothing about real firearms. That’s because the CPSC is explicitly prohibited from regulating firearms. If you’re injured by a gun, you can’t even go to court. In 2005, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which immunizes gun makers against lawsuitsresulting from “misuse” of the products. If they can’t be sued and can’t be regulated, gunmakers have no incentive to make smarter guns. It’s the Pinto story in reverse.

The article goes on to say that this tech will not necessarily stop massacres like the one in Newtown, since none of this stops people from just buying a gun and using it themselves–not all misused guns are the ones taken without permission from their owners. But a 2003 study suggests that having personalized trigger system like the one describe would stop 400 gun-related deaths a year. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 9 years since that study, and there’s apparently been no serious discussion about the technology since then. I’m not sure that we should necessarily jump right in and make such trigger systems mandatory on all guns or something–for starters, the fact that the main system described in the article still has a 1% failure rate, on top of all of the other reasons guns fail, should give us pause there. but why not make it mandatory for police officers? They use the same gun every day, right? And perhaps you could offer a tax credit on gun purchases when the gun has such a detection system. Gun advocates could hardly criticize a government for making guns cheaper, could it?

Call Slate contrarian if you’d like, but being contrarian is useful sometimes. Where else am I going to hear about guns interpreted as a consumer product, and accidental gun deaths to be the result of industry failings rather than personal ones? A worthy article, and well worth reading.