20 dead in Orlando gay club shooting

[Thumpalumpacus]

Smart guns programmed to only work for a licensed user who has undergone background and psych evals every year or two.

If it's hackable it'll be hacked.  Something like this offers no ownership safety.  Even worse, it could potentially be hacked to falsely implicate someone else.

Perhaps. But I'm not a big fan of letting the perfect be the enemy of the better. Airbags don't work right all the time, but they've certainly made a dent in auto fatalities.

If the programming for such guns could be limited to licensed dealers with a specialized hardware setup, I imagine that might address much, though probably not all, of the weight of this objection, fair though it is. If Apple can encrypt a phone such that the FBI with all their resources cannot get into it, why cannot that same encryption algorithm -- if not one more secure -- be used to encrypt both the digitized modeling of the biometrics upon which such a gun would presumably operate, and the programming codes used to re-/deprogram the weapon?

It would, I think, greatly reduce stolen-gun shootings, of which Newtown was one.

Of course, you'd have to collect or permanently disable all dumb guns -- an expensive proposition.

And no, I don't think such a collection/disabling program would be politically feasible under current circumstances. But perhaps if smart-gun legislation included a long-term sundown clause, say fifty years, we could address the problem in a couple of generations.

It should also be noted that no changes in the law -- including my own suggestion -- would have stopped the massacre under discussion; the murderer's weapons were legal.