Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review and the author of "The Conservatarian Manifesto.”

Eventually, all American gun control advocacy descends into science fiction. "If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint," Barack Obama asked last Tuesday, "why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?” For this reasonable-sounding inquiry, the president was applauded throughout the media.

It's wrong to compare guns to other products. Guns are killing machines designed to work as effectively and reliably as possible.

As it happens, though, there is a good answer to this question, and it's not that the supposedly nefarious "gun lobby" is standing in the way. That answer is that there is no market for guns that work just some of the time. Guns are simple things, all told, designed to operate as easily and reliably as possible. The introduction of electronics undermines this simplicity, and to a degree that is flatly unacceptable to the consumer. As President Obama well knows, the fingerprint software on his phone works rather erratically: Often it takes a user two or three tries to log in; occasionally, it flakes out entirely and defers to the password. When this happens on an iPhone, the user is mildly inconvenienced. If this were to happen on a Glock, the user would be dead. There is a reason that modern smartphones put the camera function outside of the authentication process.

The comparison of firearms to other commercial products invariably falls flat. It is true that, say, cars have become considerably safer over the last few decades; true, too, that “research” has contributed to this improvement. But it matters enormously that a car is not intended to hurt people, and that in a perfect world nobody would ever be injured by one. Can we say the same of firearms? Of course not. Guns are killing machines, designed explicitly to do damage to living things. In fact, they have no other purpose. As such, the salient question before any free people is not “are guns dangerous?” -- they are -- but “who gets them, and why?”

This is not to say that nothing at all can be done to improve public safety. On an individual level, gun owners should do everything to ensure that their firearms are kept away from children, and, where possible, they should train themselves in case they are ever called upon to shoot in anger. At the national level, the combination of better policing and economic growth can help to reduce crime -- and, indeed, it has. In 1993, gun crime was more than twice as common as it is now, and there were many fewer guns in circulation. Ugly as it is in its own right, that we have reached the point at which two-thirds of all firearms-related deaths are deliberately self-inflicted is a minor triumph.

How to address those deaths that remain? That is a tricky one. I do not know the answer, and nor, frankly, does anybody else. But selling fantasies to the ignorant is not going to cut it.



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