“If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?”

President Barack Obama’s question, in a January 5 address on gun violence, echoed the myriad “if we can put a man on the moon”-style complaints we’re all familiar with — the ones that have bemoaned our failure to solve various stubborn social problems ever since Neil Armstrong’s foot touched the lunar dust.

In this case: If we can put a computer in everyone’s pocket, why can’t we do something about the 300,000 gun deaths in the U.S. over the last decade, or figure out how to make the 300 million guns at large in the country a little bit safer?

Scott Rosenberg is an editor at Backchannel. ——— Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Obama’s query was also a nod to the tiny cadre of entrepreneurs and inventors who are developing “smart guns” — guns engineered to be less likely to cause unintentional or undesirable harm. Smart gun proponents aim to call a technological truce in the United States’ perennially overheated gun debate and apply some good old basement-inventor know-how to the issue. Theirs is a determined effort, but to date an ill-starred one: For two decades, as the gun-violence toll climbed and the gun debate raged, the smart gun effort has only sparked and sputtered.

It turns out that it is, in fact, a lot harder to build an iGun (as one smart gun design is dubbed) than an iPhone. One reason: it’s simply tough to design it right and build it well. Another: the gun marketplace is loaded with fanatical true believers, political booby-traps, and investor-spooking risks.

But the biggest hurdle for smart guns may also be the least visible one. Guns turn out to be just the kind of problem — controversial, person-to-person, sprawling across social and cultural boundaries — that Silicon Valley as an institution instinctively runs from solving.

All of this helps explain why the smart-gun movement, despite encouragement from The White House bully pulpit on down, remains such a rickety effort. The concept might inspire moon-shot rhetoric, but right now the actual companies and organizations taking on this challenge feel closer in scale and impact to a backyard model-rocket launch.

On a Tuesday morning last month, Ralph Fascitelli, board president of Washington CeaseFire, a gun violence activist group, surveyed the Napa Room at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. “We have, in one room, the true leaders of this movement!” It did not take a ballroom. There they were: Jonathan Mossberg, the bow-tied creator of the iGun. Ernst Mauch, a legendary gun designer (“he designed the gun that killed Osama bin Laden,” event organizers kept mentioning) who has devoted himself to smart gun work. Kai Kloepfer, a gangly yet poised 18-year-old smart gun entrepreneur who is regularly hailed as “the Mark Zuckerberg of smart guns.” Stephen Teret, the soft-spoken Johns Hopkins scholar who has tracked public opinion and policy on guns for decades.

Surveying them from a seat in the press-conference crowd was Ron Conway, the prominent Silicon Valley angel investor who is the tech industry’s most outspoken smart gun advocate. Silver-haired, burly, and prone to the occasional oratorical excess, Conway watched as San Francisco’s police chief, Greg Suhr, announced his willingness to pilot smart-gun adoption on his force.

When it was the investor’s turn to speak, he declared: “Gun companies are an old-line industry who have decided they don’t want to innovate, so we will help them out…. This is the innovation capital of the world. The gun companies have chosen to sit on their asses and not innovate. So Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are coming to their rescue.”

Conway traces his commitment to the cause to the day of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012. As he tells it, “I had [former congresswoman and shooting victim] Gabby Giffords, who’s a good friend of mine, at my home, and I had an epiphany that evening that the tech industry had to get involved in this issue.” In 2013 Conway’s epiphany fathered the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, a nonprofit that has handed out $1 million to 15 smart gun entrepreneurs and inventors, including Mossberg and Kloepfer.

To understand how unusual Conway’s support for gun safety development was at that time in Silicon Valley, and even today, consider this: In 2013, the National Rifle Association published a long list of people and groups it considered “anti-gun.” The organization has since pulled that list off the Web, but a copy was saved and published by the pro-gun Web site Second Amendment Check. Among the nearly 300 Hollywood stars, musicians, movie producers, writers, business people and other notable personalities that appear on that list, you won’t find a single prominent name from the technology or startup worlds.

The Smart Tech Challenge effort is real, but by Silicon Valley standards, it’s tiny, and the projects it has backed mostly remain in prototype-land. Mossberg has had to go outside his family’s ancestral gun business to bring his idea to fruition. Kloepfer is a teenager heading off to MIT next fall. Mauch is openly emotional about the need for smart guns yet hard-headed about how tough the engineering challenges remain.

Smart gun advocates like to say that this is their moment: We have the technology; just add money. But Mauch insists that there are still years to go. “It is not a matter of money. It is a matter of patience. If the right people are working together, finally, the money will come, in 5 or 10 years.”

There are a few different ideas out there for how we could use technology to make guns safer, but they are all built on the idea of gun “personalization”: Lock the firearm to a single owner’s identity so no one else can fire it, and it won’t become a hazard in the hands of a child or a risk if stolen or seized by an assailant. You can do what Obama suggested, and add fingerprint authentication to your gun — that’s the approach Kloepfer is pursuing. Or you can use RFID chips to make the gun operable only when someone is in possession of a “token” like a ring (Mossberg’s approach with the iGun) or a special watch (like the one that unlocks the Armatix iP1, the project Mauch oversaw before he left Armatix last year).

Whatever strategy you choose, you’re going to face problems and tradeoffs. When people use guns for self-defense, police work, or in the military, they care most about reliability. You don’t want bugs in the software; you don’t want sweat or temperature extremes to cause a malfunction. The inside of a gun, smart gun proponents admit, is hard on electronics. In terms of engineering tolerances and failsafe expectations, making a smart gun is less like making an iPhone than like building an airplane.

But the hurdles aren’t only technical; they are sociopolitical as well. The National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which represents the gun industry, say they’re not against smart guns per se, just for consumer choice. But in practice they have formed a united front against smart guns, after abortive efforts to develop them in the 1990s by companies like Smith and Wesson and Colt faltered, in part thanks to an NRA boycott. A 2002 New Jersey law aimed to give the industry a kickstart by requiring that, three years after the first certified smart gun went on sale anywhere in the U.S., smart guns would be the only kind of gun you could buy in the state. In the wake of this well-meaning but disastrous legislation, gun-rights true believers made it a holy mission to bar smart guns from the marketplace and stop the New Jersey ban from kicking in.

This is the forbidding landscape onto which Conway and the Smart Tech Challenges group set forth in 2013 to “disrupt” and “rescue” the gun industry. Smart gun enthusiasts are adamant that they are not trying to take away anyone’s guns or take a stand on the Second Amendment. Their preferred analogy is to the advent of auto safety standards and the rise of the seatbelt.

“This is not about gun control,” says Margot Hirsch, the foundation’s president. “This is not a political issue. It’s about giving people the right to choose technologies that will make their guns safer.”

Still, the automotive analogy only gets you so far. The tech industry is fond of solutions that cut out the human middleman, as with the self-driving car. Thankfully, though, no one is building a self-shooting gun (though we’re closer than you might think). Another big difference between guns and cars is that Congress, in 2005, shielded gun manufacturers from most liability suits. Why make your product safer if the government says you don’t have to?

Even if the industry is cautious, the public seems to have an open mind: According to a recent study by Teret and four colleagues, 59 percent of Americans said that if they were to buy a handgun and they had the option to buy a “childproof” weapon, they’d consider it. Smart gun proponents point to that result as evidence of nascent market demand — if only the products were there to meet it.

So why aren’t they? Armatix, the only firm to succeed in shipping a smart gun that you could (theoretically) purchase, is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Mossberg says he could start making a handgun version of his iGun tomorrow (the rifle-size version he developed and tested in the late ’90s never went into large-scale production) with the right investment. Kloepfer is perfecting his prototype with the Smart Tech money and the proceeds of a small Indiegogo fundraiser but hasn’t yet sought the investment it would take to bring it to market.

Mossberg says that aside from the work of the Smart Tech Challenges group, “I have seen no evidence yet of Silicon Valley ‘coming to the rescue of the smart gun industry.’” But, he adds, “We have been a quiet bunch, and now the evidence is coming out showing this to be near a billion dollar industry. Nobody can ignore a billion dollar profitable industry that has social impact as well. That’s the holy grail for investors: large returns and positive societal impact.”

According to its public nonprofit filings, the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation raised about $3 million total in 2013 and 2014, from Conway and, in Hirsch’s words, “a handful of people here in Silicon Valley as well as two donors back east.” That’s not nothing, and if the organization can shepherd any of its grantees into the arms of check-writing venture capitalists, it might eventually make good on Conway’s “Silicon Valley to the rescue” rhetoric. But it’s a small outfit — when I asked Hirsch how big her organization was, she answered, “You’re talking to the organization” — and there was no hint of a VC feeding frenzy at the Palace Hotel event. When I spoke with gun-issue insiders and experts (none of whom wanted to go on the record in criticizing an effort that they’re sympathetic to), I heard the amounts of money tech luminaries were putting behind smart guns dismissed as “paltry” and insufficient. The $50 million Mike Bloomberg committed to stemming gun violence in 2014 came up regularly as a contrast: Bloomberg’s cash has supported candidates who are willing to take on the NRA and backed the operations of Everytown for Gun Safety, an umbrella community organizing group founded via the merger of two other groups, Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

If smart guns really offer both a potential market and a public good, why hasn’t the world of tech money come running? Here are some reasons.

(1) There’s no data. Tech investors are a data-driven bunch, yet the entire field of gun studies is moribund — it never recovered from its kneecapping by Congress in 1996, when legislators threatened to defund the Center for Disease Control unless it stopped all research into gun violence. An executive order by Obama lifted the ban in theory three years ago, but the field remains hobbled, and even if the floodgates opened tomorrow, there’s a whole lot of ground to be recovered.

(2) There’s too much shouting. Tech investors prefer to stand above the partisan fray, and even those who have more of a stomach for public policy debates might quail at the level of vitriol the gun issue triggers. Those who do wade in need to dial up the discretion filter to a level that many in the freewheeling tech world might find uncomfortable. For example, in 2014 progressive Seattle investor nick hanauer made a high-profile contribution to a Washington state background-check initiative. Then he got in trouble for an obviously sarcastic Facebook post that read, in part, “We need more school shootings!!!” That just doesn’t happen when you’re investing in, say, high-speed wireless networks.

(3) There’s just no natural constituency. Tech entrepreneurs and investors flock most avidly to ideas that meet their own needs; they like to “scratch their own itches” and “dog food” their products. It’s not as if there are no gun nuts in the tech world. But if you are, say, a libertarian-leaning programmer who enjoys shooting, you might well think twice before getting involved with smart guns. Why be called a traitor? On the other hand, if you’re an investor with liberal leanings and friends, getting involved with smart guns means actually dealing with gun people, which could be, you know, awkward or unpleasant.

Kloepfer says, “Even if you find someone who’s interested in your idea and thinks it’s worth funding, pretty often there’s some sort of statement like, ‘Yeah, I’d really love to, and I really like the company, I think it’s a good idea and will probably be profitable, but I don’t want to get involved in the gun world.’ ”

When there’s no natural constituency for an idea, its proponents can always set out to build such a constituency. This is called organizing. But organizing is alien to the Silicon Valley mindset. If you cling to the myth that technological progress exists in some pristine dimension beyond politics, why would you dive into its mess? “I think for technology and innovation we have to ignore politics,” Conway declared in a 60 Minutes interview on smart guns last year. Okay, you can ignore politics — but that doesn’t mean politics ignores you.

In Silicon Valley, people usually see government money as slow-moving and tangled up in strings. The smart money, the money that changes the world, comes from people who know tech inside out. But aside from Conway and a handful of his peers, right now the smart money isn’t flowing to smart guns. Some investors, no doubt, have concluded that they are not yet ready for market. They might not ever be. But Silicon Valley is supposed to be the place where you solve problems by failing faster until you succeed. With guns, the tech industry isn’t even trying.

No one should be under the illusion that a bunch of rich investors and nerdy entrepreneurs can, on their own, cure the U.S.’s centuries-old firearm disorder. But, yes, they could be helping a whole lot more.

On the day of the San Francisco smart gun conclave last month, Bill Gates was all over the news, pushing the Gates Foundation’s clean-energy moonshot and other initiatives in his annual letter. A few days before, Eric Schmidt announced that Google Ideas would henceforth be known as Alphabet Jigsaw, a “technology incubator that aims to tackle the toughest geopolitical issues.” Scanning these lists of philanthropic Marshall Plans and high-risk public-good projects, you won’t find the word “guns” anywhere.