Engage Armament announced it would start carrying the iP1 on May 1st. It backpedaled less than 24 hours later, after gun-rights advocates lashed out on Facebook and called the store, threatening to shoot Raymond, his girlfriend, and his dog.

There has been renewed interest in smart guns since the Newtown school shooting, which reinvigorated the gun-control debate. However, there is immense pressure not to be the first to sell them. That’s because of a New Jersey law passed in 2002 known as the Childproof Handgun Law, which says that all guns sold in New Jersey must be state-approved smart guns within three years of a smart gun being sold anywhere in the country. The goal was to make smart guns mandatory as soon as the technology existed. Officially, no smart gun has been sold in the US yet — meaning if Raymond had sold one, it would have triggered the clause in New Jersey.

"My apologies to the people of New Jersey," Raymond said in the video, which was posted to Facebook but has since been deleted. "I did not know that I would be screwing you over."

Smart guns, or personalized guns, are designed to be useless unless unlocked by radio signal or a biometric authenticator such as voice activation, fingerprints, or a retina scan. When New Jersey’s law was written, proponents thought smart guns were just around the corner. They were supposed to be here over a decade ago, but politics keeps getting in the way.

"We thought it would take, I don’t know, three or four years for some American manufacturer to get the nerve up to do what is really not rocket science," says Bryan Miller, a gun-control advocate who led the charge for the 2002 law. "The reason it hasn’t happened is very simply because the gun industry and its lobby have intimidated American companies from doing it."

The CEO of Colt wrote an editorial supporting smart guns in 1997; he was ousted the next year. Smith & Wesson started building one in 1999 as part of a government order; the National Rifle Association immediately organized a Smith & Wesson boycott. Last month, Oak Tree Gun Club in California briefly carried the iP1, but a fierce backlash prompted a swift retreat before any were sold. The store now denies it ever stocked the gun, even though photos show otherwise.

"We want gun owners to feel like they are dinosaurs if they aren’t using smart guns."

Smart-gun advocates say the technology will stop kids from shooting themselves with their parents’ guns, undermine the market for stolen guns, and protect law enforcement from having their guns used against them. "We need the iPhone of guns," said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor, referring to the phone’s fingerprint unlock. Conway is backing a $1 million contest for smart-gun technology. "We want gun owners to feel like they are dinosaurs if they aren’t using smart guns," he told the Washington Post.

Opponents counter that the technology adds an unnecessary failure point — you don’t want to fumble with a fingerprint unlock if someone is breaking into your home. They also fear the spread of laws like New Jersey’s, since similar proposals have been introduced in other states and in Congress. "The NRA does not oppose new technological developments in firearms," the group writes on its website. "We are opposed to government mandates that require the use of expensive, unreliable features, such as grips that would read your fingerprints before the gun will fire."

Criticism also comes from a surprising place: The Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, which has a long list of objections to smart guns. "There is this idea that the smart gun is a catch-all solution," says director Josh Sugarman, but people use their own guns in murders and suicides most of the time anyway. "Even if every gun was a smart gun, it would affect a very small percentage of gun violence in this country."

The focus on smart guns cannibalizes funding and attention that should be put toward gun-violence research and the fight to stop military-grade weapons from being sold to civilians, Sugarman says. And while smart guns tend to grab headlines, there is little evidence that people actually want them.