Technology & Tax Policy Can Curb Gun Violence
An idea to move smart-gun technology forward
In 2023, 46,728 Americans died from gun deaths—128 per day. Much of America’s gun violence is committed using stolen firearms or ones purchased illegally.1
At Sandy Hook, the shooter used his mom’s guns to kill her, six staff members of the school, and 20 elementary school students. In last year’s mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs victory parade, authorities recovered multiple firearms purchased illegally or trafficked. Just last month, the son of a sheriff's deputy took his mother’s former service weapon to kill two men and wound six others at Florida State University.
It’s not just the mass shootings you’ve heard about. Every day, shootings in America involve guns either bought illegally or used by someone other than the registered owner. For example, recently, a shooter used a handgun stolen from a vehicle parked at Gold’s Gym in East Memphis to murder someone. A couple of days later in Philadelphia, a two-year old accidentally shot himself in the stomach after finding a gun at home.
We safeguard other objects in our lives so that only the rightful owner can use them. You need Face ID to unlock an iPhone. You need a pin number to use a debit card. What if guns could use similar technology to prevent all of the aforementioned shootings?
That technology exists. Smart-gun technology ensures that only the owner of a gun can operate it by using personalized identifiers, such as a biometric sensor on the gun grip. However, you won’t find smart guns in stores or on the streets today in America. The gun lobby has fought tooth and nail for the better part of three decades to stop the commercial viability of smart guns.
It’s time to stand up to them, and Republicans just showed us a way to change gun policy through tax policy.
How we got here
After Columbine in 1999, cities, states, and the White House sued or threatened to sue gun companies to hold them liable for gun violence. Within a year, the White House announced a settlement with Smith & Wesson. The manufacturer agreed to a number of voluntary reforms, including developing smart guns.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) was livid. It accused Smith & Wesson of having “run up the white flag of surrender and run behind the Clinton-Gore lines, leaving its competitors in the U.S. firearms industry to carry on the fight for the Second Amendment.” The gun lobby quickly riled up public opposition against Smith & Wesson, sending its sales and stocks plunging. The company laid off 15 percent of its workforce and its CEO resigned. The new CEO paid a pilgrimage to the NRA and reversed course. And the new President, George Bush, had little interest in enforcing the Clinton-era settlement.
A couple of years later, New Jersey took a different tack. In December 2002, it passed the bipartisan New Jersey Childproof Handgun Act that required gun manufacturers and dealers to only sell smart guns within 30 months of a smart gun being offered for sale anywhere in the United States. The gun lobby’s response? It blocked research into smart-gun technology so that the New Jersey law, which it deemed a ban on all handguns, could never come into effect.
Nevertheless, a decade later, two gun stores in California and Maryland tried to sell the German-made Armatix iP1 gun, which only works if the owner is wearing a special watch. Both stores faced wicked backlash—even receiving death threats—and quashed their plans to sell it.
The New Jersey legislature eventually saw the writing on the wall. In 2019, Governor Murphy signed into law a bill that would repeal much of the Childproof Handgun Law, recognizing it created headwinds to the sale of smart guns. In its place, he implemented a watered-down requirement that gun stores only must offer at least one smart gun alongside traditional handguns once the technology was commercially viable in the U.S.
A better way forward
The gun lobby created a chilling effect that stalled R&D on smart-gun technology for decades by threatening the bottom line of both gun manufacturers and gun sellers. There’s two ways the federal government can step in to counter this effect.
First, federal dollars can jump-start R&D. After Sandy Hook, President Obama committed millions of new dollars in grants to gun manufacturers to encourage the development of new technology. The federal government should double down on that effort, but, crucially, it should open up the grant funding to tech companies beyond traditional gun manufacturers. Defense companies like Palantir and Anduril thrive on building technology for the government (largely the military). They are less susceptible to pushback from the gun lobby because they don’t rely on a direct-to-consumer business model; they’re selling to governments. If gun manufacturers are unwilling to do this research, we should happily let them cede their market position to other leading tech companies who can drive innovation in the field and bring down costs.
Second, at the same time, we can boost demand for this technology from gun stores and gun owners. Right now, Americans can preorder a smart gun from the Colorado-based company Biofire for $1,500. It costs about $1,000 more than a traditional firearm. Through a tax credit, the federal government can subsidize smart guns to bring them closer in price to traditional handguns. The government could also provide a credit to current gun owners for swapping in their traditional firearms for a smart gun (think Cash for Clunkers).
Here’s the Biofire smart gun tested for an article in NPR. The photo on the left shows the fingerprint sensor and on the right is a facial recognition sensor.
To drive down the cost of this program, the tax credit could apply only to smart guns selling for, say, $1,000 or less. That’d further incentivize those tech companies I mentioned earlier to get a move on so that manufacturers and sellers alike can take advantage of the credit.
To help pay for the program, we can double down on tax policy. Democrats have tried and failed multiple times to ban assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Instead, they could levy taxes against both and use that revenue to help pay for this smart-gun subsidy. Representative Don Beyer has already proposed a bill along those lines.
Using tax policy on guns might sound insane. But Republicans in Congress are trying to do it right now. In their “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” the House GOP slipped in a tax break for gun silencers. Republicans aren’t holding their breath for Democratic votes on a gun silencer tax break, so they’re hoping they can do it with a simple majority.
As I described in an earlier post, bills that only affect tax and revenue can pass through a legislative process called budget reconciliation, which only requires a majority vote in the Senate. Democrats should also take advantage of this process to push gun policy. Whereas something like an assault rifle ban would never get 60 votes in the modern Senate, Democrats could pass a subsidy for smart guns and a tax on assault rifles with a simple majority next time they take Congress.
The goal of this policy, to be clear, is not to increase the number of guns in America or to enrich gun companies. We already have more guns than people. But if we can make smart guns commercially viable, we can start building toward a world where more guns on the street have smart gun technology and are less likely to be misused in accidents or in crimes.
This is the time to be aggressive and creative
Imagine if we banned seat belts for decades after the private sector developed them. Seat belts save 15,000 lives a year! Meanwhile we’ve stopped ourselves from developing and deploying smart-gun technology despite the fact that almost every day a kid in America accidentally shoots herself or someone else.
As wonky as it may sound, tax policy could be a meaningful first step, and now is the time to try. A big reason the New Jersey law failed in the past is the gun lobby effectively portrayed the law as an attempt to ban all handguns, and the gun industry had little financial motive to get involved. On the other hand, this tax credit would be voluntary for gun owners and is financially beneficial to industry.
The reason smart-gun technology is worth revisiting now is that while the gun lobby is still strong, it’s weaker than it’s ever been. Over the past few years, the NRA has been mired in litigation and financial scandal. After reaching its peak membership in 2018, the NRA has lost a million members. Its annual revenues have plummeted from a high of $459 million in 2013 down to $178 million in 2023. The once-dominant organization is losing its stronghold, and Democrats should take advantage of its mismanagement.
Taking a step back, will this proposal stop all gun violence? Of course not. Even if every gun were a smart gun, we have deeper challenges. The shooter at the 2017 Las Vegas music festival—the deadliest mass shooting in our history—had purchased his weapons legally and the Bourbon Street New Year’s Eve shooter did the same. On top of that, the majority of gun deaths are suicides.
Still, this technology could help save kids from accidentally firing guns and stop criminals from using stolen guns. It’s a good place to start.
This is hard to quantify, but here are some statistics. In the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, the Department of Justice asked prisoners who had possessed firearms during their arrest how they obtained their gun. About 90% did not buy it themselves, 25% got it from a a friend or family member, 43% got it off the street or in the underground market, 6% stole it, and 17% got it in another way, like finding it at a crime scene.
From 2017 to 2023, law enforcement asked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to trace almost 1.3 million guns. Over half—56%—of the traced guns had a different purchaser than the ultimate possessor of the gun.
Lastly, In a study of 45,247 guns recovered at crime scenes in California, researchers found that handguns were 3 times more likely to be used if a gun were reported lost and 9 times more likely to be used if a gun were reported stolen.