Eric Holder, the Attorney General and unindicted co-conspirator in the death of at least one Border Patrol agent and hundreds of innocent Mexican civilians, appeared before a House Appropriations subcommittee last Friday and waxed philosophical on the next step in the administration’s war against the Bill of Rights. From the Daily Caller, Eric Holder wants gun owners to wear “smart gun” bracelets.

Attorney General Eric Holder wants to explore “common sense” gun reforms, like mandating that gun owners would have to wear bracelets before they could activate their firearms.

Holder made his remarks while testifying before a U.S. House of Representatives appropriations committee on Friday. He acknowledged the existence of the Second Amendment, which gives people the unqualified right to own and carry weapons, but nevertheless expressed support for several gun control measures that he described as “common sense reforms,” according to The Washington Free Beacon.

“One of the things we learned when we were trying to pass those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and talked about how guns can be made more safe by making them either though fingerprint identification, the gun talks to a bracelet that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon,” said Holder, referring to so-called “smart gun” technology.

“It’s those kinds of things that I think we want to try to explore so that people have the ability to enjoy their Second Amendment rights while at the same time decreasing the misuse of weapons that lead to the kinds of things we see on a daily basis, where people, kids especially, are struck down.”

Leaving aside, for a moment, the technical problems with any of these things (what happens if the device for reading your fingerprints or receiving the signal from the bracelet fails or the batteries are dead?) the real question that should have been asked of Holder was how any of these devices make anyone safer.

To date, all the weapons used in killing rampages have been purchased legally. This implies that the person who purchased the weapon would have also purchased the bracelet or had the gun programmed to recognize their fingerprints. The only thing these technologies accomplish is inserting a problematic and untried technology into a personal defense weapon which increases the chance that the weapon will fail when needed and which prevents another member of the household using the weapon in case of the absence, incapacitation, or death of the registered gun owner. In the case of the fingerprint reader, the real target is gun ownership. The use of a fingerprint reader would make it difficult to impossible for private citizens to sell, trade, inherit, or bequeath firearms without reprogramming the weapon and presumably some interaction with a law enforcement agency.

Other alleged “smart gun” technologies include implanting a GPS transmitter or RFID chip in each firearm. While this does nothing to enhance the safety of anyone, it does permit law enforcement agencies to know where weapons are located, at least so long as the batteries work, and allows citizens carrying weapons legally to be targeted for harassment by an increasingly arbitrary and brutal law enforcement community.

Ultimately, a “smart gun” is no smarter than its user.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTalnzcO0xk[/youtube]

Accidents and homicides will happen so long as there are weapons, but as a free people we’ve made the decision that the cost of the Second Amendment is dwarfed by its value.

If Holder wants to ensure gunowners are easily recognizable, I have a suggestion which would cost a lot less money than “smart gun” technologies. How about a nifty colored star to wear on our shirts. It worked well in the past and there is no reason it won’t serve Holder’s regime as well as it did the inventors.