"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 question, the president was praised throughout the media. As it happens, though, there is a good answer to this question: there is no market for guns that work just some of the time. Guns are simple things designed to operate as easily and reliably as possible. The introduction of electronics eats away this simplicity, and to a degree that is absolutely unacceptable to the consumer. As President Obama well knows, the fingerprint software on his phone works rather _ : Often it takes a user two or three tries to log in; occasionally, it falls asleep deeply and obeys the password. When this happens on an phone, the user is mildly inconvenienced. If this were to happen on a gun, the user would be dead. There is a reason that modern smartphones put the camera function outside of the authentication  process. How could we possibly think that guns are the same as other commercial products? 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 guns? Of course not. Guns are killing machines, designed 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 guns 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 fewer guns in circulation. Unpleasant as it is in its own right, that we have reached the point at which two-thirds of all guns-related deaths are deliberately self-inflicted   is a small victory. How to deal with 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. Which of the following might the writer NOT agree with?
Few know how to deal with guns-related deaths. Efforts to improve public safety have partly paid off. The nature of guns makes them different from other products. Guns using fingerprint software can risk the lives of the users.