Can a Gun Be ‘Safe?’

Every once in a while, someone comes up with yet another bright idea for how we can reduce gun violence by making the products whose use results in the violence more ‘safe.’ For a couple of years, the ‘safe gun’ movement featured technologies which only allowed a gun’s owner to shoot the gun by matching his or her fingerprint to an electronic sensor on the grip of the gun.

Now our friends at The Trace have discovered a new approach to gun safety being developed by a company which manufactures and sells something they call ‘less lethal’ guns, which use ammunition made out of plastic which cannot penetrate human flesh like a solid metal bullet and therefore can’t cause the kind of tissue damage which leads to serious bleeding and then leads to death.

The company, Bryna Technologies, is selling their guns on their website for $379 and $479 bucks and you can also buy these products on Amazon where the listings refer to them as ‘launchers’ and say that what you are buying is an — ready? — ‘un-gun.’

The Amazon listing goes on to say, “Looks like a gun, performs like a gun, but designed to be non-lethal.”

Because this so-called ‘launcher’ uses a CO2 charge to propel the plastic round, it doesn’t meet the legal definition of a gun and therefore no background check or licensing is required in order to buy or carry what is, when all is said…