I know nothing of electronics. My experience is with software engineering, not electronic engineering. This is a "Is it possible?" type question. If it isn't possible, where are the barriers?
I'm asking this in light of Friday's tragedy in Newtown, CT, which I'm sure we're all familiar with.
Naturally, this has invoked a renewed debate on gun control. But it seems to me that what we need is not more gun control -- people have the right to own guns.
What we need is a system that keeps guns out of certain public places, and this is a problem that only an automated system can effectively solve. We can't have airport-style security in every school and mall.
Here's what I'm thinking about.
I'm a student in college, and we are issued ID cards with a radio signature of some sort. We flash them in front of scanners to get into buildings on campus.
Is it not possible to build a comparable technology INTO GUNS? To require that all fire-arms sold and purchased in the United States are built with an embedded wireless-detectable signature?
Is it not possible to then place wireless detection systems around schools and malls which can detect if such a signature comes past a designated boundary, thus putting the area on lockdown and automatically summoning the police before the incident has even begun?
And the firearms belonging to police and current military would of course not set these systems off; their signatures would match "SAFE".
Then the only task left to the government is enforcing this manufacturing requirement (a much more tractable problem) and cracking down on aftermarket modifications.
Is my proposition unreasonable? It seems so obvious that I'm sure there must be a reason it hasn't already been done.
If it is possible, and nobody else wants to try it, can you point me in the direction of the topics I should educate myself on to better understand how such a technology would work?
EDIT:
In response to the first answer:
I do realize that a non-powered component would require close proximity. But I do not believe it would be a difficult task to move this technology forward to the stage where it does not require close proximity. If they can build a particle collider -- if they can get to the moon -- if they can build an iPhone -- if they can do all the incredible things you hear about them doing every day -- they can develop a method to detect a radio signature at a distance of 500 feet. Absolutely. This is not science fiction.
As for removing/destroying the component: Say this component took the form of a micro-chip embedded into the metal. Now say, for a given model of a gun, there are five locations on the gun where it could fit.
Say 100 instances of this model are manufactured. For 20 of them place the chip in location A. For the next 20, location B, and so on. This would require a change in the manufacturing process, but not an unreasonable one, nor a prohibitively costly one.
Then mix the 5 subtypes and sell them in homogeneous batches -- a person wouldn't know where the component was on their particular gun. They would have to cut through the gun in myriad places to find the component they seek to destroy. They would destroy the gun in so doing. It would be borderline impossible.
As for sniffing -- a person would need to understand what the detection system was looking for in a signature, exactly what information would NOT set off the system. If the internal information scheme was kept secret, this is not a concern.
As for getting innocents in trouble-- a person would have to know what sort of signature the detection system was looking for, what kind of information it would convey. Easily kept secret. The people with the ability to break such a system would rarely overlap with the people looking to commit murder.
However, I have yet to think of a way around the Faraday cage.
