NRA lies smartly exposed

Anew national survey by an esteemed team of public-health researchers takes dead aim at one of the gun lobby’s worst lies among too many to count: That there’s just no market for smarter guns that would save lives. Sane people up to and including President Obama understand that equipping guns with technology that lets them fire only in the hands of rightful owners would cut firearm fatalities.

Plus, the ability to remotely disable a stolen weapon would surely reduce gun thefts — which happen more than 200,000 times a year, fuel much if not most violent street crime and also create new business for gun manufacturers.

The National Rifle Association has long insisted that Americans have no interest in smart-gun technology. Still more, the NRA’s vigorous opposition has cowed gun sellers from marketing such weaponry in fear that the association would otherwise drive them out of business.

Now, though, researchers associated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other top institutions have taken the country’s pulse on the issue via an Internet-based survey of more 7,300 American adults.

The findings as published in the prestigious American Journal of Public Health:

l If they were going to buy a gun, 59% of respondents said they would be willing “to purchase a childproof gun that fires only for authorized users.”

l Fully 43% of gun-owning Americans said they would be willing to buy a smart gun, while 55% those who owned just handguns were on board.

l There is high interest — 65% — in households with children under 18.

l Two-thirds of non-gun owners said they could make a purchase like that.

l Interest in childproof guns crossed the political spectrum — 71% of liberals, 56% of moderates and 56% of conservatives share the concept.

The survey proved the obvious but was necessary in the face of the NRA’s falsehoods. Privately financed, it also demonstrated why the association buffaloed Congress into banning federal spending on research into improving gun safety: because it is terrified that the facts will lead to reasonable actions to save lives.

The NRA touts a 2013 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry’s trade association, which asserted that just 14% of Americans were likely to buy a smart gun.

That number, never credible, is demonstrably proven wrong. On the very remote chance that it was accurate at the time of the survey, events like mass shootings have surely changed attitudes, while smartphones and GPS have acclimated millions to the powers of technology.

As the public-health researchers put it in an accompanying editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, “This suggests a substantial market exists for childproof guns among potential purchasers of new guns.”

In the perverse logic of gun zealots, the mere idea of a smart gun is distorted into a threat against Second Amendment rights: If smart guns are allowed, they will soon be mandated; then all guns will be tracked; then all guns will be confiscated.

Little wonder that Maryland gun dealer Andy Raymond reaped a whirlwind when he stocked one of America’s first smart guns in 2014.

“We got about 2,000 phone calls and maybe about the same emails,” he recalled, adding, “One person threatened to burn down the shop, another person threatened that I would be raped.”

He has vowed to never again market a smart gun.

In his raft of recent executive orders, Obama called for more federal research into smart guns — and the potential use of government purchasing power to push gun makers into offering them.

Full speed ahead on that initiative, please. Americans will buy smart guns. Somewhere, someone must have the courage to make and sell them.