Would the NRA support this?
I was thinking about the recent controversy over the gun lobby attacking yet another device in the line of "owner only" fire mechanisms. Years ago there was, and maybe still is, a magnetic key based mechanism in the grip that is activated by a ring worn by the owner. The concept is nothing new.
But how about a technology that doesn't just detect presence of the owner, but one that takes a look at the target.
It could bounce an IR beam off of the target just as the trigger is pressed, but stops the hammer or locks the firing pin if, on doing some sort of reflection analysis it detects it is being fired at someone of the wrong skin color.
The device would have a skin tone threshold setting where you dial in a point from "Lily White", "freckled", "¡Hola!", "a little darker than that" and "really black". Then you set it to only shoot at people on one or the other side of that line.
The pitch is this - "Most people buy a gun to protect their family. But some tragically shoot members of their family by accident (1). If your family has more or less the same skin tone, then you can be sure when you grab it off the nightstand and blast away in the dark at wherever that noise came from, that Family Guardian technology will only fire at someone who definitely shouldn't be in your house at night."
Now, like I said, there's nothing racist about it, because the user can set it to shoot anyone of any race. We're working on one that can do religion too (well, you know, at least some of the time). With advanced compact image recognition, we might be able to set all kinds of conditions like "Wearing a hoodie" or "Has a mullet".
I can see how this would appeal to a good chunk of their market, so would I run into any problems with the NRA?
And yeah, I'll get all kinds of free advertising from all the people who think it's horrible, but I figure they'll sell like hotcakes.
FN(1) Less tragically so when on purpose.