The Massachusetts legislature has established a commission that will study the feasibility of putting GPS locators in firearms, and that shall (not may) draft such legislation.
Where to start? Suppose we have 5 million guns (just throwing a low number out there) in Massachusetts that are GPS-equipped. Now, in order to be useful for after the fact crime investigation, we would need to store the geographic location of each firearm say, once a minute. So each minute, every gun's GPS transmits to a government mainframe its ID and location. That's five million observations per minute, or 300 million observations of data per hour, 7.2 billion observations per day, 216 billion observations per month. I think I got my orders of magnitude right.
Now, I'm speaking as a guy who makes a living as a SAS programmer analyzing massive medical datasets (100 million rows) for researchers, so I have some idea of what I'm talking about. The computing infrastructure that would be needed to read in, pre-process, write, sort, interpolate and retrieve this data would be tremendously expensive. We're talking tens of millions, at least, in IBM mainframes and staff. I can't wait to see what this committee's findings will be in terms of cost/benefit.
Thoughts on competitive shooting, gunsmithing, gun control and what it's like to be a Massachusetts gun owner.
you have one flaw in your thinking. . . You think the MA gun grabbers have any common sense and or won't cook the books to make it look affordable. . . .
ReplyDeleteI hate this state and the commies that run it. . .