I’m worried about three situations where an unauthorized person could fire my gun. One, a child — such as my own — could get hold of it. Two, someone could steal the gun, and that person would of course be a criminal. And three, in the event I use the gun in self-defense, someone could wrestle it away from me.

None of these problems can be completely addressed with current storage methods. You might forget to return a gun to its proper location immediately after carrying or practicing with it; a criminal could break into a safe, or steal the whole safe and deal with it later; and storage is irrelevant when you’re wrestling with an assailant over the weapon. Smart guns hold out the promise of solving these issues.

I’m especially drawn to the idea of a gun that would be useless to a burglar, or even one with a security system that would be difficult to disable. Most criminals who pack heat aren’t gun nuts; some don’t even know how to load their weapons. Criminals usually don’t carry guns they stole personally, but many procure weapons on the black market, and hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen each year in the United States.