Any smart technology is an added failure rate in addition to those failure modes.

Arguing that something might fail and therefore any additional changes that can introduce failure modes are therefore okay is the absolute worst claim to hear from any engineer. You can’t possibly be trying to make this argument in good faith.

A misfire or a jam are just as possible on a "smart" gun. Again, this is not a unique standard being applied unfairly.

Gun owners already treat reliability as a major factor in purchasing decisions. Whether that reliability is hardware or software is moot, as long as the thing goes "bang" when expected.

It's not hard to see the parallels to LLMs and other software, although ostensibly with much lower stakes.

There are (or were, anyway) smart guns on the market. It's just that nobody wants to buy them.

As far as your comparison with misfires and jams, well... for one thing, your average firearm today has MRBF (mean rounds before failure) in the thousands. Fingerprint readers on my devices, though, fail several times every day. The other thing is that most mechanical failures are well-understood and there are simple procedures to work around them; drilling how to clear various failures properly and quickly is a big part of general firearms training, the goal being to be able to do it pretty much automatically if it happens. But how do you clear a failure of electronics?

> But zero smart guns are on the market. How are they evaluating this? A crystal ball?

It doesn't take a crystal ball to presume that a device designed to prevent a product from working might prevent the product from working in a situation you didn't expect.

> Why do we not consider “doesn’t shoot me, the owner” as a reliability plus?

Taking this question in good faith: You can consider it a plus if you like when shopping for a product, and that's entirely fair. Despite your clear stated preference, it's not relevant (or is a negative) to reliability in the context of "goes bang when I intentionally booger hook the bang switch".

I'm not trying to get into the weeds on guns and gun technology. I generally believe in buying products that behave as I expect them to and don't think they know better than me. It's why I have a linux laptop and an android cell phone, and why I'm getting uneasy about the latter.