Now that a German-based company has announced a gun capable of determining whether it is being held by its owner, New Jersey could require all firearms to be “smart guns,” Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll told a crowd of about 35 people this week.

But if it does, the state will be making a dumb move, he told a receptive audience from the New Jersey Second Amendment Society at the Whippany VFW Tuesday night.

It would making a simple technology complicated, unreliable and likely expensive, said the libertarian-leaning Republican assemblyman, who has championed gun rights bills in one of the most gun regulation-heavy states in the country.

He ridiculed manufacturer Armatix’s claim that it could determine, with 90 percent accuracy, whether a gun was being held by a person wearing a watch meant to pair with the firearm. And he took aim at its claimed ability to only fire when pointed at its target.

“When I’m talking about targets, I’m talking about someone who’s about to rape my wife,” Carroll said. “And I want to be sure that the gun goes off when I’m firing at that particular target.”

If the Armatix pistol works just 90-percent of the time, then we’re talking about a firearm that experiences a failure every single magazine. By way of comparison, the RFI for the military’s Modular Handgun System requires a minimum of 2,000 rounds between stoppages and 10,000 rounds between failures. In addition to it’s unacceptably high failure rate, Armatix only shows a single model on their web site, the 1P1, which only exists as a .22LR. The .22LR is not generally regarded as a proper defensive caliber because of it’s low penetration, small diameter, and energy.

Put bluntly, this pistol is a piece of junk with zero commercial viability, and it verges on being criminal negligence that the ATF would even consider it for importation.