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For better or worse, smart guns can’t seem to catch a break. No, not the sort of long-range robo rifles that we test fired in our documentary Long Shot. I’m talking here about personalized hand guns with Bondian features like sensors and hand grips that render firearms into fancy paperweights unless they’re otherwise told to fire. 

Last we checked, hardly anyone was buying the things. That’s not for lack of options; the technology is certainly here. And since the early 90s, when then-President Clinton kickstarted the smart gun dream in earnest by striking a deal with gun company Smith & Wesson to look into the tech, a growing crop of companies and venture capitalists have been looking at ways to potentially personalize handguns for safety, as the Washington Post reports. 

There’s the .22-caliber Armatix iP1, a handgun that comes equipped by a stylish black waterproof watch that unlocks the gun only when it and the weapon’s radio-frequency ID tags are in a certain (close) proximity. There’s TriggerSmart, a company from Ireland researching and developing ways to childproof guns with add-on tech, again RFID-based. There’s the Intelligun, a smart gun designed by a Utah company that fires only via positive fingerprint identification. There’s the iGun and there’s Yardarm, the app that pings owners if and when their guns move.

And on and on. 

So why, 20 years on, are we still not buying smart guns? It’s a perfect storm of sky-high costs and spotty performance—to say nothing of anti-gun political pressure. 

They’re too damn expensive, for one. Want a iP1, watch included? That’ll be a cool $1,500. (Want a .40-caliber Glock? That’ll be a mere $600.) For another, critical would-be buyers are still quick to note the technology’s apparent shortcomings. Per the Post: 

The chief concern for potential buyers is reliability, with 44 percent of those polled by the National Shooting Sports Foundation saying the technology would not be reliable. A commenter in an online Glock forum explained the concern this way: “They can’t even make a cellphone that works reliably when you need it, and some dumb (expletive) thinks he can make a reliable techno-gadget gun that is supposed to safeguard you in dire circumstances?”

Besides, there are already over 300 million guns in domestic circulation. How, gun control advocates ask, could we reasonably expect to put a dent in the yearly national gun-death tolls, especially those involving children, even if every gun to hit the market from this point forward were a so-called “smart” gun?

If anything, it’s perhaps the sheer insurmountableness of doing so that has kept the buzz around smart-gun companies, and any public appetite for their products, to such a limited scope. As iGun told NPR last year, “It’s only been [the] lack of demand that has kept us from going any further.” 

But then there are people like Ron Conway. A Silicon Valley figured who had an early hand in both Google and Facebook, and who last year launched a $1 million safe-gun contest, Conway thinks there has never been a better time to build a smarter pistol.

“We need the iPhone of guns,” Conway told the Post. (It’s a fairly apt comparison: You can swiftly unlock your new iPhone 5 with a fingerprint, after all.) “The entrepreneur who does this right could be the Mark Zuckerberg of guns. Then the venture capitalists like me will dive in, give them capital, and we will build a multibillion-dollar gun company that makes safe, smart guns.”

Question is, will anyone buy them then?