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Why do you see it bad to have personalized guns? I think it's a good idea, if you don't like it don't use it. I wouldn't want anyone but me or the people I trust using my guns.
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User ID guns are dangerous because once they exist, then all guns will be mandated by law to be user ID guns, just like all current revolvers have the damn child saftey lock on them. You CANNOT get a new production gun without it (no choice).

Once user ID guns are standard, expect your gun not to work at the flip of some switch in Washington.
 
I think the big advancements will be in materials and sights. Look at just the last 20 years how we have seen the explosion in use of polymers, titanium, scandium alloys. In bullets we have seen new stuff like highly advanced JHP designs, frangibles, lead free, etc.

The trend seems to be for ever more convenient size and weight balanced with recoil (light weight Glocks, Kahr and Kel-tecs), or for ever more powerful capabilities (.500 S&W, .480 Ruger, popularized .454 Casull).

So, I think we will see slimmer slides of new materials. Perhaps tungsten alloy that would have more strength so it could be slimmer, yet also stonger and still have the weight for proper cycling? Maybe Ruger will eventually make a titanium Sp101 and GP100?

Sights are a wide open field. There is already an amazing array of iron, tritium, and electronic sights. I like the idea of a remote sighting system. Sort of the speed and convenience of point/instictive shooting with the accuracy of a red dot. I think minaturization will happen for all electronic displays such as TV, computer, etc and firearm sights will follow. The largest component of any electronic viewing system today is the display. Eliminate the traditional display and get it hooked to a near-eyball projector and the sight would be a hundred times less breakable, require much less power, and would be a fraction of the current size of red dot or ACOG sights today.
 
User ID guns would be cool for the hacker. How about turning all the cops weapons off on hell night? During a riot? If withing a block of your nefarious doings?
 
Firearms are a "mature" technology. Firearms today, are basically the same as they were 100 years ago. I think we can expect only incremental improvements in the overall design of firearms. Things such as the use of new materials in the construction of firearms, improvements in the design of the projectiles and improvement in the propulsion (ie: caseless ammunition that actually works) side of ammunition.

I think the firearms of 50 years from now will probably be very much like the ones we have today. The next big leap forward in weaponry will have to await the developement of new technology, much like when firearms first arrived on the scene and started to replace muscle powered weapons such as swords, spears and bows.
 
That's a great point. The more complicated you make something, the more things can go wrong. And if we make the operation of our firearms dependent on more and more complicated things, like electronics and all sorts of fail-safes, the chances of them failing, by accident or by nefarious means, rises higher and higher.

Imagine a criminal with some sort of EMP or some other electronic interference device shorting out all the police weapons in a certain area.

The more automated things get, the more chances there are for people to mess with them. I saw a program on TV about how the highways and cars of the future will be automated so you don't even have to drive. All the cars and traffic will be directly controlled by some mainframe. Imagine if a terrorist or hacker messed with that program.

Automation and technology are great things, but you must ALWAYS keep humans in the loop with the final word. We can let our guns help us use them properly. But we can't let the "machine" aspect override the "human" aspect. So no matter what new toys you add to the weapon, if a human wants it to go "bang" it needs to be able to go "bang".
 
I don't know how things will look, but there is one concept I would like to see tried.

This comes from a sci-fi book I read, natch, that was set in the BattleTech universe. In one of the early books a rifle was described as being fed a solid block of some sort of plastic or polymer. The soldier placed the block in the same place a mag would go and the gun would srtip off the plastic, hyper-accelerate it and send it out the muzzle.

I've always thought that would be a cool idea.
 
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