Patent Application
20180289153
The present invention is related to a system for locking and/or restraining a firearm, so as only the designated official/operator may have use of the long gun. This is accomplished by more particularly capturing the muzzle of a long gun such as a rifle, shotgun, or carbine as well as capturing the stock of the weapon thereby eliminating any possible removal of the weapon until it is unlocked.
Note that the following discussion may refer to several publications and references. Discussion of such publications herein is given for more complete background of the scientific principles and is not to be construed as an admission that such publications are prior art for patentability determination purposes.
Currently, in locations such as the vehicles of various policing and security agencies, long guns are required to be restrained so that these weapons can only be used by their official operators. These weapons (long guns) are typically locked and restrained using a gripper mechanism attached to a mount fixed to the vehicles chassis. This gripper mechanism typically grasps and restrains the weapon by grasping the barrel and/or fore-stock of the weapon. this method of restraint is becoming increasingly difficult to employ, since users are attaching advanced technologies as scopes, lights, night vision FLIR (Forward-Locking Infrared) technology, etc. to the barrel. This reduces the area available for the gripper to restrain and lock the weapons barrel efficiently. Furthermore, in typical systems the operator must hold the weapon while he or she is releasing it from restraint, which can be extremely difficult or even inconvenient at certain times.
Objects, advantages and novel features, and further scope of applicability of the present invention will be set forth in part in the detailed description to follow, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, and in part will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon examination of the following, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and attained by means of the instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.
The accompanying drawings, which are incorporated and form a part of the specification, illustrate the practice of embodiments of the present invention and, together with the description, serve to explain the principles of the invention. The drawings are only for the purpose of illustrating certain embodiments of the invention and not to be construed as limiting the invention.
In the drawings:
A long gun locking system comprised of a muzzle lock which prohibits a weapon from being removed by anyone other than the operator.
The operator preferably in
The embodiment of this invention, is largely passive allowing for the springs to do the heavy lifting. Employing this unique design, the solenoids duty cycle is extremely short. Thus, allowing for the energized time of the solenoid to be functionally instantaneous. This then creates an extremely minute change for solenoid failure due to overheating
The afore mentioned method of muzzle release varies widely from other systems which employ the barrel capturing method Ref. 8,950,596 B2. In these systems, when a firearm needs removal from its mounting system, a switch is actuated, which then activates the solenoid to release the locked gripper mechanism allowing for the firearm to be removed. However, if the firearm is not removed immediately, this delay could allow the solenoid to overheat causing system failure. To compensate, a delay or time out circuit Ref. 4,747,280 is introduced allowing for a relatively short period of time for the operator to extract the weapon from the gripper. Which if time out is reached before the weapon is removed, the sequence would require a second initiation.
To place the inventions restraining system in locked mode;
The operator inserts the firearm into the stock Assembly
Embodiments of the Muzzle Restraint 8 are the Inverted Centering Cone 13
In the event of system power interruption, a Keyed Operated Release located with the Keyed Operated Release Cavity
Embodiments of the restraining system of the present invention preferably comprises a Self Aligning Boss Structure
In the previously stated embodiments of the invention, a mounting frame having a top end and a bottom end, wherein the muzzle lock is attached to the mounting from top such that the axis of the muzzle restraint aligns vertically above the axis of the muzzle end of a long gun and the stock assembly is attached to the mounting frame bottom end such that the stock assembly captures the stock-end of a long gun. Although the invention has been described in detail with particular reference to disclosed embodiments, other embodiments can achieve the same results. Variations and modifications of the present invention will be obvious to those skilled in the art and intended to cover all such modifications and equivalents. The entire disclosures of all patents cited above are hereby incorporated by reference. This system may be configured to unlock and/or lock only in the presence of a preapproved security credential, such as that provided by a magnetic card, smart chip, near field communication, Bluetooth transmitter, or biometric sensor by the addition of additional electronic circuitry (not shown).
