But on the side of the gun grip is his technological leap: a fingerprint sensor. It was basically a 3D printed model - it's displayed at Biofire's headquarters - and it looks like a plastic gun with the top half missing. Kloepfer got to work trying to engineer one - as a science fair project. "I settled on a smart gun, which is basically a firearm that's always locked by default but instantly accessible to the user," he says. Kloepfer says there have been hundreds of prototypes of his smart gun over the years, including the one here that he developed as a high school student for a science fair in engineering.Īs a kid with an interest in engineering, he wondered whether there was a technological solution that could help tamp down gun violence. Kloepfer says he began thinking about how technology could improve gun safety after a gunman killed 12 people and wounded dozens more at a midnight screening of a Batman movie in the Denver suburb of Aurora in July that year. "The challenge is nobody's ever built one that always works for you and never works for anybody else."įor Kloepfer, 26, it's a journey that began the same year that Skyfall came out - but not because of the tech in the movie. "The basic premise of a smart gun - a firearm that only works for you - is sort of obvious and uncontroversial," says Biofire's founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer. This month, the company began taking pre-orders for the firearm, which uses facial recognition and fingerprint verification. And in the real world, the technological challenges as well as some political ones have meant that smart guns haven't become a reality.īut that may be about to change because a Colorado start-up called Biofire says it has developed the first biometric smart gun for market. There's the movies, though, and there's the real world. It's a Hollywood version of a smart gun, a firearm that only an authorized user can unlock and fire. In the 2012 film Skyfall, Q presents James Bond with a special handgun for his latest mission - a Walther PPK 9mm short - fitted with a sensor encoded to Bond's palm print so only he can fire it. Biofire founder Kai Kloepfer says his goal in creating this 9mm smart gun is to "have an incremental positive impact on sort of the uniquely American challenge of gun deaths."
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