Smart guns hit the market

BY DYLAN SIMARD KUNC

At rst glance, the Bio re Smart Gun is di erent from other rearms. e large handgun looks part Halo, part Cyberpunk in design.

It’s an appropriate look since the gun is made with new technology ripped straight from science ction. It’s unlocked biometrically, meaning it can only be activated with an authorized user’s ngerprint or face. at, in turn, means only authorized users can shoot it.

Kai Kloepfer is the CEO of the Broom eld-based company Biore. He said making a gun like this was impossible until very recently.

“A lot of the technology we’re using did not exist two years ago, in most cases,” Kloepfer said.

Kloepfer began thinking about the smart gun in high school. He grew up in Colorado and remembers the 2012 Aurora theater mass shooting, where 12 were killed. He brought an early design to an international science fair and won rst place. More than a decade later his plastic prototype has evolved into a fully functional handgun.

“I’ve gotten a chance to be shooting it, handling it. Even got to take one home for a little bit. It’s just been really cool to see something that I only dreamed of like 11 years ago,” Kloepfer said.

Experts say putting a computer into a gun is a remarkable feat—a gun’s explosive force once made it unthinkable. But beyond the computer, the gun is unremarkable in its function. Bio re’s smart gun is a semiautomatic 9mm handgun, meaning a user can pull the trigger, a round goes downrange, and a new round is fed into the chamber. It functions exactly like any other handgun of its class and caliber— and that’s by design.

It takes an expert like Bryan Rogers, the lead designer at Bio re, to bring the gun to commercial production. He said the secret to making a reliable smart gun is to enable more than one way to unlock it.

“It uses both ngerprint and facial recognition to recognize you as the owner,” Rogers said.” It’s either/ or—whichever one it gets rst.” e gun uses a portable dock with a small screen attached to both charge the gun and edit its user permissions. e battery life is considerable—with a full charge, it will be ready to shoot as many as 6 months later. ere’s evidence that the presence of guns makes a home more dangerous. Having a gun in the home leads to a fourfold increase in the risk of suicide, according to a study from Stanford University. But this research didn’t look at smart guns, and it will likely be years before there is enough data to know if a smart gun is a safer alternative to a traditional gun. McCarron remains concerned about the mental states of those in possession of smart guns.

So, a gun that can only be shot by its designated owner is now available for purchase—but does that mean it’s any safer than other guns? Eileen McCarron, president of the gun violence prevention organization Colorado Cease re, said this rearm is an improvement— but there are still no safe guns.

“ e safest thing you can do for your family is to not have a gun,” McCarron said.

“ ere’s still the issue of suicide for the person who is identi able by the machine,” McCarron said of smart guns’ user-recognition