High School Student Creates Smart Gun That Only Unlocks With Fingerprints

There have been a lot of debate about gun safety over the years, and there have been many suggestions that have come up. For example earlier this year gun manufacturer Armatix came up with a solution which is to pair a gun with a smartwatch, thus allowing it to fire only if the smartwatch is in range. This means that if you don’t have the watch, you can’t fire it, which would hopefully help reduce accidental shootings or gun theft.

Well it looks like we now have another possible contender for smarter guns, thanks to a 17-year old by the name of Kai Kloepfer, a high school student from Boulder who won the $50,000 grand prize in the SmartTech for Firearms Challenge. Kloepfer’s answer to gun safety was to embed a fingerprint sensor on the gun, thus unlocking it only if an authorized fingerprint is detected.

Kloepfer’s creation will also store the fingerprints locally within the gun itself as opposed to in the cloud where it could potentially be hacked. This would also make it ideal for military use. Kloepfer has also suggested that multiple fingerprints could be stored in the database so that guns could be shared amongst authorized users, such as police in a precinct.

The teen has managed to create a prototype with a plastic model of a gun which costs him about $3,000 to put together. The money he won from the challenge is expected to go towards purchasing a 3D printer to create new parts for his prototype and the rest will go towards the integration of the fingerprint scanner.

We should point out that there have been concepts and prototypes of guns with fingerprint security in the past, so safe to say this isn’t the first, but it’s still a worthy effort for the youngster.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Firearms, Social Hit