Could Judge Dredd’s gun help broker peace?
A teenager from Colorado has built a pistol with a smartphone-style fingerprint sensor built into the stock


	Kai Kloepfer began his gun as school project in response to the 2012 Aurora mass-shooting
	He’s now backed by influential Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway
	Laws designed to help promote smart guns are acting as a roadblock to their introduction to the market


Curation Comment

A gun that is only activated when picked up by its owner has been a staple of comic culture ever since future lawman Judge Dredd first strode across the pages of 2000 AD. But now a teenager from Colorado has built one. It’s not the first such device, but it is the one that is capturing imaginations – and investors.

Beyond high-school shootings, which its young inventor admits would not be prevented by such an innovation, what really upsets the anti-gun lobby is the fact that nearly two thirds of the 33,000 gun deaths in the US every year are due to accidents caused by unauthorised users – often children – getting hold of firearms owned by someone else.

If a “touch pad” smart gun could make inroads into a statistic like that, then it would be a path towards détente in what is one of the most bitterly divisive debates in America today. But while plenty of NRA members are in favour of smart guns, a vociferous faction stands vigorously opposed, largely because the 2002 New Jersey Smart Gun Law, which requires every firearms dealer to sell ONLY smart guns three years from the moment they become available on the market.

Because of this law, activists pressured stores to remove the German-made Armatix watch-controlled smart gun from their shelves when it went on sale last year. But tech has a habit of making such objections irrelevant. Touch pad guns are coming, and there is clear demand from gun-owning parents and women worried that their weapon could be used against them by an attacker. And in America the market – estimated to be around $1bn a year for handguns alone – always wins.

Fingerprint-access gun technology allows user-authentication to be quick and effortless. This technology is already widely used in smartphones and security devices and offers a simple solution to prevent others from using your firearm.

When an authorized user presses their finger to a fingerprint scanner on the gun, the scanner compares the print to its internal database, finds a match, and allows the user full access to the firearm. Unauthorized users cannot fire the weapon. This technology can be programmed for an unlimited number of users, allowing gun owners to give other family members access to their firearm or enabling police departments to authorize an entire police force access to the same firearm.

Fingerprint-access innovations

Learn more about innovator SGTi’s fingerprint-access retrofit kits. The Safe Gun Technology fingerprint access retrofit solution gives gun owners peace of mind by making it impossible for anyone except authorized users to fire the weapon.

Learn more about Sentinl’s IDENTILOCK, a biometric trigger lock that reads the shooter’s fingerprint before unlocking and allowing the trigger to be pulled. It fits directly over the trigger of any firearm and once authorized, detaches from the firearm within seconds.

Learn more about Biofire’s fingerprint-access handgun. Biofire is integrating a gun with a fingerprint scanner that can be programmed for a virtually unlimited number of users and boasts a 99.99% accurate recognition rate. This technology could prevent children from shooting a family member’s gun,, people attempting suicide, and individuals untrained to use the weapon.