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Kai Kloepfer was in high school in 2012 when 24-year-old James Holmes walked into a movie theater in Aurora, half an hour’s drive from where Kloepfer lived.
Holmes shot and killed 12 and wounded another 70. The incident left Klopfer wanting to shoot by accident and stop suicides. He is now 26 and about to ship the world’s first smart gun.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s fellowship program awarded Kloepfer $100,000 for dropping out of school to start his business.
To date, Biofire has raised $30 million and has about 40 employees.
Biofire’s smart gun comes with a dock equipped with a touchscreen that links your face and fingerprint to the gun. Kai Klopfer (pictured), 26, dropped out of school to start the business
This is how it works
The barrel of the smart gun is twice the size of a regular gun.
The $1,499 pistol is 9mm, striker-fired, and fed from 10- or 15-round magazines.
It contains infrared biometric sensors, laser sights and an electronic interface.
The goal, Klopfer said, was to create a high-tech weapon that still felt familiar to veteran and novice shooters.
Biofire’s smart gun comes with a dock equipped with a touchscreen that links your face and fingerprint to the gun.
Once the system detects an approved user’s fingerprint or face (whichever comes first), it quickly unlocks and can be fired like a regular gun.
Up to five people can be registered per gun.
“If you are the owner or someone chosen by the owner to register for the firearm, then it unlocks and functions just like any other gun,” Kloepfer said.
“But at the same time, it locks in a fraction of a second as soon as it leaves your control.”
He said fingerprint and facial recognition technologies are well understood and have their own strengths and weaknesses.
The combination of the two makes for a much more reliable system than just one method.
“It should always be unlocked when you pick it up, and it should always be locked when it leaves your control,” he said. “That bit of reliability… is the most important part of building a viable smart weapon.”
But think about when your iPhone’s Face ID fails and you have to enter your PIN. Authentication technology is far from perfect.
Lawfully armed civilians protecting themselves and their families can be killed if their weapons fail to identify them and malfunction.
Proponents of smart weapons believe that police should also carry these types of firearms.
But imagine a police officer in a life-or-death situation, trying to restart his weapon.
And yes, semi-automatic pistols can jam. Trained firearm owners, especially law enforcement officers, can clear a jam in two to three seconds.
Proponents of smart weapons believe that police should also carry these types of firearms. But imagine a police officer in a life-or-death situation, trying to restart his weapon
A gun that you have to charge
A lithium-ion battery powers the smart gun for months on a single charge.
“We’ve done a lot of work to make sure that doesn’t become something you ever really have to think about,” Kloepfer said.
He said that if the battery is low, there are many warnings and indications to alert you to charge the battery. That takes about 30 minutes to an hour on the included dock.
Here’s a problem: if the battery is dead, the gun won’t work.
Warning users about a low battery is not enough. Many, perhaps most, gun owners who don’t carry their guns keep their guns under lock and key. They don’t check the batteries regularly and probably wouldn’t know until it’s too late.
Anyone forced to use a firearm in their home, in a clear case of self-defense, could be in extreme danger if they point the gun at an armed intruder, only to find the batteries dead.
What about security?
Hackers find ways to break into just about anything in a world where everything is connected. Therefore, the smart gun has no wireless communication, Klopfer said. For security and privacy reasons, there is no WiFi, GPS or Bluetooth.
The captured biometric data is only stored on the gun and hashed. The information side of the weapon is encrypted with credentials that Kloepfer says he has no access to.
“That’s all in the hands of the owner, and only their biometrics can really access all that data or cause changes to the system.” So it’s a very, very closed architecture,” he said.
The Smart Gun comes with a smart dock, with which the new owner must enter his biometric data: fingerprints and facial recognition. The system allows them and they alone to control who can unlock the weapon
Undoubtedly, proponents of smart weapons technology are eager to reduce gun accidents and violence. Regardless of your stance on the Second Amendment, we agree. Smart guns are a great idea in theory.
But much work remains to be done to satisfy most gun owners and law enforcement agencies.
Biofire’s marketing statements estimate that its smart weapon could prevent about two-thirds of gun deaths attributed to suicide each year, an estimate that would have amounted to 22,000 lives saved in 2018.
But Biofire’s estimate has been accused of being inflated.
An analysis by Engineering & Technology (E&T)the internal publication of the non-profit Institution of Engineering and Technology in the UK estimated that probably only about 6,109 firearm deaths could be prevented each year.
E&T based its findings on data from the US Center for Disease Control and other research reports.
In both cases, of course, this is only if the high-tech firearm reaches the market on time, as planned.
“Our goal is not just to start collecting orders, but to get this into full production and produce as much of it as people want to buy,” said 26-year-old Biofire founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer. told the Denver Business Journal“because it’s a great concept and I think it will be a good thing for the world.”
“It has the potential to have an incremental, immediate impact that bypasses much of the political deadlock,” Kloepfer believes.
As a high school student, Kloepfer lived about a half-hour drive from Aurora, a Denver suburb, in 2012 when a gunman killed 12 people and injured many more during a midnight screening of the Batman sequel. The dark knight rises.
The Gen Z entrepreneur immediately started toying with the idea of a biometric lock system that could make firearms safer from misuse, accidents and theft.
Soon his concept for a fingerprint scanning gun went from a science fair project to a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
He then caught the attention of libertarian VC Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, which helped him raise more than $30 million for the start-up.
Biofire, alongside its competitors in the “smart gun” space such as LodeStar Works and SmartGunz, has boasted for years that their products are nearly ready for market with launch dates still glistening on the horizon.
Last year, Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the firearms industry association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), expressed skepticism last year about these companies’ repeated promises.
“If I had a penny for every time in my career I heard someone say they’re about to bring us a so-called smart gun,” Keane said, “I’d probably be retired by now.” ‘
Nevertheless, U.S. customers ready to pre-order can pay a $149 deposit, about one-tenth of the smart weapon’s $1,499 price tag, to reserve their weapon via the Biofire website.