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High School Student Builds Gun That Unlocks With Your Fingerprint
An anonymous reader writes: Kai Kloepfer is a 17-year-old high school student from Colorado who just won the Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge. Kloepfer designed and built a smart gun that will only unlock and fire for users who supply the proper fingerprints. "The gun works by creating a user ID and locking in the fingerprint of each user allowed to use the gun. The gun will only unlock with the unique fingerprint of those who have already permission to access the gun. ... According to him, all user data is kept right on the gun and nothing is uploaded anywhere else so it would be pretty hard to hack." The gun can have up to 999 authorized users, and its accuracy at detecting fingerprints is 99.99%. For winning the challenge, he won $50,000 in funding to continue developing the smart gun. Some of the fund have already gone toward 3-D printing portions of the prototype.
Just what I need in a firearm. One more area that can fail epically. Also yet another battery to carry and eventually run out of.
Call me crazy but none of my firearms accidentally go off.
<happiness>beer</happiness>
This one will insist on checking your fingerprints first.
As soon as the Police and Military adopt these guns,I'll start considering doing so.
Until then, my old-fashioned guns will have to suffice.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...the deaths caused by an innocent person not being able to defend him- or herself with such a gun due to no battery of malfunctioning electronics or software? Why is this risk not taken into consideration?
> The gun can have up to 999 authorized users
This really bothers me. What current memory hardware stores stuff in base 10? Just either use a byte or the wordsize of the device and be done with it!
If you are too incompetent to control the use of your own gun, then you should not have one. Period. Take the money you were going to spend on this smart gun and take a basic gun safety class.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This is certainly not the first time someone came up with this idea, nor the first time an actual implementation was made. This article and the award sounds like a publicity stunt, and it has all the usual elements: young wunderkind, technical gadgetry to solve some social or politically charged issue.
And other posters here are right: the last thing you need is a weapon that fails when you need it most. If you want a weapon that's safe at rest, get a gun safe with a fingerprint scanner so you can get at it quickly when needed. And if you really want a gun that is disabled when it's taken away from you, I'd go with a simple mechanical solution like a pin on a lanyard that will lock the gun when removed. But in reality, if you've pulled out your weapon with intent to use it, you want nothing to stand in the way of a shot being fired when you pull that trigger.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Also, how long does the fingerprint analysis take? Sometimes you need to fire in a hurry. One second might make the difference between you walking away and the other possibilites mentioned above.
Guns must not be simply reliable. They must be infallible. They must work instantly, every time. Otherwise, any gun is useless.
See how fucking idiotic that sounds?
Is that none of the politicians demanding them, most of whom are big city liberal politicians, are saying "well if we had smart guns, of course we'd let all law-abiding citizens carry in public." It's just a measure intended to further lock down legal gun ownership disguised as a way to keep criminals from using stolen weapons. Even though theoretically smart guns should make it easier for police to account for gun crime, the people pushing this aren't going to let up because their goal isn't even really to balance freedom and security.
Human beings have been "barely domesticated." When you manage to domesticate the average criminal, we can talk about domesticating the best defense against one.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Guns must not be simply reliable. They must be infallible. They must work instantly, every time. Otherwise, any gun is useless. See how fucking idiotic that sounds?
It doesn't sound idiotic at all. Yes, the real world means that you will have some measurable failures-to-fire. Also IN THE REAL WORLD, quality ammo in a well-maintained gun simply doesn't fail. You'll see less than one FTF in a thousand, and that one will only happen after a long day at the range with the gun completely fouled. And even then, a tap-rack-bang will usually clear it (as opposed to a dead battery, which would mean a dead you when you have two seconds before a home invader gets from the door to you).
So yes, guns MUST be as close to infallible as possible. We have to accept the constraints of the real world, but adding a functionally unnecessary point of failure amounts to nothing short of suicidal.
On 9/12/2014 at 12:10AM a skunk in my garage was going to spray me as I rushed in and the door closed behind me ... I was holding my wife's cloths and supplies for the hospital as her water just broke.
Silly me, I thought that I used a tool when, I dropped bags, drew my handgun (which, is by design for defense) and shot the skunk as it was turning around to spray.
Silly me, I had no idea I was using a weapon of war. That really changes my entire presentative on the event.
Given hospital is 40 minutes away and baby arrived by 1:36AM, upon reflection, I sure wish I didn't have that "weapon of war". I wish the skunk Iived and I had simply to wash myself off and find replacement supplies for my wife.
You know when you think about it, computers are a weapon of war. In fact, the first computers, Enigma and Eniac were designed with war purposes as the motivation.
If I had a smart gun and it delayed for a half second before firing or failed to recognize me as a valid user, do think that HS kid would recognize and accept liability?
Respect the Constitution
Was that 99.99% test done on a fire arm that has been used much?
If you check out the pics in TFA, you'll see that not only didn't they test fire this the hundreds of thousands of times it would take to come up with that claim of accuracy - This "proof of concept" wouldn't ever work in a real gun.
Apparently, this genius 17YO knows so little about the functioning of an actual gun that he simply filled the receiver with electronics (because nothing important goes in all that empty space) and produced what amounts a gun-shaped fingerprint reader. Because, y'know, who needs all those silly little things like springs or hammers or firing pins or magazines to also fit inside a working gun?