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.

Comments

Great one more fail

[Maznafein]

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.

Re:Great one more fail

[cellocgw]

Call me crazy but none of my firearms accidentally go off.

Standard answers apply here:

1) Yet
2) You're not everyone
3) Many policemen would far prefer that their gun not be useable if someone takes it away from them.

Re:Great one more fail

[CrimsonAvenger]

Yet Another Responsible Gun Owner Shoots His Own Penis
At least five American men have shot off their penises since 2010.

Note that this new "smart" gun won't save you from doing this.

Note also that an average of one such accident per year in a land of 300+ million makes it less common than being struck by lightning. So when we get that lightning problem under control, I can turn my attention to the "shooting my own penis off" problem....

Re:Great one more fail

[LynnwoodRooster]

Would you accept a report by the anti-gun Violence Policy Center that concludes there are 67,000 valid defensive uses of a firearm each year, making it slightly more likely that a firearm will be used for defense rather than for committing a crime? Reality probably lives somewhere between the points (VPC and NRA), but in either case - it's more than the criminal use of firearms.

Re:Great one more fail

[Mr. Slippery]

If gun ownership were more tightly controlled, those 14000-19000 nonfatal injuries and the hundreds of fatal injuries from accidental shootings would be reduced by at least an order of magnitude - lives would be saved.

The number of firearms accidents is statistical noise. Anyone making a great hue and cry about them is clearly not actually concerned with gun accidents, but is trying to use them to veil a prohibitionist agenda.

If gun ownership were more tightly controlled, the 60,000 to 2,500,000 annual incidents of firearms self-defense (yes, huge error bars) would be reduced -- more people would be murdered, raped, and robbed from. Lives would be lost.

Also, of course, enforcing a prohibition law ipso facto means locking people in cages for acts that do not credibly threaten the rights of others. Liberty would be lost.

Here in the civilised world...murder rates and prison populations are proportionally tiny compared to the USA.

Folks in Mexico, Philippines, and Brazil might take exception to being called "uncivilized".

Yes, we have more violence than other wealthy nations. We also have more of a problem with an unaddressed legacy of slavery and segregation, ongoing racism, ongoing economic injustice, and lack of access to useful mental health care than those nations do. Those factors have far more to do with our violence problem than access to firearms does.

999

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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!

Been there, done that

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:If You are Too Incompetent

[NormalVisual]

Take the money you were going to spend on this smart gun and take a basic gun safety class.

If it's priced like the existing smart guns (Armatix, etc.), you'll likely be able to buy a week at Gunsite or similar training program, where you'll also learn important stuff like identifying/using cover, off-hand shooting, clearing malfunctions, retention, and tons of other skills that will be far more useful than an electronic lock.

The other question that needs to be asked

[pla]

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?