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

it doesnt address a major bug.

[nimbius]

As an american I applaud any effort toward making guns safer, but our critical defect is our public policy. I dont mean to troll, some of this opinion will be very crontroversial but part of the second amendment has been forgotten, in that the right to keep and bear arms applies to a well regulated militia. Instead, we've doled out Uzi's to nine year olds and have the malevolence to turn around and act shocked when she kills her instructor. we've at best imposed a 1 week wait on ownership of a firearam, which as recent shootings have confirmed only serves to offer a week of additional planning for the murder of 32 school children, or a crowded military base, or any number of other venues for people who are simply too unstable or unfit to own a weapon. The greatest barrier to owning a firearm is competent penmanship. Biometrics arent going to stop the antifederalist lunatic or the hopelessly depressed suicidal person. they will only serve to electronically verify our callous, sadistic, and laughably ineffective approach at firearm ownership in america.

most of this problem is the NRA. the NRA targeted the first safe-gun and wiped it from stores everywhere. they spun uncited rhetoric about the unreliabiltiy or the technology and pounded the communism/fascism fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the public that a biometric or safer firearm was simply another cobblestone in the road to hitler/stalin/mao. politicians are too terrified of the NRA, despite it having no effect on the clinton election and no effect on the obama election to impose or even suggest marginal efforts to make firearms safer. This is because the NRA does not represent firearm owners. It is the lobbying and PR wing of a conglomerate of foreign and domestic firearms manufacturers that, faced with a shrinking customer base, are doing damned near anything to make ownership barriers like waiting periods, legislation, and even firearm related fatality statistics disappear. It needs the general public to associate guns with can openers and blenders; utilitarian and good. the NRA does not support open carry overtly in states like texas because on a national level the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative to the tactics of average citizens occupying starbucks and mcdonalds with assault rifles and pistols. Texans are reducing the marketability of firearms.