18 April 2023 - 05:08A mass shooting during his teen years left Biofire’s Kai Kloepfer determined to make a safer handgun. Now the entrepreneur faces his moment of truth. Picture: BLOOMBERG
During two target sessions earlier in 2023 at the Colorado headquarters and range of Biofire Technologies, the gun I selected from a table recognised me without an appreciable delay each time I picked it up. I let off several rounds, and the weapon felt just like many of the handguns I have fired in the past, delivering a light kick. Other users registered for permission to use the gun had the same experience, whereas nothing happened when people who had not registered, pulled the trigger.
Complicated does not begin to describe the US’s relationship with guns or the nested social ills correlated with the surge in suicides. The gun lobby has spent many years telling anyone who will listen that smart guns cannot be trusted — that they are glitchy at best and, more likely, part of a government conspiracy to gain more control over weapons.
Kloepfer says that is what it takes to make a smart gun that works. His is the first commercial “fire by wire” handgun, meaning it is controlled by software. “We have removed a huge portion of the mechanical linkages and replaced them with solid-state electronics,” he says. “It’s like an electric gun.”
As the rest of the world knows, the US has an enormous gun violence problem. CDC data show that about 50,000 Americans die from gunshots each year, more than 50% of them from suicide and about 40% from murder. Gun owners are four times more likely to die of a gunshot than non-owners.
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