These 5 Smart Gun Technologies Could Be the Future of Firearms in America

Would anyone shopping for a new car buy one that wasn’t equipped with seat belts? Live in a house without smoke detectors? Use a chain saw without a safety brake? It goes without saying that consumers expect products to be safe. But when it comes to one of the most deadly objects — a gun, which killed more than 30,000 Americans in 2013 — people are hard-pressed to find one with state-of-the-art safety features.

That’s not because the technology isn’t readily available. Back in 2000, Smith & Wesson agreed to manufacture handguns with a built-in lock, but boycotts curbed sales. More recently, in California and Maryland, stores stocking the leading smart gun in production were met with vicious backlash online, protests and death threats. Some question the reliability of smart guns, and others believe that they threaten the Second Amendment. But Stephen Teret, a policy expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says unequivocally, “Smart guns are going to save lives. They’re not going to save all lives,” he continues, “but why wouldn’t we want to make guns as safe a consumer product as possible?”

Many Americans share his sentiment. In 2014, through the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, Silicon Valley luminaries like Ron Conway pledged $1 million toward research and development of smart gun technologies, and last month, President Barack Obama signaled his support. Which devices are the most promising? NationSwell interviewed five leading inventors about their prototypes.

A small wireless transmitter, disguised within a ring, communicates with a circuit board in the gun’s handle.

TriggerSmart by Robert McNamara

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology keeps guns from firing when they’re in the wrong hands. TriggerSmart’s small wireless transmitter (disguised inside a ring) “talks” with a circuit board in the firearm’s handle. When they’re within less than two inches of each other, the gun unjams. (The technology works nearly identically to keys that remotely unlock car doors.) And unlike fingerprint recognition, the signal communicates through material, like a glove.
Robert McNamara, founder of the Florida-based company manufacturing the technology, started investigating how to build a smart gun after wondering why he could remotely lock and disable his iPhone, but not his gun. He approaches the issue of gun violence with a foreigner’s eye. Uncomfortable with the regularity of shootings of America, this level of gun violence “doesn’t happen every day in Ireland,” McNamara points out, speaking with the thick brogue of his homeland. “We never hear of a child shooting themselves or their mother, or a police officer being overpowered.” Recognizing that U.S. politics around smart guns are “a bit of a hot potato,” McNamara hopes to capitalize in an industry avoided by many. Previously working in construction and property development, he now spends his days courting big investors with the hopes of soon bringing TriggerSmart into final states of testing.

Dual:Lock’s stainless steel core resembles a knife block.

Dual:Lock by Timothy Oh

Dual:Lock is a throwback to traditional safety measures, but with a contemporary twist. In essence, the device is simply a high-tech, wall-mounted gun safe. Rather than punching in numbers or spinning a dial, the safe opens with a fingerprint scan. Dual:Lock’s stainless steel core looks like a knife block; its carbide retaining pin locks the weapon in place.

With relatives in law enforcement, creator Timothy Oh says that he was raised with an ingrained sense of the devastation gun violence can cause, as well as the importance of firearm safety. The native of Orange County, Calif., and current student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., built his first smart gun in high school. After uploading his idea to an online forum and receiving extremely negative feedback, he started listening to consumers’ desires and conducted 500 interviews with military, law enforcement and civilian gun owners. Many told him that they keep their guns loaded and unsecure in case there’s an emergency. “Immediate access and security are two values that are conflicting right now in the current market,” Oh explains. For these gun owners, Dual:Lock provides faster access than traditional closed-door safes (the device opens within 0.8 seconds). A prototype will be tested at the Los Angeles Police Department gun ranges this fall, and eight gun stores in the Albany, N.Y. region, have signed letters of sale intent.

Chloe Green works on the breadboard prototype of her technology, gUNarmed™.

gUNarmed by Chloe Green

Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Oikos University, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Umpqua Community College. Fifteen-year-old high school student Chloe Green says she’s read too many news reports about, “children being killed and the families being torn apart by gun violence.” Green comes from a family of gun owners, but thought she could bypass the political divide and enhance “safe, responsible gun ownership” with technology.

Her early-stage device, gUNarmed, will use satellites to track a gun’s location and automatically jam the magazine when inside schools and government buildings. (The owner can program additional excluded areas.) When a firearm is detected in a prohibited space, a motor on the magazine prevents bullets from entering the chamber and could send an alert to local law enforcement. Currently, Green has mapped out the electronics in a breadboard prototype, but she doesn’t know when she will advance to the next stages since her young age makes it difficult to network professionally. Still, she doesn’t plan to let that derail her. “I’ve always been interested in the process of making, tinkering and inventing things,” she says, hoping to save American lives from firearm deaths while also getting other young women involved in STEM.

A mini camera that can detect distances is installed in this smart bullet.

EverLokt by John William Stein

Pennsylvania resident John William Stein believes that smart guns will only sell if they are attractive to gun owners. The one-time biotech inventor for pharmaceutical companies knew little about firearms, but he was moved into action by the Sandy Hook massacre. (A few weeks after the shooting, dozens of kids walked onstage at his church to sing Christmas carols, and he could only think of the other children who had been lost.) The 75-year-old’s first device was a safety round hooked up with a motion-sensor that pinged parents by cell phone if shaken (a sign that a child or an intruder had found their gun). But that device seemed too simplistic to motivate firearms enthusiasts.

So recently, Stein decided to take advantage of today’s increasingly compact processors and cameras and installed a miniature lens into the head of the bullet. Using its ability to detect distances, this smart bullet would not fire if a person is less than three feet away or if a child is looking down the barrel. At the same time, however, the bullet would release if aimed across a room in the direction of a home invader. Still in the early stages of development, Stein’s bullet could also film the incident for law enforcement, and a second camera in the back could snap a picture upon discharge to show who fired the gun.

Before developing this biometric sensor Kai Kloepfer, built a remote control robot.

Ægen Technologies by Kai Kloepfer

Boulder, Colo., teen Kai Kloepfer describes the 2012 Aurora movie theater mass shooting, where 12 people died at a sold-out midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” as feeling like his September 11. The loss of life was close — he had visited the Century 16 theater with his friends — so the self-taught electronics nut who participates annually in the local science fair focused his next project on something socially relevant: creating a smart gun. His first attempt involved iris recognition. But that idea foundered when he realized the sensor would be incompatible with sunglasses, thick eyeglasses or shooting in the dark. The next logical alternative? Fingerprint recognition.

Going on four years later, Kloepfer’s biometric sensor is located on a gun’s grip. It captures an image of a person’s fingerprint and checks it against a database of authorized users. If the system finds a match, the gun unlocks. As soon as the owner releases it, the device relocks — a vital feature if the firearm is used in self-defense or is stolen. “The whole goal is to remove human error from the equation as much as possible,” Kloepfer, now 19, says. Kloepfer’s current 3-D printed plastic model unlocks within a span of 1.5 seconds, but he aims to reduce it to just half a second. Just weeks away from his first live sample, Kloepfer is already a long way ahead of most high school science fair projects.

MORE: This Lifelong Hunter Aims to Make Guns Safer — By Making Them Smarter

This Lifelong Hunter Aims to Make Guns Safer — By Making Them Smarter

As a resident of Weston, Conn., about two towns over from Newtown and the father of a first-grader, Don Kendall, Jr., was deeply affected by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But rather than signing petitions or making calls to legislators, he teamed up with more than 40 investors, including venture capitalist Ron Conway and serial entrepreneur Jim Pitkow to launch the Smart Tech Foundation, which funds smart gun technologies.
In advance of a NationSwell Council event on gun violence solutions, Kendall spoke about the need for readily available, safer guns.
What led you to look beyond changing laws as the best way to reduce gun violence?
Until [Newtown], my work was really focused on education and social entrepreneurship; gun violence is not an area that I was schooled in. But I took the time to get to know the space well and met all the organizations I could to understand their theories of change and the key issues. Pretty quickly, I became convinced that traditional political advocacy to change this issue was a dead end. The business model of Washington is to take money from people on either side of this issue: you might not like guns so I give money to the National Rifle Association (NRA) to stop people like you, and you give money to the Democratic Party to stop people like me. It was promoting an us versus them. It was gridlock, and I didn’t want to contribute to that.
I took my bedrock beliefs in technology, innovation, capitalism, the rule of free markets and the feeling that business can solve big social problems, and I went looking for other ways to get involved. I came at the issue from the standpoint of believing I could play a bridging role because I am a gun-owner and a lifelong hunter, but I also saw what was happening to 30,000 people dying every year in thousands of accidents and thousands of suicides. I thought that could be stopped, but it would take somebody saying, “I’m one of you, and we can make a difference on this.” That was the impetus, the genesis of Smart Tech.

Don Kendall is a serial entrepreneur who loves startups, frontier spaces and uncertainty.

How does Smart Tech identify a promising smart gun technologies to invest in?
This industry is in its infancy. These projects are literally two guys in a garage kind of stuff. The amount of money that is flowing right now is miniscule. We take the classic venture approach: You look for a mix of different approaches, whether it’s some folks working on actual firearms, other products like gun locks and safes, and then the technology that needed to be baked into everything like user-recognition, biometrics and RFID (radio-frequency identification). We wanted to have a mix of things that we were fostering. Again, as a nonprofit, the goal is to stimulate innovation and bring attention to the whole space and not focus on any one effort.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
In the context of gun violence, you’re talking about building an entire ecosystem that didn’t exist and hopefully making people rich at the same time that they’re reducing the number of people that are killed every year, right? There’s an opportunity to do both. The analog that we researched for Smart Tech was the number of people killed and injured by automobiles. The story of automobile fatalities over the last four decades is one of constantly chipping away at the problem. It’s through government regulation mandating airbags, two-point safety belts and different rules for signage and how roads are constructed, but manufacturers also stepped in. Safer cars are ones you can charge a premium for. Thousands of different businesses have been started because of that, and a lot of wealth has been created. At the same time, the number of people killed or injured by cars has gone down and down and down. That, to me, is what’s exciting about doing the same thing in the gun space — if we can just get markets working the way that they should work and breaking some of these market failures that are blocking innovation right now.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I transitioned from being a for-profit entrepreneur to being a “philanthropist,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, at age 42. I had started a bunch of companies, a few had done very well, so suddenly I literally woke up with enough money in the bank for me and my family. It was sort of like, “Okay, well what am I gonna do now?” Looking back, it took me about six years to answer that question. The key insight for me (and this is maybe not everybody) was realizing that I could still be the person that I am, namely a serial entrepreneur who loves startups, frontier spaces and uncertainty, at the same time that I’m a philanthropist. When that lightbulb went off for me, it changed everything.
Hunting spans three generations in the Kendall family. Here, during his first quail hunting trip, Don’s father teaches him how to hold and fire a shotgun.

With so much gridlock stopping solutions to gun violence in Washington, D.C., and statehouses nationwide, what inspires you to tackle this problem?
It’s my first experience in a market where there’s a huge headwind, and that is extremely frustrating. I’m not going to say that it’s been fun, but I believe very strongly that I have some role to play in solving this social problem. If we can just get the markets working the way that they’re supposed to work, we can start making headway and saving lives. The stakes are pretty high. The stance of the NRA and the gun manufacturers lobby is wrong from a historical standpoint. They’ve chosen a stance on this issue that is against the arc of history, and I think they’ll ultimately be proven wrong. I believe that there’s white space in this industry for a successful company or a whole cluster of successful companies that can disrupt this industry, because the stance taken by the leaders is just wrong. It’s ripe for that disruption.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, I did grow up with a lot of privileges. Yes, I started a bunch of companies, and some are successful. But my dad was chairman and CEO of PepsiCo. He was a legendary business leader. I grew up in a wealthy setting, and it also meant that he wanted to help me. He was willing to pick up the phone. That was a huge advantage. I was acquainted with privilege, but I also had a real strong desire to stand on my own two feet and be a success on my own terms. That’s an aspect to my bio and my background, that if I’m being authentic and transparent like I’m trying to be, that needs to be factored in.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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