Biofire founder Kai Kloepfer says his goal in creating this 9mm smart gun is to “have an incremental positive impact on sort of the uniquely American challenge of gun deaths.” Photo: Biofire
NPR.org | Ryan Lucas | April 29, 2023
A #SafeStorage story; 26-year-old Colorado inventor, Kai Kloepfer, CEO and founder of Biofire, created safe solution after the 2012 Aurora Theatre Shooting.
In the 2012 film Skyfall, Q presents James Bond with a special handgun for his latest mission — a Walther PPK 9mm short — fitted with a sensor encoded to Bond’s palm print so only he can fire it. It’s a Hollywood version of a smart gun, a firearm that only an authorized user can unlock and fire.
There’s the movies, though, and there’s the real world. And in the real world, the technological challenges as well as some political ones have meant that smart guns haven’t become a reality.
But that may be about to change because a Colorado start-up called Biofire says it has developed the first biometric smart gun for market. This month, the company began taking pre-orders for the firearm, which uses facial recognition and fingerprint verification.
“The basic premise of a smart gun — a firearm that only works for you — is sort of obvious and uncontroversial,” says Biofire’s founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer. “The challenge is nobody’s ever built one that always works for you and never works for anybody else.”
For Kloepfer, 26, it’s a journey that began the same year that Skyfall came out — but not because of the tech in the movie. Kloepfer says he began thinking about how technology could improve gun safety after a gunman killed 12 people and wounded dozens more at a midnight screening of a Batman movie in the Denver suburb of Aurora in July that year.
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