The First Take on a Smart Gun that Actually Works

Me and a Navy Seal tried the Biofire handgun together

A couple of months ago, I went to Colorado for an early test of the Biofire Smart Gun.

It’s a handgun that has a fingerprint sensor and facial recognition built into it, so that only someone registered to shoot the gun can fire it. Many attempts have been made in the past to develop a smart gun, although only James Bond’s seemed to work. The Biofire weapon, however, has been in development for years and, in my experience, is quite good.

It’s the brainchild of Kai Kloepfer, who started working on the weapon as a teenager.

I’ve got a feature story on Biofire and Kloepfer here, and a video with my test of the weapon here.

The NRA and many gun advocates have been against smart guns in principle. They see them as the first step toward the government trying to add controls to weapons. Mostly, though, the past smart guns have been so hopeless that no one has really had to deal with what the prospect of what a smart gun means or if it can actually curb things like accidental shootings and suicides. The Biofire weapon strikes me as good to kick off these debates in earnest now.