For the goal of very quickly and accurately being a weapon. You can't make something much better than a modern firearm but they're pretty unsafe and they can be used by anybody and they can cause a lot of harm in the wrong hands and that's where there's been little to no innovation meet kai Klopfer. He spent the last four years making what appears to be the first gun that fires only when it recognizes the fingerprint of its owner. He also happens to be just 19 years old. This is our most current prototype. A fully functioning live firearm with this smart technology built into it. Basically we've inserted a fingerprint sensor into the side of the firearm here and there's circuit boards and batteries and everything. Inside the gun that allow this fingerprint sensor to read my fingerprint and only unlock for the owner or someone the owner is authorized. This means that if. I don't put my finger on the sensor and just try to pull the trigger. Nothing's gonna happen but the moment that I picked the firearm up and grip it normally and put my finger on the sensor here then this times gonna be unlocked and ready to use. The idea is to prevent people contemplating suicide children or anybody else. From pulling the trigger on a gun that doesn't belong to them if this sounds familiar ideas for smart guns and even other prototypes have been around for a long time if we can set it up so you can't unlock your phone. Unless you've got the right fingerprint. Why can't we do the same thing for our guns but the firearms establishment does not share. Obama's enthusiasm for smart guns owners are skeptical of the technology and fears about government. Mandates have made the idea so toxic that most major gun makers won't even talk about smart guns but big leaps in technology. Don't usually come from insiders that's one reason why. KY with the help of some wealthy Silicon Valley backers maybe just the outsider to make smart guns a reality when I was 15 beginning of my sophomore year of high school.

I was looking for another science fair project bulla Colorado. My house is about 45 minutes away from the movie theater where somebody walked in wearing full tactical gear and was one at the time one of the worst mass shootings as I was doing research for of the mass shootings. I kept coming across these numbers about sort of accidental gun deaths and suicides and things like that you know we could have 1,200 children dying from gun accidents every single year and that's you know more than even your worst mass shooting but there's a pretty good chance we could make a big dent in that and that's substantial measurable change and you know the fact that. I've been placing the opportunity to do that as a 15 year old that just could get started. Early with a prototype of his fingerprint sensor gun kai made it to the International Science Fair earning him a $4,000 prize but then he heard about a program out of Silicon Valley called the smart tech challenge. That was giving grants to people working on gun safety though. Kai was still in high school he applied and to his surprise he won that too kai is the Mark Zuckerberg of guns two years ago three years ago before the authenticated phone you know this all seemed pie in the sky it was like you know going to Mars or or you know inventing a new drone. This is not pie in the sky anymore. This technology exists. It just needs to be ruggedized for an environment that includes gun use if we can go to. Mars we should be able to authenticate a gun. Of course making a prototype is only step one in making smart guns a reality. The key thing at this point is no one has solved the technological challenges that the gun is works as reliable as current technology and all the indications from the market are that it has to work as reliably as your current firearm. Otherwise people aren't gonna buy it your iPhone typically now has fingerprint recognition technology. It doesn't always work when it doesn't work you're inconvenienced in a firearm.

If you're using it for self defense and it doesn't work you're you're not inconvenienced you're dead and that's a real problem. I mean I've heard people jokingly say that the only people demanding smart guns are people who don't buy guns. Even some of khai supporters think he faces an uphill battle to get product into gun stores resistant to offend customers and to find a market for people willing to spend a $250 premium on a gun lock. It's going towards the direction of the new gunnars. The new people who grew up around firearms are now purchasing firearms the first time and who are you looking for sort of the same things. They look for in a smartphone like seatbelts which took decades to gain acceptance before dramatically reducing auto deaths new gun. Safety tech will not be adopted overnight. Ultimately it comes down to this. There's a smart gun. Work kai wasn't shy about letting me try his. We've now erased the firearm and added you as the owner it's gonna try to recognize my fingerprint but it's just gonna flash white because I'm not enrolled additionally if I go here and I try to pull the trigger. Nothing's gonna happen if I hand it to you and do same thing. Got it all right finger on the sensor. Yep it's gonna turn red. We're red. Let's do this. The firearm industry is one which hasn't changed in a very very long time. I'm one of the most commonly sold firearms today in 2016 is a firearm called the Colt 1911 which was developed in 1911 by Colt. And there's still like one of those popular firearms and so this is this is a world where a Model T is competitive with a Tesla like there's no other market like that.