NEW YORKA--Personalized smart guns, which can be fired only by verified users, may finally become available to U.S. consumers after two decades of questions about reliability and concerns they will usher in a new wave of government regulation.
Four-year-old LodeStar Works on Friday unveiled its 9mm smart handgun for shareholders and investors in Boise, Idaho. And a Kansas company, SmartGunz LLC, says law enforcement agents are beta testing its product, a similar but simpler model. Both companies hope to have a product commercially available this year.
LodeStar co-founder Gareth Glaser said he was inspired after hearing one too many stories about children shot while playing with an unattended gun. Smart guns could stop such tragedies by using technology to authenticate a user's identity and disable the gun should anyone else try to fire it.
They could also reduce suicides, render lost or stolen guns useless, and offer safety for police officers and jail guards who fear gun grabs.
But attempts to develop smart guns have stalled: Smith & Wesson got hit with a boycott, a German company's product was hacked, and a New Jersey law aimed at promoting smart guns has raised the wrath of defenders of the Second Amendment.
The LodeStar gun, aimed at first-time buyers, would retail for $895. The test-firing of the LodeStar gun before Reuters cameras has not been reported elsewhere. A range officer fired the weapon, a third-generation prototype, in its different settings without issue.
Glaser acknowledged there will be additional challenges to large-scale manufacturing, but expressed confidence that after years of trial and error the technology was advanced enough and the microelectronics inside the gun are well-protected.
Most early smart gun prototypes used either fingerprint unlocking or radio frequency identification technology that enables the gun to fire only when a chip in the gun communicates with another chip worn by the user in a ring or bracelet. LodeStar integrated both a fingerprint reader and a near-field communication chip activated by a phone app, plus a PIN pad. The gun can be authorized for more than one user.
The fingerprint reader unlocks the gun in microseconds, but since it may not work when wet or in other adverse conditions, the PIN pad is there as a backup. LodeStar did not demonstrate the near-field communication signal, but it would act as a secondary backup, enabling the gun as quickly as users can open the app on their phones.
