Can A New Smart Gun Crack The Firearms Market?
BY Herschel Smith5 years, 6 months ago
Sometime in the next year, Philadelphia-based startup LodeStar Firearms says it will release the first commercially viable smart gun, a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun with a user-recognition lock designed to allow only authenticated users to fire it.
This sort of technology hasn’t caught on in the U.S., so it’s something of a gamble for LodeStar, which is raising $3 million in seed funding to finalize a prototype. The company is banking on being able to disrupt the firearms industry by capitalizing on an uncertain demand for gun safety features. If such advances prove popular, LodeStar says, it could lead to an industrywide evolution that would ultimately save thousands of lives each year.
LodeStar is still ironing out the specifications of its pistol; regardless of how it turns out, it won’t be the first or only smart gun on the U.S. market. Firearms manufacturers have been tinkering with personalized locking technology for decades, hoping to sell consumers on handguns that are resistant to misuse by children, thieves or assailants.
But smart guns have largely failed to break through, in part because of opposition from people who claim the technology will lead to bans on traditional firearms, with only more expensive and less reliable options allowed. Pro-gun groups have even boycotted companies that have pursued gun safety initiatives.
In 2014, German manufacturer Armatix released the iP1, a semiautomatic, .22-caliber handgun that initially retailed for about $1,800 ― as much as five times the going rate for some comparable traditional handguns. Included in that price is a watch required to activate the weapon, using radio-frequency identification (RFID).
LodeStar told HuffPost that it may use similar technology and that it’s also exploring an unspecified alternative. The company ruled out fingerprint technology, which Armatix reportedly utilizes in a new prototype. LodeStar CEO Gareth Glaser previously raised the possibility of a firearm that could be unlocked by a microchip implanted in a user’s hand.
Oh please, please, please, please let it be. Please Lord let a company invest huge sums of money into a gun that costs too much, is too complicated, has too many failure modes, and [oh please Lord let it be] requires surgery to operate.
And remember what I said about hard hats and ketchup.
On September 10, 2018 at 12:02 pm, Gryphon said:
An RFID-Tag Enabled Firearm is an interesting ‘Additional Safety Device’, but can be Defeated (rendering the Gun unable to be Fired) with simple ECM techniques, nothing more complicated than a cell-phone sized Jammer.
But We all Know that this is just another “Gun Control” scheme by the (((usual suspects)))