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Startup Raises $17 Million To Develop Smart Gun (axios.com) 229

Posted by BeauHD from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
Biofire Technologies has raised $17 million in seed funding to further develop its smart gun, which uses a fingerprint sensor to unlock the trigger. Axios reports: Biofire's guns only can be fired by authorized users, which should exclude kids or teens from using guns that their parents didn't secure. Even if you're someone who decries firearms proliferation and supports stricter gun control, this is an innovation that should be welcomed. "I see firearm ownership continuing to be part of American culture for the foreseeable future," says Biofire founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer. "This issue has become so politicized that really nothing is being done, even for things that shouldn't be political in any way, like kids getting hold of guns ... A smart gun isn't a cure-all, but we do think that we can have an immediate and substantial impact."

Kloepfer, who dropped out of MIT to pursue Biofire, adds that the gun is being beta tested with law enforcement and firearms experts, and that it doesn't have any RFID or other wireless capabilities that could turn off prospective buyers A recent Morning Consult poll found that 55% of current gunowners would be comfortable using a smart gun.
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Startup Raises $17 Million To Develop Smart Gun More

Startup Raises $17 Million To Develop Smart Gun

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  • Hope it's fingerprint reader would actually work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:23PM (#62531312)

    Not like in some phones where you'd have to try to pull the trigger 10 times before it would discharge because it wouldn't get the fingerprint read at the right place and/or angle in the heat of the moment.

    Good luck using it with any tactical gloves, too.

    • My concern would be a sandyhook situation when the kid kills their parent the cuts off the finger. When guns have biometrics only criminals will have thier dead relatives fingers.

      But the bigger issue is reliability. I have to use fingerprints for some of banking. The sensor quality varies widely. It is not often I get verified on the first try.

      • Working is the real problem (Score:5, Informative)

        by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:52PM (#62531454) Homepage Journal

        Okay, this one is a fingerprint sensor. Last "smart" gun was RFID locked.

        Except, get this, it could take up to 15 minutes to pair with the authorizing device.

        And a security tester managed to get it to fire quicker using a magnet.

        Imagine you spending $1000 on a fancy, fancy lock. It's so fancy it takes you 15 minutes with the key to get it unlocked.

        Then Joe Schmuck comes along and pops it open in in under a second, without the key.

          Oh yeah, and they have trouble making the guns "reliable" at higher powers, so they're all like .22lr. Not 9mm, which is the most common police caliber in the world.

        • Reliability is something that is definitely a concern to many gun owners. I know many who would decry such a mechanism, because keeping the electronics charged when your gun is in a bed-side holster for a long time between uses (such guns are used for defensive purposes only). Also, the reliability of it recognizing your finger after months have passed when you might have developed a scratch or some other issue requiring re-pairing. The best solution is a simple gun safe that allows you to withdraw it quick

      • Re:Hope it's fingerprint reader would actually wor (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:55PM (#62531476)

        It is silly to object to technological improvements because of bizarre edge cases that would almost never happen. Mass shootings are a tiny fraction of all gun deaths, and an amputated finger would not have made Sandy Hook any less horrific.

        There are way better objections to this technology, mainly reliability. I will only consider it after it is mandatory for the police and military (i.e., never). If it is good enough for the proles, it should be good enough for our overseers.

        • Mass shootings are a tiny fraction of all gun deaths.

          That is true. However, I understand that a significant number of gun deaths happen because a kid gets hold of a loaded gun and plays with it.

          I admit here that I am a British resident, so I don't have much experience of firearms in the home. The rule in the UK is for firearms to be kept under lock and key, unloaded, and that ammunition is kept separate from firearms. This strikes me as an appropriate technical solution, on a par with keeping medicines out of the reach of children. Maybe there are some people

          • Maybe there are some people who feel the need to keep a loaded pistol by their side, in case a criminal should attack, but I note that people in most developed nations do not think this is necessary.

            Not all "developed" nations are created equally.

            All developed nations are facing the same existential crisis and poorly right now, it's going to be ever more useful to be armed going forwards into the water wars.

        • Some police department vehicles and many military vehicles have the ignition keys replaced with toggle switches. I have asked LEO/military dudes involved why more than once and the answer was a universal "well, we have guns" which obviously doesn't make complete sense.

      • My concern would be a sandyhook situation when the kid kills their parent the cuts off the finger. When guns have biometrics only criminals will have thier dead relatives fingers.

        Oh, that’s easily fixed by changing it to a retinal scanner.

      • My concern would be a sandyhook situation when the kid kills their parent the cuts off the finger. When guns have biometrics only criminals will have thier dead relatives fingers.

        But the bigger issue is reliability. I have to use fingerprints for some of banking. The sensor quality varies widely. It is not often I get verified on the first try.

        Well, my concern is already red-lining when a kid wants to take a gun - any gun - to school. They're just deeper in the rabbit-hole if they're willing to cut off their parent's finger to unlock the gun.

        And how would they kill their parent to take the finger? With the gun? Oh, wait.

    • It's hard to know where to fall on this issue, on the one hand in theory it sounds great, on the other hand there are some obvious ways this can be bad in practice. If I understand correctly, there is somewhere (California?) that has laws where guns will be required to have this technology as soon as it's commercially available (but not necessarily works great).

      I think a good middle ground would be to require any such technology be used by bodyguards (including for political officials) some number (2?) of y

      • Making politician bodyguards use them first (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:54PM (#62531468) Homepage Journal

        A good idea on making the politicians depend on the tech first, though most of the "somebody else first" to prove them reliable enough has traditionally been the police. Who, for said California law, campaigned long and hard to make sure they were completely exempted from the project.

        Me, I'm like "make it required only when the police are voluntarily using the technology universally(or nearly so)."

      • there is somewhere (California?) that has laws where guns will be required to have this technology

        It is New Jersey [wikipedia.org].

        Of course, the law applies only to little people. Police and the NJ National Guard are exempt.

        There are challenges to the law primed and ready to go, but currently, no one has standing to oppose it since it is unenforced. An obvious challenge is based on the "militia" clause in the 2nd Amendment. If the NJNG is exempt, these are not militia weapons.

    • Not like in some phones where you'd have to try to pull the trigger 10 times before it would discharge because it wouldn't get the fingerprint read at the right place and/or angle in the heat of the moment.

      Good luck using it with any tactical gloves, too.

      This has been tried before in various forms, and no one wants it.

      In effect, anything that makes the gun less reliable is absolutely a non-starter among gun owners. If something could go wrong when you need your gun to operate, they don't want it.

      Gun control advocates never take a critical look at what they perceive as "the problem". Problems that arise from legal gun ownership are such a small portion of gun deaths that there are many, many other issues that should and could easily be taken care of first, s

      • I could see it being useful. As long as it's not cloud-based (that is, someone else owns the gun), and it's not a gun you are planning to use in an emergency situation, and it doesn't ruin the gun in some way. No one wants their kid to accidentally get a gun.

      • require the police to use it first.

        Before seriously proposing that, you would need to look at whether there is a problem with police firearms being used by unauthorised people. I am going to assume here that police officers in the US are trained in the use of firearms, and that the training would include preventing someone getting hold of your weapon. This kind of training is probably not a requirement for a regular citizen to own firearms, though perhaps it should be.

        • The cop who killed Ashli Babbit was the same dumbest who left their gun in a public DC bathroom. You vastly overestimate most law enforcement training. After all, bullets and range time cost money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Just have the local high school kid show you how to field strip your weapon, bend a paperclip and use it to permanently hold the lockout solenoid in the fire position.

      A bent piece of coat hangar and it's fully automatic too.

    • Not like in some phones where you'd have to try to pull the trigger 10 times before it would discharge because it wouldn't get the fingerprint read at the right place and/or angle in the heat of the moment.

      Good luck using it with any tactical gloves, too.

      Don't be foolish. The fingerprint reader is just the excuse to get the remote control AI-powered cloud-connected hardware to fire or disable firing into the gun. It's a transient feature which will eventually be replaced by remote overrides when the scenario will result in victory for the desired party, and after that with Neural Lace powered gunners to carry them around. You know it's true.

    • These are intended to address civilian personal protection use from what I can read.

      So... this would be a good solution for allowing someone who insists on living someplace where personal protection is a consideration (only third world countries have this issue). As such, for the firearms you own for hunting and target practice and sport can be properly stored in a locked cabinet and your ammunition can be stored in a safe. First world countries actually have laws and training and such and our guns are prop

      • So... this would be a good solution for allowing someone who insists on living someplace where personal protection is a consideration (only third world countries have this issue).

        What the hell? I can point to countless major US cities where "personal protection is a consideration" right now. Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City all come to mind as "first world" places where "personal protection is a consideration."

    • Good luck using it with any tactical gloves, too.

      Most people aren't internet tough guys doing special forces cosplay.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      That assumes you want the gun for self defence. If it's for sport then a phone quality fingerprint sensor is fine.

      FWIW I have a Pixel phone and the fingerprint sensor works in a faction of a second 99 times out of 100.

  • Just like my TV .. (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:28PM (#62531330)

    .. parental controls, I had to have my 10 year old configure it for me.

  • Police and military first (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hsthompson69 ( 1674722 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:29PM (#62531336)

    ...and if you don't want to do police and military because they have to be 100% positive that their weapon will work in a life or death situation, maybe you should ask the question on why civilians don't have lives that are just as valuable.

  • Useless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:38PM (#62531368)

    So I can't wear gloves while firing this "smart" gun? That's no good. While practicing you end up firing off quite a few rounds. I'd rather not have all that residue left on my hands if I can help it.

    Also, why do I want to add complexity to my firearm? It just adds to the potential problems that could happen. The only thing this "smart" gun could maybe help prevent is if someone disarms you and shoots you with your own gun. Don't really hear that happening very often.

    More like, you go to use this gun and the battery is dead... Yeah, no thanks.

    Furthermore, this "smart" gun won't prevent crime. It will still get stolen and factory reset for it's new owner.

    Also, what if this has some kind of radio built into it that could be tampered with and used to possibly disable the gun. Criminals, cops, foreign invaders, no thank you.

    My firearm does not need a micro-chip of any kind to operate and it doesn't benefit me in the least to add vulnerabilities to it.

    • >"So I can't wear gloves while firing this "smart" gun? That's no good."

      Or if the battery is dead.
      Or if your finger has a bandage on it.
      Or if you find yourself in a sandy or dirty mess for some reason.
      Or if the electronics fail.
      Or if there is too much EFI.
      Or if you are cut and have blood running over your finger or the sensor.
      Or any number of other potential problems.

      No thanks.

      • Weird. So many BS answers. I guess you haven't used fingerprint readers much.

        I have one that happens 100x more often than any what-ifs.

        Wet fingers. 99.9999% chance the reader won't recognize your finger until it's dried. (And still maybe not after that. Ever get pruney fingers? Yeah, that makes phone fingerprint readers not work so well.)

  • I'd love a smart gun. My scenario is recreational firearm use at the range or hunting, but I'm in a household with children.

    As the NRA recommends, for child safety reasons, it's good to store unloaded firearms in one locked safe and ammunition in a different locked safe. This already means that the firearms are't useful for repelling home intruders. That's fine; that's not something I ever want to use a gun for. I'm only interested for range and hunting.

    There are other sensible precautions I take too -- alw

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by anegg ( 1390659 )

      I raised my kids to adulthood in a home with firearms. I made sure they understood what to do if they found a firearm (don't touch it, tell an adult). I have a gun safe, and I use it to store my firearms.

      I have never stored my ammunition in a "separate locked container." I can't see any useful reason for doing that, since my firearms are already stored in a locked container. I also don't store my car keys in a locked container, nor do I store my kitchen knives or power tools in locked containers. Ther

      • We don't all drive around at 20 MPH in our cars even though it would practically eliminate deaths due to automobile crashes (except for pedestrians)

        A large amount of London is now 20MPH only. And it certainly does reduce pedestrian deaths a great deal.

      • Actually, a modern car can prevent death of the occupants in nearly any accident under 35mph. (If you're paranoid, now is the time to ask: "what about the freeway?")

    • As the NRA recommends, for child safety reasons, it's good to store unloaded firearms in one locked safe and ammunition in a different locked safe.

      That is good to know, but is this recommendation actually enforced in law?

  • At the 2:02 mark is the relevant portion [youtube.com] for this discussion. It's only another 700+ years from now.

  • It's not a cure all? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by presearch ( 214913 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:41PM (#62531390)

    You know what would be a cure-all?
    Get rid of all of the guns.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by beepsky ( 6008348 )
      Start with disarming the government, then disarm the citizens.

      • Start with disarming the government, then disarm the citizens.

        You live in some kind of twisted fantasy where you think you have a remote chance of standing up to your government with your peashooters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quall ( 1441799 )

      GREAT IDEA!!!!

      Let's start with the criminals who use them to commit crimes. What do you propose? Keep in mind that these people are buying guns illegally and aren't following the law. So how do we get rid of their guns?

      Disarming law-abiding citizens first seems pretty stupid, so surely that isn't your plan. So what exactly is your plan?

      • Let's start with the criminals who use them to commit crimes.

        If you disarm only criminals they will simply rob everyone else.

        What do you propose?

        I thought he was quite clear.

        Disarming law-abiding citizens first seems pretty stupid, so surely that isn't your plan.

        Yeah, horribly stupid. Basically eliminated gun related deaths in Australia, and completely eliminated mass shootings. What a fucking dystopia. Who would want to live in a first world country when you can live in a 3rd world shithole where people need guns to feel safe!

    • You know what would fix AGW? Just get rid of all the CO2!

      You know what would fix microplastic pollution? Just get rid of the plastic!

      I could do this all day but zzz

  • I am all for tech solutions to problems but in this case wouldn't it just encourage people to be lax about their gun safety in the first place?

  • That is all. [youtube.com]

    [Warning: this scene is dark, in more ways than one.]

  • Absolutley NOT (Score:5, Insightful)

    by randalware ( 720317 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:51PM (#62531444) Journal

    There are people that don't trust an semiautomatic pistol.

    They carry a revolver in a caliber that will stop a human with 1 shot.
    Also many carry a backup pistol & extra ammo.

    In Alaska they carry one that will stop a bear and prefer to have a rifle also.

    When your life and the lives of your loved ones are on the line, you want your weapon to work.
    Wet, dusty, with bruised,shaky, bloody dirty dirty hands & finger, you want high speed lead to hit your target.

    NOT application handgun did not pass checksum/security check, please reset & try again.

    I don't care what they say or promise or guarentee.

    If it has a problem, you are dead.
    Batteries, my ass...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

      There are people that don't trust an semiautomatic pistol.

      They carry a revolver in a caliber that will stop a human with 1 shot.
      Also many carry a backup pistol & extra ammo.

      In Alaska they carry one that will stop a bear and prefer to have a rifle also.

      When your life and the lives of your loved ones are on the line, you want your weapon to work.
      Wet, dusty, with bruised,shaky, bloody dirty dirty hands & finger, you want high speed lead to hit your target.

      NOT application handgun did not pass checksum/security check, please reset & try again.

      I don't care what they say or promise or guarentee.

      If it has a problem, you are dead.
      Batteries, my ass...

      Oh I'm almost ready to cum, keep going!

      • Fucking weirdo.

      • Oh I'm almost ready to cum, keep going!

        Somebody with mod points clearly didn't like your joke.

        I find it funny that it's usually your typical middle-aged straight white suburban, or sub-suburban (as in, rural, but only like 30 minutes drive from "civilization") dweller who feels that somehow, some big baddie is going to come out of the night and he'll have to blow him away like Clint Eastwood.

        Try being part of a marginalized group that has politicians making jokes about killing you [floridapolitics.com] and then maybe you can talk about why you need the 2A. Just sayi

        • Try being part of a marginalized group that has politicians making jokes about killing you and then maybe you can talk about why you need the 2A.

          Though gay rights didn't come around with some gay army blasting away with the full force of their second amendment rights. The 2A has not featured even slightly in that story.

    • There are people that don't trust an semiautomatic pistol.

      There are people who go out at night dressed in a rubber gimpsuit to have a dominatrix kick them repeatedly in the balls, do you suggest we all calibrate ourselves to that baseline definition of normality?

      There are people who think guns are fucking stupid and Americans are too stupid to have access to them. Personally I think if we pick a common denominator then that opinion should be it.

  • Off the shelf biometric readers are widely understood technologies.
    As are solenoid-activated safeties, compact power systems and displays.
    Considering firearm engineering has been practiced for well over a century.
    integration should not require that much research.
    $17 Million seems like a lot, on top of whatever else they've already spent.

    • Since all the off the shelf ones I've ever encountered aren't even remotely reliable enough to put on a gun, I'd say they need even more than that. It will need to work at any angle, without a perfect contact, and when there's dirt or blood on your finger (why blood? because someone is trying to end your life, that's why you need the gun to fire.)

    • There's some points that you might be missing:
      1. Gun manufacturers are used to rather extreme reliability demands by their users. As in, a 99% fire rate - where 99% of bullets correctly fire when the trigger is pulled(and safety off), is considered wildly insufficient and a reason to replace the ammunition, firearm, or both. Consider what would happen if you decided your cellphone wasn't good enough if it failed to unlock on your first attempt just 1%.

      2. A firearm is a rather simplified and optimized me

  • Guns have been developed to a very high degree of maturity and reliability over hundreds of years Making this tech work with the same degree of reliability is much harder than it seems. I smell an attempt to attract funding based on political considerations. I predict failure

    • This is probably being stealth-funded by groups like Bloomberg's (Everytown etc) in an attempt simply to push it to market, because doing so triggers clauses in state law for multiple states that then requires ALL pistols (or sometimes all firearms entirely) to have this kind of technology.

      In fact, I'd put money down it's Bloomberg. He's almost monomaniacal about this. Total civilian disarmament is like his superfetish or something. Maybe he can't orgasm properly until every last gun is gone, I dunno.

      Try

  • Well that's just spiffy (Score:3)

    by willoughby ( 1367773 ) on Friday May 13, 2022 @07:13PM (#62531534)

    If I very much need my gun, and I have blood on my hands, I don't think I'd trust one of these.

  • The reason guns are as popular as they are (besides the obvious) is that there's been, literally CENTURIES of R&D invested into them.
    There are LOTS of ways to build guns, and lots of ways to make them safe and ridiculously reliable.

    So they're going to insert some faulty electronic mechanism in there to make them LESS safe and reliable.

    Yeah! Sounds like a good way to wipe your ass with $10,000 bills!

    If you own a firearm for self-defense, if you need to use it, do you really want the damn thing deciding

    • I think that criminals would still steal them. Just factory reset them and resell, or if they want to use them, jailbreak the electronics(IE rip most of them out and permanently fuse the solenoid into the firing position, or substitute something else so it works) for personal use.

  • Point it at your eye. Retina scan. Good to go.

  • >"Biofire's guns only can be fired by authorized users"

    Maybe, if you are lucky. And if you are unlucky, you could be dead. No thanks.

    >"this is an innovation that should be welcomed"

    I welcome *CHOICE* and *FREEDOM*, but all this type of innovation will likely do is spur useless, regressive, dangerous, ineffective legislation to try force all guns to use the technology and take away choice. Absolutely nobody I know would have any interest in such a device.

  • who leave guns lying around and accessible are not going to buy this thing.

    Responsible gun owners already have their weapons under control.

    And when somebody says that these should be mandated, all gun owners are going to see it for it is, a slippery slope to a situation where only cops and criminals have guns.

    Let's ask crime victims in NYC and DC how well that has worked.
  • be declared unconstitutional by the supreme court. The US has decided that our constitution guarantees the right for every hallucinating, bipolar pissed off 17 year old boy with daddy issues to own whatever gun he pleases. They haven't gotten around to legalizing full auto, hand grenades and RPGs, but rest assured with the current supreme court in place, it's just a matter of time. The right to shoot up your own personal Sandy Hook is clearly enumerated in the constitution, and gun safety is for the loony,
    • Same logic though, the new abortion bans will bring more rapist genes into the pool and those guys probably don't hate guns, so a bit of a wash.
  • Only outlaws will have dumb guns? Only in-laws will have smart guns?

  • Almost all guns today come with a safety mechanism -- essentially a combination lock, where if you don't know the combination, you can't pull the trigger.

    The problem is that the combination lock that guns currently come with is extremely easy to guess -- there are only two possible settings ("safe" and "armed"), and the gun's combination is hard-coded to the latter at the factory.

    Making that combination lock a bit more elaborate (e.g. three or four decimal digits) would provide a fair amount of safety -- people who don't know the gun's combination would have to spend at least a few hours guessing it before they could successfully fire the gun. The gun's owner, OTOH, could dial up the correct combination within a few seconds, which is comparable to the amount of time it would take to extract the gun from a gun safe. Or if they feel that's too long, they could trade away safety for speed by leaving some or all of the digits set to the right combination in advance.

    Other benefits: no batteries or electronics to potentially fail or malfunction, and it's pretty simple and cheap to implement -- the technology has been widely used for bikes and storage lockers for decades.

    • Making a mechanical combo lock that can be durable enough to handle the stresses from firing even moderate calibers is rather difficult, hence why nothing like that exists yet.

    • Almost all guns today come with a safety mechanism -- essentially a combination lock, where if you don't know the combination, you can't pull the trigger.

      Yeah, except all guns are designed for the safety mechanism to be easy to disable while holding the weapon in the firing position, so the combination is easy to guess. If it's not in the reach of your right hand (or for ambi guns, either hand) while it's on the weapon, it's not the control you're looking for.

      Making that combination lock a bit more elaborate (e.g. three or four decimal digits) would provide a fair amount of safety

      Sure, for the person that you want to shoot. But that's not who the gun is designed to serve.

    • I see you have a Hollywood level of intelligence about guns. There are many that don't have a safety. (Or "the safety is the trigger".) RTFM is no joke when it comes to guns.

  • I don't see any way that they will be successful. They claim that half of gun owners support it, but I question their polling data. I know a lot of people that buy a lot of guns, and quick polling of them showed that there was zero interest. If you include cousin Karen, who has an old shotgun she inherited from a deceased relative, you will probably get different results, but for gun BUYERS, I think there will be zero interest, and probably a lot of hostility towards the product. It's safe to say that i

  • A firearm is a very basic machine, with one basic function, and everything it needs to do that function reliably.

    Along comes an idiot, probably supported by political idiots and agendas, who says [in effect] "let me add a very complex mechanism that will be in control of an added failure mechanism", and we're all expected to admire the results and clap like trained seals.

    Deliberately adding a failure mechanism to an otherwise completely successful and reliable design, and then putting a flakey expensive hig

  • There's a law there that says once such a weapon is available they will be the ONLY guns allowed to be sold in the state. I think there's other states with similar laws, and that's a big rain why they aren't a big priority for established manufacturers. Well that and ALL the reliability issues others have pointed out.

  • One of these malfunctions - and they WILL malfunction - in a do-or-die situation, and the failure of the device causes the death of the user.

    The PLCAA (fed law that you can't sue gun makers for unlawful use) does not protect from liability for flawed products.

    That company will be bankrupted and gutted alive by one case. ONE. And it will probably happen within a couple years of these going on the market, if they ever do. Firearms meant as fighting weapons have been steadily evolved for hundreds of years t

  • ...in most school shootings owned by the mass murderers? How's this going to save lives?
  • Hmm, let's take the thing that you want to always work and make it need batteries and firmware. Sounds like a bad idea IMO.

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