Smart guns could save lives, the CEO of a Radnor start-up says

The shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has ramped up the debate around gun violence to its usual partisan levels, setting Democrats and Republicans on familiar sides of the gun legislation divide.

Yet, what if the solution isn’t legislative but technological — by making sure the person had the right to fire that gun? It wouldn’t have prevented Uvalde, where the 18-year-old shooter bought firearms legally.

It could, however, stop a school shooting where an underage person illegally gained access to a weapon, or slow the huge wave of suicides that constitute the majority of gun deaths in America — 24,292 in 2020, vs. 19,384 murders, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — by limiting teens and others’ access to guns they don’t own.

So argue a group of entrepreneurs who say that the tech has finally advanced far enough — and that the threat has reached sufficiently high levels — to make smart-gun tech a no-brainer.

“We feel the time is right for smart guns. There’s a market for it, and there’s a great need for it,” said Gareth Glaser, cofounder of LodeStar Works, a Radnor-based gun manufacturer that uses fingerprints or a phone app to grant access to a 9-millimeter handgun it has been developing.

» READ MORE: Main Line start-up LodeStar Firearms aims to sell first U.S. 'smart guns'

Many high-profile mass shootings involve legally owned firearms. But scores of other people have died at the hands of someone who did not have the right to fire the weapon. The shooter in the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan last November was 15 and using a gun bought by his father. Unintentional shootings by children resulted in more than 100 deaths in both 2020 and 2021.

Smart-gun technology, also known as “personalized guns,” could also prevent fatalities in the case of stolen guns in prison and other settings, advocates say. And teen suicide often involves a gun belonging to an adult that has been found by an underage person in the home.

But it is unclear whether the smart-gun efforts can get past gun groups, which in the past have been ambivalent at best. And the technology is not yet proven — smart-gun proponents have historically offered more promises than proofs.

Smart-gun technology uses biometric data such as fingerprints — and radio-frequency identification (RFID) transmitted by ring or wristband — to unlock a gun for its legal owner. After years of engineering delays and political resistance, smart guns now appear at least to be nearing the market.

LodeStar expects to have a product on the market sometime next year, probably early in the year, Glaser said. The Colorado company Biofire has also been generating headlines recently, announcing this month that it has raised $17 million in seed funding from unidentified investors who it said had backed Google and Airbnb. Its flagship product is also a 9 mm fingerprint-enabled handgun.

And a Kansas company, SmartGunz, has been developing a similar product that runs on RFID. The company was cofounded by Tom Holland, a Democratic state senator, and began offering presales to law enforcement last year. It will ship in July, Holland said, with consumer sales happening probably in August or September.

“Our mission is to save lives. I can’t tell you how many times I pick up the paper where I live in northeast Kansas and see a little kid shooting himself or another child because an adult left a loaded handgun,” Holland said. He said that he “totally supports Second Amendment rights” and that this is “just an option — we don’t intend it for everybody.”

Firearms are becoming a bigger cause of death for young Americans. In the past 20 years, the number of firearms-related deaths for people under 25 has gone from seven for every 100,000 people to 10, according to research from the CDC and the New England Journal of Medicine. In 2017, firearms became the leading cause of injury-related death for young people, surpassing even motor vehicle accidents.

“The statistics are shocking,” said Kai Kloepfer, founder of Biofire. A teenager at the time of the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater a decade ago, Kloepfer dropped out of MIT several years ago to focus full time on the company. “And we don’t believe this has to be the case.”

The argument is that personally identifying technology is already accepted by most people for far less violent tools, from a thumbprint to unlock a phone to an RFID system for a keyless car start. Glaser said he believes LodeStar could prevent “a majority of school shootings, since they are most often committed by underage teenagers with a gun found in the home.”

But smart-gun tech is still unproven in real-world circumstances. A gun’s heat and pressure can complicate biometric readings, and signals sent to a separate PIN-based app or ring are susceptible to potential interference and hacking. At its heart is a slippery engineering challenge — how to make unlocking as seamless as possible to its authorized user but as difficult as possible for everyone else.

To prevent killings on a meaningful scale, smart guns would also need to reach high levels of market penetration. And costs remain high — the SmartGunz product, for instance, is listed between $1,800 and $2,000.

A Morning Consult poll in March nonetheless found that 43% of adults would be interested in using a smart gun, a number just below the 46% who said they wanted to use a traditional firearm.

The tallest hurdle may be political. More than 20 years ago, gun-manufacturing giant Smith & Wesson said it agreed with a list of government regulations laid out by the Clinton administration, including the pursuit of smart-gun tech. But it soon faced a National Rifle Association-led boycott that sent sales plummeting and nearly destroyed the company.

A New Jersey smart-gun law passed in 2002 — it mandated gun retailers in the state carry only smart guns beginning three years after they first became commercially available — also faced intense pressure from the NRA. In 2019, the law was revised to simply require that gun retailers carry at least one such approved smart gun 60 days after it is put on the market.

The state continues to help lead the push on smart-gun adoption. Last year, Gov. Phil Murphy named seven experts from various disciplines to the new Personalized Handgun Authorization Commission to explore the issue.

Glaser and Kloepfer say that while they are open to government-enhanced incentives for buying a smart gun (similar to electric vehicles), they do not support mandates. They both say they hope to remain politically neutral on the question of gun laws. The growth of smart guns, they say, should happen organically.

“We want people to buy smart guns because it’s a better firearm,” Kloepfer said.

The NRA has indicated it could be open to the idea if mandates were not involved.

“The NRA doesn’t oppose the development of ‘smart’ guns, nor the ability of Americans to voluntarily acquire them,” the group’s lobbying arm previously said in a statement. “However, NRA opposes any law prohibiting Americans from acquiring or possessing firearms that don’t possess ‘smart’ gun technology.”