From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. It's the big take. I'm west Kesova today a gun designed to reduce accidental deaths and suicide. We're faced all the time in the US with horrifying news of mass shootings and the go nowhere arguments that follow over what can be done to keep firearms out of the hands of those who intentionally use them to kill others. But accidental gun injuries and deaths, especially among kids and teenagers, as well as people who use guns to take their own lives, are also a
large and growing problem. Now, a young inventor in Colorado named Kai Klupfer is working on a new handgun specifically designed to prevent these tragedies. It uses technology to stop it from being fired by anyone but its owner.
The key thing that we are trying to solve, which I think we could completely solve, is children and teenagers getting access firearms. We think that by building technology that busy works with the gun owner to enforce what they're already looking to do, allows us to really actually address that portion of the challenge of busy gun doests in America.
In a new Business Week's story, Bloomberg reporter Ashley Vance writes about how the gun works.
So as you're walking up to it, this white light sort of goes off, and that signals, hey, the gun knows somebody's getting near it, somebody's about to hold it.
And whether gun rights advocates will embrace this new safety feature or oppose it.
You can look back going twenty years at different efforts to make smart guns, most of them not terribly inspiring. The trend seems to have been trying to slap a fingerprint sensor onto an existing gun, or a lot of them had watches that were compared to the gun to give you some kind of location to the person. But pretty much they all required just too many steps and often failed in demos and really did the smart gun effort no favors to date?
Why have people tried to develop them? Like, what is the appeal of a smart gun?
It has a couple different fronts to it. One is just if you think of it, I almost started thinking of it almost just like a seatbelt in a car. It's just this extra thing we're putting on, something that some people use all the time, and it's this extra safeguard and so on the one hand, you could prevent accidents in the home. Obviously, a kid finds a gun and pulls the trigger and it's loaded, this would stop something like that happening. There's the thought that this could
also prevent a lot of suicides. It would make it that much harder, especially for a young person to find a gun that they could get their hands on. It would give them this extra moment of pause to think about what they were doing. The last big bucket is someone like a police officer who's afraid that their weapon might be turned against them, and so again you have this extra safeguard.
And obviously we're having yet another year where we're seeing a lot of mass shootings, just another one very recently. Is there any argument why a smart gun might bring down that sort of violence.
On the mass shootings? Not really, if we're being honest. The biggest case for smart guns, at least it seems to me, is that we have a lot of people who are eighteen or under who are not supposed to be buying guns. They're not allowed to buy guns. Mostly this is aimed at these kids who shouldn't be able to get a gun, and if they do now, they wouldn't be able to use it, you know, in a
lot of these shootings. Sadly, we see people coming in with assault rifles and weapons that are sort of beyond what these measures would protect.
So, as you say, people have been trying to develop this technology all different kinds of ways for a long time and they haven't been able to do it. But now you write about a young man named Kai Kluppfer who seems to have kind of unlocked the coat.
Yeah, he's only twenties now, he's been working on this since he was fifteen. So you've got kind of the person on a quest, this young man who was possessed by this idea of making a smart gun and was very committed to it and has seen it through all these years. And then I think it's also the technology has really gotten to the point where this is a lot more feasible than it used to be. Kai's company is called Biofire, and they have a smart gun that has a fingerprint reader on it and it has facial
recognition on it. It's a lot like your smartphone. And so you know, this is technology that Apple and Google and Samsung and everyone else has really refined over the last ten years to make it work very well, work cost effectively, and So Kai is the first person that I've run across who really took this ground up approach to starting from scratch and really making a gun that works, but with all this stuff baked into it, as opposed to just slapping things on an existing weapon.
And Ashley, you got a chance to speak to Kai klupp For about this gun. Listen to what he had to say.
The number one kind of key challenge here is building something that is reliable enough both that is always going to be locked when the owner needs it to be locked, but also that is always going to be unlocked when the owner needs to be unlocked. And both of those are really important. You can't just have one or the other. And we've never seen in some of the kind of failed attempts from other folks in the past, we've never
seen people actually achieve both of those. In most cases, they don't achieve either of them.
Tell us about Kay klub For and how he came to develop this gun.
Yeah, he grew up in Colorado. His parents were lawyers, but he was always this tinkerer at home. He was at the age of eleven making customs circuit boards of the family garage. He was always running around with his engineering textbooks, just one of those people who's wired that way and.
Had been entering science fairs and things like that.
When he was fifteen, the Aurora shooting happened, where a gunman went into a theater and killed about a dozen people and injured many dozens more. This one hit very close to home for Kai physically and emotionally. It was about a half hour from his house.
For me, growing up, you know, I was fortunate enough to not have to think about gun violence or gundest and that was really my first sort of encounter with the topic.
Right.
I was just starting to grow up, just starting to think about these kind of topics as a fifteen year old and really start to think about how how can we do something about this? Really, how could we you know, start to kind of tive away the problem in some way.
And so you had this fifteen year old who saw this as his calling. He didn't think that he could stop mass shootings, but he wanted to do something to try to curb gun violence. And so he really settled on this idea of a smart gun, and he began just chasing after his usual sort of science fair exploits. He began trying to make prototypes of this smart gun for science fairs and did quite well at it. He
wins first prize. It's a very prestigious science fairs, and this gets the attention of There's a gentleman named Ron Conway in Silicon Valley who's a very famous angel investor. After Sandy Hook another tragedy shooting, he had been looking to fund some smart gun type technology and so Kai got a fifty thousand dollars grant as a high schooler to pursue the prototype some more. And so he just kept at it. He went to MIT. He was there
for two years. He wasn't able to work on his prototypes as much since it was a university setting and they didn't want him experimenting in his dorm room, but he worked a lot on his business plan around what a company might look like that made this and after two years at MIT and a gap year, he dropped out. And then Peter Tiel one of the most prominent and controversial venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, one of the original
backers of Facebook. He actually has this program called a Teal Fellowship where he pays usually undergraduates one hundred thousand dollars to drop out of college and start a business, and so so Kai had already dropped out, but he was qualified for this teal fellowship. So he got one hundred tho dollars to formally create biofire as a company. And so at that point, he's around twenty years old and he.
Starts this company.
He hires a couple people, he keeps working on these prototypes, and at that point, after a little while, he moves the company from Boston back to Colorado.
And you spend quite a bit of time with him when you were reporting this story. What's he like.
He's sort of this old soul.
He's just always incredibly well prepared for any question you can send his way. He could tell you all the merits of smart guns back and forth. He's clearly an engineer. I mean, he could talk very technically about this gun.
I've been working on smart guns broadly for over ten years now. It's about forty percent of my life, which is sort of scared to thing about. I was always an engineer. There's some pretty hilarious photos out there of me, like running around at like summer camp with an electionbal and shaering textbook. I think everybody thought it was just
absolutely insane. And so I'd always love building things. I'd dide a whole series of different projects, none of which had any i think, like societal value or anything, but you know, just ways for me to learn and you know,
try lots of different things. Yeah, and so I started thinking about this concept of a smart gun, and in particular, after I started digging too this again, I was no expert on gun deaths or public health issues or anything like that, I started to realize that, to my surprise, over two thirds of all gun deaths are the result of suicides and access. That was true ten years ago, it's true today as well. In fact, the percentage has
only gotten larger. And so where you know, what I'd heard about was always the mass shootings, the violent crime homicides. The fact that two thirds are this sort of like silent, you know, kind of portion where he almost never hear about suicide and access really sort of startled me. And it also lends itself to an engineering or technical based solution much more effectively.
Can you describe it? What does it look like? How does it work?
It's called the biofire smart gun. It's a handgun. It looks quite similar to standard handguns, very similar to a glock, except it's a bit larger. It's got all of this electronics packed in there, so you know, around the handle, the grip, it's a bit fatter. It's quite larger where there's a battery. I should mention this is a it's an all electric gun. It does have some mechanisms inside of it, but at it's heard it's an electric gun and so, and then you know on the grip it's
got a fingerprint sensor. And then right at the back it would be a bit above your hand if you're holding the gun, there's this facial recognition system. And then there's a little device that goes with it. It's about the size of a smartphone. They call it a doc and that's where you can can figure up to five people, have them put their fingerprints on, have it recognize your face, and so you become this registered user.
Basically when you first plug it in, it walks you through the onboarding screen and then you can enroll your biometrics basically directly into the firearm. Just like all the data, this is stored encrypted locally on the device. Biofire has no access to your biometrics. We don't process your biometrics anyway. It's all happening inside of the gun. It walks you through the steps. You basically grab it a couple of times to roll your fingerprints, sort of like old Apple
touch idy. Yeah, and then you do the same with your face. You know, you look at it, sort of take your head around, et cetera, and it captures your fingerprint in your face, biometrics sores inside the firearm. From that point forward, the only person that can make any changes or configuration changes to the firearm is the owner. You can have permanent users, you can have temporary users, but basically, you know, let's say you have a spouse and want them to have permanent access to firearm, you
can easily enroll them just via the touchscreen. Let's say you have you know, maybe a teenage child that you want to take to the range and only have them have access for an hour. You can do that as well, and then it'll be automatically disabled.
In full transparency.
In my experience on this demo, it was a little finicky when my finger went on there. Other people seem not to have that problem, and I was shooting a prototype which the company said they had noticed this fingerprint issue and have fixed it on the gun that's actually going to.
Go on sale.
But you do not have to have both the fingerprint and the facial recognition work and so on. The couple instances where my finger was a little off, the facial recognition had already seen me and the gun was ready to fire anyway.
And yeah, I tested it out.
They had a firing range there, and only the people who had gone through this process were able to have anything happen when they pulled the trigger.
I had sort of.
Two rounds at the shooting range, all standard ammunition.
It worked pretty flawlessly.
So when you walk up to this gun, it also has a sensor just for somebody's presence, So as you're walking up to it, this white light sort of goes off and that signals, hey, the gun knows somebody's getting
near it, somebody's about to hold it. And then right when you pick it up, your finger sort of naturally goes to this sensor, and as you're picking it up, the facial recognitions looking for you in this green light comes on the gun, which means you know, now it's ready to fire, and you know, I mean, it just never glitched We had people come in who were not registered and try to fire it. Like I said, in the past, demos have been the undoing of many of these weapons, and this one worked flawlessly.
And so you say it has a button for a trigger as opposed to a traditional trigger.
It has an actual trigger. The trigger might as well be a button. It could be anything because the trigger is not actually connected to the firing mechanism. It's what you would call fire by wire. It's sort of like a modern car. When you hit your brakes in the car, it's really just sending a software signal to your brakes
and this is very very similar. You pull the trigger and they've made it feel given it some resistance to feel like a trigger, but it's really it's just sending a signal to all these computing systems that are throughout the gun.
And how long after you pick it up are you able to fire? Is it immediat or just take a while to figure out who you are?
It was way faster than I ever would expect. It goes faster than like human perception. You know, this presence sensor really does notice when somebody is already coming near it, and when I pick it off the table, any change in weight. It knows now there's a humans who's touching this thing, so it sort of puts it in this primed state.
And then the.
Second it catches your face or your fingerprint, we're not quick enough to notice the time.
It's less than a millisecond.
After the break. Who will buy this gun and who won't? And since it's an electronic device, does it suffer from the usual things of software updates? So the battery is going to die or it'll become obsolete in a few years, Whereas you know, somebody who owns an analog gun can keep that thing forever and it'll just keep working.
This is a really tricky issue.
There's a couple things I could say that are basics that, yes, you have to keep this charged. The company says it takes about an hour to charge it up, and it'll last for months in that state and be ready to fire. There's also the computing device I mentioned is a It serves also as a dock, and so you can leave that plugged in the wall and have the gun in there if you so choose.
On the updates thing.
Now, this is where there's like controversy because a lot of people in the pro gun rights crowd have not been a fan of these guns being connected to the internet, having any sort of information about the owner who's firing it, seeing it as another means of sort of government control or trying to track where you are. And so the gun itself has no wireless communications, no Bluetooth, no Wi Fi, no Internet.
It's totally off the grade, right, and that's because, you know, we've gone a pretty extreme links to ensure that all the data that's inside of the firearm is encrypted. It can never be accessed by anybody, including Biofire, and it's
stored very securely inside of the firearm. Right. Our customers do very clearly do not want us to have some sort of ability to access additional data anything like that, and so we've worked with some of the best folks in the cybersecurity space to design what is honestly a massively overdesigned cybersecurity implementation to ensure that everything is encrypted locally on the device, using credentials that are generated by the device during manufacturing that Biofire has no access to.
We further enhanced that security by having it be wired only. Right, there's no wireless communication in the fire there's no ability to wirelessly talk to or potentially disrupt the functionality the fireman.
Anyway, if you choose to update the gun, you can connect it to this dock and update the software that way. Otherwise, you can also just leave the dock completely off the internet, and the company says, you know it'll fire for many years without doing any updates, so you can sort of choose which lifestyle you want to lead.
The gun movement has been against the development of smart guns for all kinds of reasons for a long time. How are they responding to this one.
Nobody's really seen this thing yet, and I'm quite curious to see how the gun advocates react to this thing, because I do think it's certainly far more sophisticated than anything's come before. So I think this is sort of the moment where we find out what happens when something that actually works is out there, and how people react to it. There have been attempts in a couple states to begin putting legislation in place for if a smart gun that is viable exists, this is how we're going
to react to that. New Jersey's sort of the most famous or infamous example, depending how you want to look at it. But they had put a law into place which said, if a viable smart gun was available, they wanted the entire industry to move towards smart guns and require that to be purchased. And as you can imagine, people got extremely upset and you know, hated the idea that they were going to be forced to buy something.
And this happened at a time when when a real smart gun really didn't even exist, and so it was a huge blow to the smart gun advocates because it was sort of going through all this turmoil before you even had a product that could maybe test and appeal to people and show them the capability of this technology. And so New Jersey, after many years, changed that law and now it really is if a smart gun exists, you must at least carry, you know, one of these
in your store. And so it's pulled back a lot. In California many years ago, there was a company that had an early smart gun prototype and one of the stores that was quite excited to sell it. They faced all these protests from people and it never even got to the shelves. They had to pull it from the shelves due to all this controversy.
Is there any concern that if you have a smart gun you sort of have a false sense of safety and security in how a gun works and how you have to behave around a gun.
Yes.
The gun rights advocates I talked to basically said I was.
A problem number one in some of this, and that I am.
The kind of person who is not that comfortable around guns but sees this as a safer option, might be something I would bring in my house. But they said, look, you're you're not going to go do classes, You're not going to go do training. You just become this huge problem. We end up just putting more guns into the supply overall, and now we have a class of people who are not doing the work that's needed to really operate a firearm safely, and now they have guns.
And what is the argument from gun advocates again smart gun technology, except where they don't want to be told what they can buy and not buy.
That's probably reason number one is we see where this is heading, You're just going to start putting more and more controls on what we can do. Then it quickly because we can't really trust these guns. I'm not going to trust my life to some computer gadget that I don't know if it's going to work or not, and so that's where the argument begins. Some of the more nuanced arguments would be around does this even make sense?
You know, if if somebody is the type of person that has a loaded weapon in their house that their child might find, is that the same person who's going to go out and buy a smart gun that, at least for now, is more expensive than a regular gun.
People do concede that this could help with the prevention of suicides by putting this extra hurdle, and the numbers there are quite high on the number of suicides that happened per year, although the you know, the gun rights advocates say this even there be a relatively small percentage.
I want to note here that Michael Bloomberg, who's the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, also founded every Town for Gun Safety, which advocates for gun safety measures. How are they actually marketing this gun.
It's interesting because biofire and Kai Kai has been at this so long and he's seen these past mistakes. So he, for example, has lobbied against efforts to mandate smart guns. He does not want the company to be seen as this enemy of gun rights.
One of the really key tenants to the way that I've approached this, which I think is it's pretty critical the success that we've seen so far is we're looking to offer a choice, right We're looking to offer a choice that doesn't exist in the market right now, and we think there's gonna be a whole lot of people that are going to choose to purchase our product. And that's awesome, right Like, we're looking to build sucessful business.
But at the same time, if people don't feel like our are just a fit for their use case, their environment, their experience, their situation, that's correct, right Like, there's lots and lots of other competitive pducts and the market traditional firearms, and they're welcome to purchase any of those obviously, or not purchase environment at all.
And the company is also not going after police forces and the military first, which is where I thought it would head, but it is actually pitching their handgun. It really people like me first and foremost, somebody who would consider having a weapon in their house to protect their family and wants the safest possible option of that. There are many people who would argue consumers only will be sold on this if they see police forces use it first. So it's an interesting strategy.
When we come back. If smart guns like this one are shown to work, will the government start requiring makers to adopt this technology. He's been very careful and not to antagonize gun advocates. Did you ask him where he comes down on things like federal background checks and limiting sales of guns on the internet and gun shows, which are real points of conflict between gun advocates and gun control advocates.
He tends to take the middle ground on all these things of never saying something that's really going to upset the NRA too much, but also trying to you know, his mission is safety. The whole origin story of this company is to try and save lives, and so is very polished. I found it interesting he said he fired guns a little bit as a kid growing up in Colorado, mostly I think hunting, well, mix of hunting and going to the shooting range.
But since then he has.
Quite a number of guns now and has become quite an enthusiast on his own.
On the other side, have gun control advocates embraced his smart gun technology.
Yeah, you know, gun control advocates historically have embraced smart gun technology. I think biofire has been a little secretive about this particular weapon that's just going on sale, and so we don't have a lot of public reaction to it yet. I think that's going to hit as our story goes out and people discover this weapon for the
first time. There's been a number of researchers, both at universities and the government who have been studying this issue for about thirty years and produced data saying why they think smart guns will work. It was unsatisfying. Part of this story is that we just have no idea because you've never had this product out in the world to see what actually happens. And so I have to confess I went over a ton of the data. You know, it felt like a little flimsy to me, just because it's hypothetical.
So if someone wants to buy one of these things, they didn't really exist yet, but they're about two how do you go about buying one?
Right? You could?
You go to uh to biofires website and right now you would place a pre order. I think it's roughly around two hundred dollars just to get in the line to place your order, and then you're going to have to pay about thirteen hundred dollars more.
So it's around fifteen hundred dollars for this gun.
And the company is saying they want to see how many pre orders come in the first people who order it. They expect to deliver the weapon early next year, they're saying. And I asked them if you could buy this in all fifty states. They did not have a great answer for me. And so there are some restrictions in some states around buying newly developed weapons. And it's going to be in the United States only for a bit, and people have to check what's going on where they live.
Are they prepared to manufacture this at scale or is this going to be kind of a boutique item.
I went to their headquarters, which is ostensibly where they're making them by hand right now, and they are going to set up an assembly factory, which they have not set up yet, And so to me, this is a huge question.
This is always a major test.
When you go from a something that's beyond a prototype, but it's this early model technology object to making lots of them tends to be quite hard. I mean, again, go back to Tesla. They suffered through years and years and years of struggling to just make their car, even after they had it dialed in. So I think that's
the huge question. I really got the sense that they are waiting to see what happens when they turn this ordering website on and how much reaction there is to try and gauge what they have to prepare for.
Have they gone the Silicon valor route and trying to get a lot of seed money the way startups do.
They've raised about thirty million dollars in total, which is a mix of venture capital and private investment. There's been people who have been along side Kai for most of this ride who have put money in. The most prominent backer is still Peterteel via his venture capital fund Founder's Fund, which is the major backer of the company. Thirty million dollars for a manufacturing company is not a lot, and so these pre sales I think are going to have to do some work.
When you look ahead at this technology and the idea of these smart guns, where do you see it going If this gun is primarily intended or marketed to prevent accidents. A lot of accidents happen with hunting rifles, with modern sporting rifles. Some people call them, other people call them assault style rifles. Can we expect this technology to start popping up on long guns.
There are efforts to do that, and some companies have created prototypes, have gotten weapons like that in the hands of the military. It's the same sort of story I poked around all their websites.
It says, we have.
This gun, we just don't have enough demand to manufacture a lot of them, but we could do it if you wanted it.
I have to say, you know, I went into this so skeptical.
Well, things have not gone well in the smart gun world for the last twenty twenty five years, and I have to say I mean, at least just as a gun and as an object, it was impressive. The more I used it, the more time I spent seeing how it worked. It just it feels inevitable. Why would you not use something like this if it works well and exists?
Ashley Vance, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you, Thanks for listening to us Here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky berg Alina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Rebecca
Shassan is our producer. Our associate producer is Sam Gobauer. Phil de Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Casova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take