Often when I’m doing a presentation for a potential investor, the discussion about biometric guns always comes up. Sometimes the investor will say “won’t biometric guns make your Gun Leash unnecessary?” Their logic is if someone finds a biometric gun, or steals a biometric gun, then the criminal won’t be able to use it. I always warn that biometrics guns aren’t a panacea that may have a lot more problems than people realize. First being, any technology is hackable. This is an indisputable statement. And biometric guns can still be lost or stolen. At forecasted prices of $1500 to $2,000, that’s gonna hurt.

But the more worrisome issue is all technology is fallible. This is the dangerous part. When you think your biometric gun is working properly, and it’s not, that could put you and other people in harm’s way. For instance, if you’re a law enforcement officer forced to carry a biometric gun, and you’re confronted by a person with a normal functioning gun. They draw their weapon you draw yours. They fire their gun, but your gun does not fire even though you pulled the trigger because something went wrong with the biometric assessment feature. Your gun failed to recognize your thumbprint. Or  it failed to recognize your facial features. Or both! This will happen. Mark my words. What is even worse is, if you think the biometric “smart gun” is working and it’s not and someone does get their hands on your gun and harms themselves or someone else. You’ll see the reality of this later in this email.

I remember the day the congresswoman from California, Katie Porter, grilled the CEO of Ruger firearms, Christopher Killoy. She pointed at her phone and asked why her iPhone had a thumbprint reader and Ruger guns which “shred people’s vital organs” don’t. (watch that video here) It’s a silly question asked by a person who clearly has zero real-world gun knowledge. This shows the lack of understanding by Porter to how these technologies work. A handgun is only used in an emergency. A life-or-death emergency I would say. You have one chance to get a shot off to save a life. And the possibility of a malfunction of a technology, like facial recognition or thumbprint print recognition at a moment in time, where your ability to grip the gun a certain way, may not be possible but you can still get a shot off if you’re not being challenged by a biometric reader device.

And a recent example of this illustrates my exact message. Here we have a gun safe manufacturer recalling 60,000 biometric gun safe, because a programming error made the thumbprint reader not selective enough to read only the rightful users thumbprint. This means a child could potentially see their parent unlock their handgun safe by placing their hand a certain way and by the child mimicking their parent, unlock the gun safe. In fact, there was one reported death and 39 reported non-death related failures of this gun safe that occurred before the recall went into effect. You can read the article here..

We know from the latest ATF report of 300 major cities, between the years 2017 and 2021, between 50% and 70% of the handguns used in crimes were previously owned by law abiding citizens, but then lost or stolen. The answer to reducing gun crime, continues to be, helping people not lose or have their gun stolen in the first place. Gun Leash continues to be the only product that will solve this problem.