Silicon Valley Targets Smart Guns
Read the full article from Newsweek here.
Written by Grant Burningham with Michele Gorman in New York.
Brutus, the shop dog at Engage Armaments in Rockville, Maryland, sits next to some Armatrix iP1s, a smart gun his owner decided to not sell after being threatened with arson. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post/Getty)
In the 2012 movie Skyfall, James Bond brandishes his trusty sidearm, but with a high-tech twist: There’s a sensor in the grip that reads palm prints so only he can fire it. The souped-up firearm saves the secret agent’s life, and in the real world, similar technology could do the same for thousands. Or so says Ron Conway, an avuncular Silicon Valley billionaire trying to disrupt the gun industry.
Speaking at the International Smart Gun Symposium in San Francisco in February, Conway exuded the cockiness of a man who invested early in Google, Airbnb and Twitter. “The gun companies have chosen to sit on their asses and not innovate,” he said. “Silicon Valley is coming to their rescue.”