On August 8, 2016, Motherboard published an exclusive from my garage in Washington State: the world's first implant-activated smart gun. Reporter Brian Anderson's headline called me a bodyhacker building it in his garage, which was accurate on all counts. The prototype was built on an FN PS90 fitted with an RFID trigger lock: when a designated user grips the firearm, it reads the implant in the webbing of the hand and unlocks the trigger. In anyone else's hands, it stays locked.
"It's two old technologies coming together in a new way," I told Anderson. Existing smart-gun designs had a reliability problem, and implants happened to solve it. What pushed me to build the thing was watching how fast a firearm purchase happens here in Washington. The interesting part is what happens after the sale: "eventually we'd be able to control who's able to operate the weapon once it leaves the store."
The story moved fast: Guns.com the same day, Adafruit the day after, The Firearm Blog that week, NBC affiliates behind them.
Motherboard: the exclusive
KING 5: the hometown angle
A week later Seattle's NBC affiliate KING 5 came up to Skagit County for the local version of a national story: "Skagit County company touts implant-activated gun."
Circa: the short version
In late September the digital news outlet Circa distilled the whole thing down to seventy-three seconds.
Who Killed the Smart Gun?
The real epilogue arrived the following March, when Motherboard released Who Killed the Smart Gun?, a forty-three-minute documentary hosted by Brian Anderson. It moves from the ATF's gun reference vault and test range in West Virginia, to a nineteen-year-old MIT freshman running a smart-gun startup, to a grieving mother in upstate New York, and to my garage, for the exclusive first test fire of the implant-activated prototype. With an estimated 260 to 300 million guns in the national stock and the political will for nationwide gun legislation dead in the water, the film asks why the people trying to build user-authenticated firearms are blocked at every turn. Whatever else remained unsolved, the technical question had an answer.