A new firearm safety device is being demonstrated at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Called Identilock, it lets gun owners lock their firearms using biometrics.
Identilock is a device that attaches to a firearm at the region surrounding its trigger, and uses a fingerprint scanner for access control. To get access to a weapon, a gun owner needs only to scan a designated finger on the device, and it will drop away from the weapon, allowing almost instant access to the firearm. Moreover, a gun owner can register other users’ fingerprints, and can also deregister them at will, ensuring an even higher level of safety; and the Identilock team says its scanner is 100 percent accurate.
It isn’t the first biometric firearm lock. Similar solutions came into the fore back in 2013, after the tragic Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut; and more recently an Israeli startup called Clipfort has been promoting a fingerprint sensor-based lock for ammunition magazines. For its part, though, Identilock is already available for pre-order and should ship this summer, with an expected retail price of $319; and given the increasing attention being paid to the alarming rate of gun violence in the US, it could prove appealing to many firearm owners who agree that better security is needed for their weapons.
Sources: TechCrunch, Fox 40
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January 7, 2016 – by Alex Perala
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