The Death Of The Smart Gun

Firearms makers have resisted a Silicon Valley innovation that could transform public safety

- Dimitra Kessenides and Aaron Rutkoff

Smith & Wesson still feels the wound it suffered two decades ago when it decided to invent a smart gun. The idea was to invest heavily in the development of a personalized weapon that could be fired only by a single person: its owner. This was considered an almost sci-fi proposition in the late 1990s, years before smartphones and finger sensors became ubiquitous. But consumer backlash against the project drove the gunmaker to the verge of ruin, and Smith & Wesson recently told shareholders that “sales still suffer from this misstep.”

The ordeal didn’t lead to a technical breakthrough anyway, and Smith & Wesson never brought a smart gun to market. Neither have competitors Colt, Glock, Mossberg, Remington, Winchester, or Sturm, Ruger. It’s not clear that any of these other major gunmakers has seriously tried. No one can quite agree on who’s to blame for the standstill. Gun manufacturers fault difficult-to- navigate technology. Investors and entrepreneurs are sure that restrictive legislation has created a dead end. Politicians blame each other.

Almost half of gun owners in the U.S. would consider buying a smart gun, according to a Johns Hopkins University study. The promise of guns that can be used by only one person is that fewer would be fired by accident or by someone who shouldn’t have access to a gun—and fewer would be sold on the black market. This is the story of why the multibillion-dollar U.S. gun industry hasn’t yet managed to make guns any smarter. (Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Businessweek owner Bloomberg LP, is a donor to groups that support gun control.)