Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Colorado’s Biofire swears they have made a functional “smart gun” but all my attempts to test it — whether to have them send one to me for review or to have me got to their facility to test it — have so far been denied or met with delays and/or silence.
For example, the company’s communications director never responded to a request to review.
A member of the PR firm that represents Biofire began emailing me months ago about the launch of the smart gun and when I asked him for a model to review he indicated they were not sending models for review. He offered me a ZOOM meeting with the CEO of Biofire, which I rejected, because that does not allow me to use the gun and run it through malfunction tests.
The PR person offered me the opportunity to come to Biofire headquarters and see and handle the gun. I gave him dates I could come and he said those dates did not work. So I gave him more dates and, as of now, the latest response I have received from him was an indication that he has not been able to nail down any date that works and an apology for the delay.
The Biofire smart gun features a biometric fingerprint reader–which to date has failed on all smart guns when the user’s hands are wet, muddy, or the user is wearing gloves.
Biofire suggests they avoid this problem by having a secondary unlocking device–a facial recognition device–built into their pistol.
On their website they suggests the gun unlocks quickly so the use can “pick up and fire your Smart Gun without thinking twice, every single time.”
They do not address what the user is supposed to do when the fingerprint reader fails and the home intruder has put his hand between the rear of the gun and the homeowner, in an attempt to harm the homeowner. Will the facial recognition technology still unlock the gun for self-defense if the intruder’s arm blocks it from making a full read? (This question cannot be answered without being able to handle the gun.)
Also, how often do both unlocking mechanisms fail, as they appeared to do when Forbidden Weapons was allowed to the handle the Biofire Smart gun?
While Forbidden Weapons was shooting the gun on camera, it failed to fire. So the shooter pulled back the slide–to eject and/or reseat the unfired round–and raised the gun again, but it did still did not fire. Either both locking mechanisms–the biometric fingerprint reader and the facial recognition camera–failed to unlock the pistol or the pistol simply failed to fire the round that was in the chamber.
One has to consider what would result if the Biofire smartgun locked up in a similar fashion on a homeowner under duress. Would the homeowner be seriously wounded or perhaps even killed by an intruder?
Gun Digest tweeted a review of the Biofire smart gun in which they claimed the unlocking mechanisms were “foolproof.” I spoke to the individual who wrote that review and he admitted he never touched the gun, much less fired it. The review was immediately deleted from the Gun Digest Twitter feed.
In the end, there is no way to know how smart the Biofire smart gun is until I get my hands on one or they allow me to come to their facility and test it. Until then, the video from Forbidden Weapons shows that Biofire’s pistol could have some reliability issues.
The Biofire smart gun is priced at approximately $1,500, which is roughly three times the amount one would pay for a traditional Glock, Sig Sauer, or Smith & Wesson 9mm.