While many anti-gun activists have responded to recent tragic shootings by demanding that law-abiding gun owners give up their Second Amendment rights, many in the industry have worked to make guns safer. One such innovator is Kodiak Arms President W.P. Gentry.
The manufacturer spent time and money researching the potential benefits of installing software into firearms allowing them to recognize authorized users before becoming operable. Gentry noted that his company was at the forefront of perfecting such technology just months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“I then had the biggest development in smart-gun technology coming together at my facility in Utah,” he said, touting a product called “the Intelligun.”
He explained that the handgun’s grip would be able to identify fingerprints and, within one second, recognize whether the holder was authorized to use the firearm or not. When Attorney General Eric Holder met with multiple gun manufacturers in April 2013, Gentry said he was invited to discuss his innovation.
“This interested Eric Holder,” he recalled. “He wondered how we might be able to control who was or wasn’t authorized.”
Immediately, Gentry realized the host was proposing something antithetical to the motivation behind his research.
“I stopped him right there,” he said. “I looked right across the table at Eric Holder – yeah, the attorney general of the United States – and told him, ‘If you try to mandate my smart-gun technology, I’ll burn it down.’”
Gentry explained that it was clear he and Holder had opposing views regarding how to make guns safer.
“The Intelligun is designed to save lives,” he said, “not restrict freedom.”
Holder’s interest in restricting users by utilizing the new technology is just one reason gun rights advocates say that many anti-gun activists want to see the software mandated in all firearms.
New Jersey, for instance, passed a law more than a decade ago requiring that, within three years of smart-gun technology having been introduced in a commercially approved firearm, all guns in the state must contain similar software.
National Shooting Sports Foundation President Larry Keane confirmed that many gun makers “have been reluctant to invest R&D dollars in smart-gun technology because gun-control advocates want to make the technology mandatory. If that happens, new guns will become prohibitively expensive, which is part of what these groups want.”