BioFire CEO urges voluntary adoption of smart guns, warns against mandates

Kai Kloepfer, founder and chief executive of BioFire, told the Special Legislative Commission that his company has developed a 9-millimeter personalized firearm, the BioFire Smart Gun, and urged state policymakers to favor voluntary adoption and incentives rather than legal mandates.

“We oppose any law that would mandate, whether de jure or de facto, the use or sale of personalized firearm technology,” Kloepfer said. He described the product as engineered from the ground up for home defense and said its safety features are integrated into the firearm rather than appended as add-ons: “The BioFire Smart Gun is a 9 millimeter semiautomatic handgun designed primarily for home defense.”

Kloepfer told commissioners the firearm uses a redundant biometric authentication system he called the Guardian Biometric Engine, integrating fingerprint and facial-recognition sensors, and an electronic fire-control system that makes a “sub-millisecond decision about whether or not to fire based on if the user is authenticated.” He said biometric data are stored locally on the firearm in encrypted form, that the product has no wireless connectivity, and that BioFire follows a “zero‑knowledge”…