I don’t know who stumped-up the prize for the Brooklyn-based Smart Gun Design Competition, but they got rooked. The winner — Autonomous Ballistics — collected one million dollars for designing a “smart gun” holster. Not a gun. A holster. Which qualifies for the prize as an accessory, but still. Anyway, here’s a closer look at the winning design and a description of how it works from brooklyneagle.com. . .
The smart holster uses fingerprint ID, RFID and voice identification to keep out everyone but the legal owner (and up to 200 other users), Cohen and Raj Kumar said. A small fingerprint reader is embedded into the wall of the holster. The beauty of their design is that you “don’t have to change your gun at all. It’s just a holster similar to the one you have except this is maneuvered so that it’s almost inherent that you put your finger [on the fingerprint reader] when you pull it out,” Cohen said.
“The holster can be tailored for every gun available in the market,” Raj Kumar told the Brooklyn Eagle. “So that makes it easily feasible for all the guns that everyone is using.”
Are we to assume that the fingerprint reader works so well — even inside the owner’s clothing — that its inventors added two other electronically based releasing systems as backup? Or is it dealer’s choice? If it’s me, it’s “Alexa let me have my gun now!”
But it isn’t me. Nor will it be. But, as the NYPD had a rep on the judging panel (which included two prominent gun control advocates), I reckon it’s only a matter of time before New York City’s finest will be carrying their leaden-triggered GLOCKs in an Autonomous Ballistics smart holster. Or not.