Can smart gun technology be trusted?

SEATTLE — Smart Gun Technology could work like the latest iPhones, where you just hold your thumb over the button and it reads your fingerprint.

Omer Kiyani is a gun owner and founder of Sentinl. He’s developing a trigger lock that quickly reads the authorized user's fingerprint.

“As a child I was shot in the mouth,” Kiyani said.

“I need to keep that gun in the house to keep the family safe. But I also need to keep the family safe from the gun,” he said at a Smart Gun symposium sponsored by Washington Ceasefire and the Washington Technology Industry Association.

But as participants waited for the program to begin, staffers couldn't get the technology for the video projector to work, a less complicated technology than Smart Guns.

In response to a question Allied Biometrix CEO Alan Boinus said people should not trust that the technology will work right now. But he says it will in the future.

Boinus’ company is testing an electronic pistol grip that can tell the difference between an authorized user and a child.

“A child's hand-grip is different from an adult hand-grip and that can be mathematically stored into data and compared against a user,” he said.

Another company, Triggersmart, uses a radio ID tag that can be embedded in a ring.

But a poll done for the symposium reveals only 40 percent of current gun owners would switch to a smart gun -- and 62 percent of gun owners reject any mandatory requirement to have them.

Dave Workman is a gun owner with the locally based 2nd Amendment Foundation.

“Let's not even be talking about the technology until we are certain that it works,” Workman said.

King County Sheriff John Urquhart was on a panel, but wasn't ready to commit to smart guns.

Urquhart says it will be years before the smart gun technology is ready. And then he's not likely to mandate it for his officers.

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