One potential answer to the issue of gun violence and gun deaths in the U.S. is smart gun technology. Its aim is to ensure that only a gun owner is able to fire a weapon.

One innovator is trying to save potential victims of gun related violence, by making guns a little ‘smarter.’

CCTV America’s Hendrik Sybrandy reports.

Kai Kloepfer, 18, was never particularly drawn to guns, he hadn’t grown up with them in his home. But than several years ago the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado happened.

Kloepfer thought there might be a way to prevent, not mass shootings necessarily, but unintentional gun accidents which cause an estimated 2,000 injuries and deaths in the U.S. every year.

“These sort of accidental deaths, the misuse of firearms that happens every day is in almost every way a much larger problem and additionally it’s a problem I could actually solve with engineering,” Kloepfer said.

“I actually started with iris recognition technology which was really promising until I realized that most people using guns wear sunglasses. Eventually I settled on fingerprints.”

A fingerprint sensor embedded in the side of a gun captures the image of the print of the person holding it.

If the image matches a print stored inside the weapon, it unlocks. The gun than locks again less than a second after leaving a user’s hand.