A Sound Investment in Security

By Helmut Brandtner

Helmut Brandtner is the Managing Director of Armatix GmbH. Prior to joining Armatix, he served as a military advisor for NATO and as a Chief Operations Officer for the United Nations.  

Gun technology itself hasn’t changed for the last 100 years, but now we are starting to see a new period of innovation through the integration of more smart technologies into firearms. The major advantage of smart guns is that their use is limited only to the authorized user. Smart technology in guns also offers a variety of additional features, including: shot counting, drop detection, activation and de-activation, writable and readable memory (similar to a black box of an aircraft), various sensors, etc. For example, our iP1 pistol uses an radio-frequency identification (RFID) watch that communicates with the gun to authenticate the user’s identity, and has several different operating modes, as well as the ability to integrate several different modules into the weapon – each of which provides additional functionality in and of themselves. All of these features serve to make guns safer and more useful to their owners.

In late 2015, President Barack Obama laid out an executive action directing the U.S. Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice to sponsor more research into smart gun technology. This initiative is mainly driven by the mass-shooting incidents that have occurred in the last couple of months in the U.S. We see the President’s initiative as a confirmation of our smart gun’s technology to have a positive effect, and that we are on the right track in developing it, despite all obstacles which we are still facing in making it available. We welcome the President’s plan to develop new safety technologies — but we would argue that the technology already exists, at least in our products. The new smart technology in guns is more expensive, but it is a sound investment to ensure the security of family members, relatives, friends, and other citizens.

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