With the recent anniversary of the events at Columbine and with the trial of the Aurora Theater Shooting, along with many other shootings, it has been considered by most leaders that there should be a disregard for the right to bear arms and instead citizens shouldn’t be able to arm themselves with guns at all. Some people clearly can’t use them for the right purposes and most, due to these horrific shootings, don’t fight this notion. However, a teen engineer has a new idea in mind.

Kai Kloepfer, a seventeen-year-old from Boulder, has created a new prototype for a “Smart Gun”. Kloepfer got the idea when he was falling asleep one night around the time of the Theater Shooting two years ago. Originally, he just needed something for his science fair project, but it evolved into something much bigger.

This gun is unlike all others due to its ability to fire only under the owner’s command. Kloepfer can accomplish this by adding a fingerprint scanner on the handle of the gun. Once the gun scans its owner’s finger, it will unlock and make itself ready to fire. The user information would be stored within this gun, therefore making it hard to hack.

Kai entered his gun into the Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge, and walked out with 50,000 dollars to continue building this life-saving device. Some of the money has already gone towards buying a 3D printer to make the model on paper come to reality. The remainder of the money will go to the creation of the fingerprint scanner.