NPR article on smart guns.

Found this in the NPR archive file. Good time to grab a cup of coffee to read thru this one.


http://www.npr.org/2016/04/07/473416699/how-an-idea-to-develop-a-safer-smart-gun-backfired?ft=nprml&f=2,3,46

If you have a smartphone, maybe you unlock it with your fingerprint. And if we can do that for a phone, some people wonder why can't we use digital locks on guns too? Well, one company tried it - tried to give its customers a safer kind of gun. As Joel Rose of our Planet Money podcast explains, it paid a steep price.

JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: That company was Colt. It made the first successful revolver back before the Civil War. One of its advertising slogans was God created man, Samuel Colt made them equal. But by the early 1990s, Colt had fallen on hard times. That's when Donald Zilkha bought the company with a plan to get it back on its feet.

DONALD ZILKHA: I was doing something that I thought was innovative in an industry that hadn't done too much innovation in a long time. It was going to improve things in this business.

ROSE: Donald Zilkha didn't even own a gun. He was an investment banker from Manhattan, wears nice suits, cufflinks. What attracted him to Colt was its iconic role in American history. And he thought he saw another historic opportunity, a smart gun - a gun that will only fire for an authorized user like its owner.


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