A smarter gun? How Kai Kloepfer's high school science fair project led to the development of a child- and thief-proof gun.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

Colorado has seen its share of gun tragedies. In 1999, two students at Columbine High School killed 13 people in a shooting rampage at the school. And in 2012, a gunman walked into a movie theater in Aurora and opened fire, killing 12 and wounding 70.

Both mass shootings occurred within an hour of where Kai Kloepfer lives, in Boulder. At the time of the Aurora shootings, Kloepfer, then 15, was looking for a project for his local science fair, and he started thinking about ways to prevent unauthorized or negligent use of a gun.

Kloepfer's project led to a design for a new kind of "smart gun" that will fire only when a fingerprint it recognizes is on the grip. His design won a grand prize in the 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. It also won a $50,000 grant from the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation to refine the technology.

"Smart-gun technology offers a way that a dangerous weapon can become less dangerous," says Kloepfer, now an 18-year-old senior at Fairview High School in Boulder.

Two Centuries of Debate

But by designing the gun, Kloepfer is wading into an issue that has long divided Americans. The debate over guns goes back to 1791, when the Bill of Rights-- the first 10 amendments to the Constitution--was adopted. The Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

If you think that's a sentence your English teacher wouldn't like, you're not alone: For more than 200 years, no one really knew what it meant. Did it guarantee an individual's right to own guns or only someone serving in a militia? In 2008, the Supreme Court finally decided: The Court said it applies to individuals, not just militias (see box).

But the controversy has continued. Advocates of gun control say we still need stricter gun laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people; gun-rights advocates argue that most restrictions-- including limits on the types of guns that people can own for self-defense--are unconstitutional (see Debate, p. 22).

To Kloepfer and other proponents of smart guns, the idea is a commonsense approach to a terrible problem: Many accidental gun deaths and mass shootings by young people have involved a small child or teenager getting a hold of someone else's gun, often a parent's or relative's.

Consider what happened to Veronica Rutledge of Blackfoot, Idaho, when she took her 2-year-old son to a...