You've heard of smart phones, smart cars and even smart homes.
Now, a group of Collin County teens are developing a new high-tech device: A smart gun.
After the Las Vegas concert massacre, the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and numerous guns brought on local campuses, the group of students said enough’s enough and developed what they hope will be a solution.
“It’s fear stimulating and in my group we were like, we can't deal with this, we have to do something about it,” said Salwa Shahid, a junior at Plano West High School.
The 10 Plano and Frisco high-schoolers are in a program called DiscoverSTEM where students identify real-world problems and try to fix them.
Their most recent creation: A smart gun aimed at stopping mass shootings.
“We realized that at home we have a really grave problem,” said Amina Syeda, a senior at Frisco’s Liberty High School.
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The Secure Gun is a modified Nerf gun.
A camera on the front uses artificial intelligence to detect if a gun is pointed at a person, crowd, animal or target.
If aimed at a person or crowd, the gun limits the amount of times you can pull the trigger.
“You still are allowed to do one bullet every 20 seconds so you still are allowed to use self-defense so it’s still going to work,” said Shahid.
GPS on the gun would create geo-fences, stopping it from firing in certain locations like schools and churches.
“We realize that this will offend some people but the thing is you have to have compromise … you have to have a compromise in order to have the better of humanity,” said Hanzala Rehan, a senior at Plano West High School.
The Secure Gun, they say, would be built into new guns and a version would be made to be retrofitted onto existing guns.
The prototype and any implementation - they know - has a long way to go.
But their sites are set on turning the tricked-out toy into in a solution to a serious problem.
The Secure Gun placed in the top five at a competition with innovations from 45 countries.
A patent for the device is pending.
Students who helped create the Secure Gun are Rayyan Punjani, Hanzala Rehan, Hawwa Shahid, Salwa Shahid, Faaiz Nadeem, Amina Syeda, Nabeeha Qazi, Areeba Qazi, Hanin Shakeel and Mohammad Amaan Jaffar.
