I'm a lawyer who likes doing business stuff and I have an interest in out of the ordinary markets with odd regulatory considerations. I've done a lot of work in healthcare. In the early part of my career, for 20 plus years, I was general counsel at AARP and after that I was CEO of AARP Services Inc.
And through all that I learned a lot about how to create products for customers that many companies avoided. We did a variety of things, but most importantly, we ran a large operation for seniors.
After AARP, I ran a brokerage in the health space. Later, I started doing research on guns and while reflecting on the power of the firearms lobby. It caused me to think about why the market for firearm safety doesn’t work. Basically, why does a device that can cause harm not have harm mitigation priced into it? Why isn’t there incentive from the manufacturer to mitigate harm?
The first thing I did was put together a data mining program with a Medicaid plan to try to find people who would be at risk for violence-oriented claims and then bring in community health workers to solve problems that led to risk of violence.
It was really successful! In that process, I kept thinking that these health plans should just give gun locks away, because that would lead to safer communities and improved claims histories.
I started talking to more people, including a colleague in Silicon Valley and others in the academic world. I just wasn’t finding products that made sense. When I dug deeper, I came to the conclusion that because the gun industry is exempt from liability by an act of Congress, there’s an inadequate amount of research and product development that goes into making guns safer.
So I figured, maybe there’s an opportunity to do it myself! I put together a team committed to gun safety, raised capital and the rest is history.
Obviously, I didn't want to do a cable lock because I know how easy they are to break. I didn't want to do a trigger lock because lots of people said that they're vulnerable, they're easy to break, and in some cases you can actually fire the gun with a trigger lock on! So I was looking at things that lock either through the chamber or through the barrel.
And I was introduced to a number of people working on some things. I got professionally involved with the SmartTech Foundation, which is in Silicon Valley. Around that time, it was trying to finance innovations in gun safety. And there was also a professor at Hopkins who was a leading guru on innovation in the gun industry for safety. And he was extraordinarily helpful to me in bringing me up to speed. So I just talked to a lot of people about safe gun storage.
We ended up picking this kind of secure gun barrel lock over other choices for a variety of reasons. After many tests, we solved design problems and those solutions became the subject of our second patent.
I’ve worked with a great engineering shop along with firearms expert Mark DiOrio and engineer Danny Reader and also brought in Scot Thomasson formerly of ATF as advisor.
It took about three years. Part of that development period was during the Covid-19 pandemic, which slowed things down, but it was important for this to be done with integrity. I had read all the startup books for a minimally viable product and you can’t do that with a gun lock. It was important to get firearm safety right.
Guns in the US raise many complicated emotions. Plus the Second Amendment to the US Constitution is an absolute that we respect. The environment we work in makes it crucial that the safety devices we create work well and enhance the lives of gun owners in the US and abroad.
Responsible gun owners do not want guns to be used in crime or to be the tool with which a person takes his or her life. If we think of the challenge as improving public health, we have a job to do to introduce gun owners to SafeGunLock and to build the case for why it meets their needs to have their gun unavailable to any unauthorized user and rapidly accessible to intended users.
We will consider ourselves successful when we have millions of satisfied SafeGunLock owners and we are able to establish that this device is reducing gun deaths in our country by 10 percent.
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Our mission at SafeGunLock is to save lives by providing the most secure, convenient and portable gun lock in the world. Discover how SafeGunLock enhances gun safety.
Protect yourself, your family and your firearm with this heavy duty, quick release and portable SafeGunLock.
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