Original subtitles

Every 17 minutes in America,

someone is killed by a gun.

It's a wave of violence that political debate

can't seem to stop.

Can science point the way forward

by pinpointing how the shootings spread,

predicting gun crimes before they happen,

and uncovering how guns infect our minds?

Is this an epidemic that can be cured?

Could gun crime be a virus?

Space, time, life itself,

the secrets of the cosmos lie

through the wormhole.

Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com

captions paid for by discovery communications

if gun violence is a disease, we are suffering mightily.

In Chicago, where shootings on a summer weekend

soar into the double digits.

In Newtown, where 20 children

never came home from school.

In Orlando,

where a night of dancing became a bloodbath.

Every day,

new holes are opened up in some family's life.

Is gun control the answer, or is it safer to carry one?

The answer may come, not from politicians,

but from scientists,

who are tracking the spread of gun crime

like a biological pandemic.

Reports of a school shooting in progress

are coming out of Colorado today.

They started shooting everyone in the cafeteria,

and then you could hear them laughing and running upstairs.

Since columbine, the heartbreak has been broadcast live.

Since Orlando, it's been screened.

The names have been running together.

It's a flood of data.

How do we understand it?

Sherry towers is a statistician.

In her work, streams of data tell stories.

One of the things that I've noticed

as I've been sitting here

is that, once people lock their bikes there,

they tend to walk underneath that tree

and go to the path.

- Bicycle, lock, tree, repeat. - Sherry can make a prediction.

Soon, bikers will wear a path in the grass.

We can use mathematical and statistical models

to study far more complex patterns

than just the ones we're seeing on this school campus today.

For instance, these models can be used to predict

the spread of disease within a population.

We can use these models

to try to forecast trends in the stock market.

We can also use these models to examine earthquakes

and try to predict when and where there will be aftershocks.

But one day in 2014, Sherry's safe world

of spreadsheets and stats came unmoored.

She was heading to a meeting at Purdue university

when the event was canceled.

A student had been shot on campus.

I realized that, that was the third school shooting

I had heard about in approximately a 10-day period.

And I wondered to myself

if this was just a statistical fluke

or whether there was other patterns involved.

Then, Sherry had a radical idea.

Could the media itself be the mechanism of transmission?

Could stories about shootings actually lead to more shootings,

triggering an epidemic?

We decided to focus on gun tragedies

that get the most media attention,

and those are school shootings and mass killings.

Sherry's team went story by story

and broke the events into discrete pieces of data...

Type of shooting, map location, date, and time.

It was the largest, most comprehensive survey

of its kind.

Was each shooting an isolated event?

With all the data in, Sherry was able to isolate a pattern.

It didn't matter where an event occurred.

The important variable was when.

What we found was, there is very strong evidence

of clustering in time.

When there is an event that occurs,

one of these gun tragedies

tends to trigger a similar tragedy

in the very near future.

And this bunching together in time

is actually the hallmark of contagion.

We typically use the word "contagion"

to describe the spread of diseases,

but Sherry says it also applies to mass shootings.

It appears the gun violence really does spread

like a contagious disease.

Unlike influenza, that spreads by direct,

person-to-person contact,

the medium for spreading the contagion is media itself.

And, as with a biological virus,

Sherry's data show there is a definite period

during which any one incident of gun violence remains contagious.

What we find is that,

the contagious period seems to last around 13 days,

which also seems to be, approximately,

the same time period of the attention span

that's given to these high-profile shootings,

like, for instance, the Newtown tragedy

or the San Bernardino tragedy.

13 days... One famously unlucky number.

Sherry hopes she'll never make another discovery like it.

This is, by far, the hardest study, emotionally,

that we've ever undertaken.

You're reading the details about how children have gotten killed,

and you realize that these are entire families

who aren't here anymore.

Sherry believes that, as long as the media

keeps giving mass shootings wall-to-wall coverage,

the gun virus will continue to spread

and claim even more victims

unless someone intervenes.

Shots fired.

Mass shootings are the most visible aspect

of America's problem with gun violence.

But vastly more Americans are killed in isolated shootings

on city streets.

And many of these killings

receive little or no media coverage.

But renowned epidemiologist Gary Slutkin

thinks they, too, bear the hallmarks of a virus.

Gary made his name by fighting contagious diseases

all around the world.

But when he finally returned to Chicago,

he realized his hometown

harbored an epidemic of a different kind.

When I began to look at violence in Chicago,

I didn't really know very much about it.

But I did ask, first, to see the charts and graphs and maps,

and the data on it looked exactly like the epidemic maps

that I had been working with in all these other problems.

To Gary's trained eye, the clustering of gun crimes

resembled the way a contagious disease

sweeps through densely populated areas.

He'd seen cholera do this in refugee camps in Somalia

during the 1990s.

So, what we have here is a representation

of a refugee camp.

The white chips here are representing the population,

and the red, a person with cholera.

And when the infection comes,

it can spread from one person to another.

Stopping cholera isn't complicated.

A strict regimen of washing hands,

boiling water, and quarantine will do it.

But Gary struggled to get these practices adopted in Somalia

because the refugees were suspicious of outsiders.

Then, Gary had an inspiration...

He could hire refugees and train them as health workers.

These locals successfully interrupted

the spread of the disease

because they had what Gary did not...

Street cred.

In Chicago, Gary saw a city repeating the mistake

he'd once made himself...

Fighting an outbreak with outsiders

who weren't trusting.

The cops pulled up, and they left.

They're scared.

They're scared of the community.

So, Gary founded an organization called "cure violence"

with the mission to hire and train trusted local aid workers.

He calls them "the interrupters."

Almost all of them know the violence

of the streets firsthand.

Well, I've been shot five times, you know,

on different occasions.

The man that was watching us got shot in his head.

I was part of the violence.

Now, I'm part of the solution.

Because of who they are,

interrupters can go where police cannot.

They don't carry handcuffs

and they don't serve search warrants.

Instead, they carry a simple message...

You don't need a gun to settle an argument.

Crazy, man.

You two guys, man, y'all been around here

on a lot of bull, both of y'all.

Robbing people, breaking in windows, all kinds of stuff.

Don't get it all twisted.

Once upon a time, this man was out here too.

Through the interrupters, Gary keeps the focus

where he thinks it belongs...

On preventing disease, not punishing crimes.

So, Jacob, you from this community.

You're going to be hearing gunshots tonight?

Probably, 'cause if you tell

for whatever I did yesterday, it's just a cycle.

If you want to use violence and shoot somebody as a way

to solve your differences,

we trying to say that's not the way to go

'cause you can't take back a life.

It's a simple, but revolutionary, approach,

and it has shown dramatic results.

We started in February.

By march, it was already 67% down.

It was amazing.

There was this park across the street that they'd never use.

Now, their kids are playing there.

The epidemic's no longer there.

Gary has now rolled out "cured violence"

in locations across the country.

On average, the program has reduced shootings by 44%

and killings by up to 56% in the neighborhoods it targets.

It's an approach born from medical techniques.

To Gary, its success proves gun crime

is no different from a virus.

You can't see gun crime under a microscope,

but if it spreads like a virus,

if we can fight it like we fight a virus,

maybe we need to stop thinking about gun crime

as a political issue

and start treating it as a medical issue.

Some researchers already are.

They've discovered a new way to predict shootings

and to stop them.

Every virus spreads in its own unique way.

Mosquitos spread malaria.

The common cold relies on the sneeze

to spread its germs through the air.

On the Internet, memes go viral when they spread

from person to person across a social network.

If we're going to stem the epidemic of gun violence,

we have to discover the precise means of its transmission.

In Chicago, the police department

is trying to do just that

by launching a high-tech and highly controversial program

to reduce gun crime.

This is the heart of the operation.

It connects to 29,000 surveillance cameras.

It has microphones to record gunshots in real time,

and the brain behind all of this

is an algorithm designed to predict

who is going to be the next victim of a gun crime

before the crime happens.

It was developed by Illinois tech professor Miles Wernick.

The algorithm tries to see,

how many times have you been shot recently,

how many times have you been arrested on things

like weapons charges.

And all of those play into a pattern,

which turns out to be very accurate

in predicting a person's risk.

Miles developed his algorithm from one he'd used

to detect the spread of cancer cells in MRI scans.

But Chicago pd deputy chief Jonathan Lewin

has used it to develop a politically charged heat list...

The 400 people in Chicago

most likely to be involved in violent crime.

So, we were wondering, could we look at

person-based prediction methods,

and could we look at a way to develop a risk score

for a specific person's likelihood

for becoming involved in future gun crimes?

This is a subject who, as you can see,

was first arrested when he was 13.

He was 14 in that picture.

See, he's 15.

And this, we see too often.

The subject ended up being killed...

Fatal, multiple gunshot wounds.

Everything we're doing is trying to prevent this.

Is the heat list government overreach,

an invasion of privacy?

Or can such tightly targeted policing

actually stop the spread of gun violence?

Yale professor and Chicago native Andrew Papachristos

believes we need more and better data

to predict and prevent the spread of urban crime.

His social statistics work was the inspiration

for Chicago's current program.

So, really, my stock and trade is dealing with big data sets,

data sets like arrest records,

immunization records, census records,

survey records, and pulling them all together.

So, when I was growing up in Chicago, there were 800, 900,

nearing 1,000 homicides a year.

And kids all around me were getting pulled into gangs,

other types of stuff.

Still, I've never had anybody pull a gun on me.

I've never been shot at.

The question is, "why?"

Andrew doesn't believe he just got lucky.

His research shows that gun crime

is tied to limited networks of people...

Far smaller networks than you might expect.

And you don't have to be a criminal to be a victim.

Jonylah Watkins was just six months old

when she was shot to death.

She was lying in the back seat of a car

while her father changed her diaper.

She was so innocent.

Her murder looked truly random, and I was interested

to see how random it actually was.

Investigators learned Jonylah's father

was the target of the attack.

To the media, her death was a tragic case

of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But as a statistician, Andrew wanted to know

whether Jonylah's death could have been predicted.

Jonylah didn't have almost any of the risk factors

that we usually look at in these models...

Being young, being male,

living in a particular neighborhood,

being part of a street gang.

But what those really tell you are about aggregate risks.

The vast majority of people with those attributes,

they never shoot anybody nor do they ever get shot.

To find Jonylah's risk factor,

Andrew peered into the network of people around her

using a forensic tool called "social network analysis."

It measures relationships between people,

counting their number and their strength.

Who were Jonylah's parents?

Who were their friends and their friends' friends?

All of those connections carry risk factors.

So, one of the variables that really helps you identify

who's at risk, who's a potential victim,

is exposure to violence.

Even if you're not directly engaging

in these sorts of incidents, but people around you are,

it can increase your individual probability of getting shot

upwards to 500% to 900%.

For Jonylah, the greatest risks stemmed from her father.

He had been shot in the past, and almost 40% of his associates

had been victims of violence.

Statistics don't assign blame to anyone,

but mathematically speaking,

anyone belonging to her father's social network

faced dramatically higher risks.

If her father is literally living in a world

where his friends are getting shot,

she's at risk by her own connections to this network.

Andrew's social network analysis shows that gun crime

is highly localized within social networks.

In one of Chicago's high-crime neighborhoods,

41% of all gun homicides took place in a network

that represented just 4% of the population.

You have a very small percentage of the population

that are responsible for the vast majority

of the violence as victims.

You can use that information to use prevention efforts,

as well as enforcement after its... when needed,

to get those individuals.

And in fact, to save their lives.

But focusing on small social networks

to prevent gun crime also has a down side.

In Chicago, the police department has faced criticism

for tracking people based only on who they know.

But it claims the heat list has a social benefit.

A cop may come knock on your door,

but a social worker would be there, too.

The goal is not to be punitive.

The goal is to try to reduce the chance

that somebody's gonna be

continuing the cycle of violence.

The jury is still out on Chicago's heat list,

but no one expects it to prevent every gun death.

So, how can we protect ourselves from the gun virus?

Should we all go out and buy ourselves a gun?

You've seen it in the movies.

Our hero saves the day with a well-aimed shot.

It's the end of the road for you, Malone.

This is the heart of the gun debate.

Does it take a good guy with a gun

to stop a bad guy with a gun?

I ain't done yet.

Or would it just mean more bullets flying around?

Do guns make us more safe, or less?

Epidemiologist Charlie Branas started out as a paramedic.

On the tough streets of Philadelphia,

he treated many gunshot wounds.

As a paramedic, I was exposed to cases of gun violence,

but it became very frustrating not to be able

to prevent those cases,

to simply see them on a regular basis.

It was here in Philadelphia where the right to bear arms

was added to the U.S. constitution in 1791.

Today, it's reeling from gun violence

with almost five shootings a day.

So, now, Charlie is returning to the crime scenes

he once visited as a paramedic

with the skills of an epidemiologist.

And he's asking one burning question...

Does carrying a gun make you safer?

It is important to begin to think about

whether a gun is protective or perilous,

and if you are in possession of a firearm,

under what conditions will you be able to protect yourself?

His first challenge was how to study this scientifically.

Charlie knew he couldn't hand out guns

and wait to see which subjects got shot.

But epidemiology offers a different approach...

Find people who've contracted a disease

and then work backward to discover how they caught it.

To identify cases of the gun virus,

Charlie got his research team hooked up

with Philadelphia's police department.

We set up, with the city police department,

a system whereby we were notified,

typically on the day of a shooting,

but soon after, within hours.

As the shootings roved in,

the team collected key details about each victim.

Where was he at the time?

To what age group and race did he belong?

Was he under the influence of drugs or alcohol?

And most importantly, was he carrying a gun?

But in epidemiology, you can't pinpoint why a person gets sick

until you compare him to a similar person who hasn't.

So, for every gunshot victim,

Charlie's team had to find a comparable person...

during the past month... who was not shot.

As a case came in, depending on their age,

their race, and their gender,

we called around, through random digit dialing

across the city, to find someone roughly of the same age,

race, and gender, to ask them quickly

about their experiences

at the time of a case and shooting.

And lastly, they asked their interviewees

whether they themselves had been carrying a gun

at the time the crime took place across town.

How old are you? Do you own a gun?

Where were you at 10:00 P.M. last Wednesday?

Were you in possession of a firearm at this time?

For over 2.5 years, Charlie and his team collected data

on almost 3,500 shootings.

They ended up with 677 shooting victims

for whom they had a good comparison group.

Now, Charlie could answer the central question...

Are you less likely to be shot if you're carrying a gun?

We expected to see a protective effect,

and we simply could not find it,

no matter how we analyzed the data.

In fact, Charlie saw exactly the opposite.

Philadelphians were four and a half times

more likely to be shot

if they were in possession of a gun.

One of the things that we hypothesized

from our case-control study was that,

possession of a firearm changed peoples' actions...

Mere possession of it.

And so, that, perhaps, people reacted in ways

they would have otherwise not reacted

had they not had a firearm.

Charlie plans future research to see whether firearm training

could make guns more protective.

But his research on gun possession

sends a simple message...

If you want to lower your chances of being shot,

don't carry a gun.

Is the best way to immunize yourself against the gun virus

not to put a firearm in your hand?

Well, that may not be enough, because science is finding

guns do strange things to our minds.

The mere sight of one can trigger an outburst of violence.

We've all heard it said...

"guns don't kill people. People kill people."

In other words, the gun isn't what matters...

It takes a finger to pull the trigger.

But new research casts doubt on this idea.

Maybe it's not the people who fire them,

but guns alone, that are fueling the epidemic.

Why do people shoot one another?

For over 25 years,

Ohio state university psychologist Brad bushman

has been asking that question.

But recently, he's been asking it in an unusual setting.

This state-of-the-art simulator

was designed to study the behavior of drivers.

But Brad hijacked it to study aggression.

In this experiment, drivers encountered

a number of frustrating events,

such as somebody mimicking their behavior,

somebody cutting them off in traffic,

construction zones.

We all know about road rage,

but Brad wanted to see if he could trigger it

with something seemingly unrelated.

We placed a stimulus object in the passenger's seat.

What we told participants when they got in the car was,

"this car is being used

in a number of different experiments."

All right. And again, I just wanted to apologize.

The other experiment was supposed to put it away,

but they didn't, so you can just ignore that.

Brad and his team

measured how the tennis-racket subjects drove,

how frustrated they got,

whether they broke any traffic laws,

or leaned on their horns.

Nothing unusual happened.

But the tennis racket was just there to set a baseline.

Brad's real question was, what would happen

when a gun was sitting on the passenger's seat.

So, he's breaking the speed limit again.

He's pretty impatient, I think.

Oh, dude. Right in the middle of the road.

- Oh, man. - Wow, over the center.

That's a double yellow line.

Yeah, I think he's really an aggressive driver.

In driver after driver, Brad saw the same thing happening.

What we discovered in this experiment is that,

the mere presence of a gun in the passenger's seat

made drivers more aggressive.

It primes or activates aggressive thoughts in memory.

We call this "the weapons effect."

in a fight, having a gun would give you the upper hand.

So, perhaps, Brad's armed drivers

consciously chose to be more aggressive.

But Brad thinks we may not be so logical...

At least, not according to a second experiment.

Driver behavior's a great laboratory

for studying aggression,

not just in a driving simulator,

but in the real world.

Researchers did an experiment where they had a pickup truck

pull up to an intersection.

Driver remained at the stop for 12 seconds

to see what the motorist trapped behind him would do.

A few honked.

Most sat quietly until they pulled out and went around.

In a second version, the truck blocking the intersection

had a rifle on a gun rack.

What's amazing about this study is that, people do the opposite

of what you would expect.

Motorists were more likely to honk their horn

when there is a gun in the back window

of the pickup truck

than if there is no gun in the back window.

It's an instinctive response, not a logical one.

There's nothing logical about it.

Why does a gun provoke an aggressive response,

even when it's in someone else's possession?

Brad thinks it comes down to the wiring in our brains.

Human beings are very good at identifying

potentially dangerous stimuli in their environment,

such as spiders and snakes.

It's called the "fight-or-flight response,"

and it happens faster than we can think.

Brad believes that the sight of a gun

activates that same system.

We've been repeatedly exposed to images of guns and violence

that the link between guns and violence

in the human brain is very strong

because people recognize them

as a source of threat and danger.

In other words, a gun doesn't merely shoot.

It plants the idea of violence in your mind.

And by triggering those feelings,

a gun is actually prompting you to use it.

Of course, it takes a finger to pull the trigger,

but by increasing these aggressive impulses,

the trigger may also be pulling the finger.

Today, there are more than 300 million guns in America

silently triggering our aggressive impulses.

A few of us give in to them.

But if you catch the gun virus, do you have it for life?

One scientist thinks he's found a way to cure it.

Gun violence, whether it's mass shootings

or the ceaseless daily litany of killings,

is almost always committed by one type of person...

Young men.

If we're going to eradicate the gun virus,

we need therapies to target those who have been infected.

Is there any way to cure them?

Neuroscientist Kent Kiehl is trying to understand

the brains of those who kill.

You dialed 9-1-1.

What's the location of your emergency?

Sandy hook elementary school.

I keep hearing shooting.

It's still happening.

I was approached by the parents who had lost their children

at Sandy hook elementary school in that tragedy.

And they asked if there was any science that we could do

that might help us understand

why people might commit such types of crimes,

and how we might be able

to develop better ways of preventing them.

The tragedy of Sandy hook haunts our society.

In just five short minutes, 20 first-graders were murdered,

along with six teachers.

The killer was male, 20, and disturbed...

Not unlike the young juveniles Kent has come to study.

All of these kids that we were working with

were in an ultra-supermax facility...

The highest risk facility in the state of new Mexico...

Because they had committed one or more felonies.

And I'm not talking, you know, simple things.

These are serious multiple felons.

A lot of the time, the crimes that are committed

by these kids use handguns or firearms.

And almost every one of them has had or owns a firearm,

or has acquired one.

It's really something that's just commonplace.

Kent studies the brains of these violent young offenders,

but his subjects can't come to an MRI lab,

so he brings the lab to them.

So, we designed and created

a state-of-the-art mobile MRI system.

We've scanned the brains of over 4,000 inmates,

developed the world's largest repository of youth populations.

Kent is trying to detect patterns

in brain anatomy

that are correlated with violent behavior.

He scanned the brains of 25 incarcerated young men

who had committed murder

and contrasted them with the brains of 150 offenders

who had not.

He looked for differences in areas involved with emotion,

impulse control, and decision-making...

The amygdala, anterior cingulate,

and orbital frontal cortex.

The scans revealed stark differences.

Turns out that, parts of this amygdala

are actually not well-developed in youths that commit homicides,

compared to their peers.

As well, kids that commit homicide

have less orbital frontal cortex.

Parts of the brain that we have found

that are not developed normally, or developed differently,

are actually parts of the brain

that are kind of the last to develop.

They usually don't reach full maturity until age, about, 25.

It appears almost, like, even though they're 15, 16 years old,

their brains might only really be 10, 11 years old.

With 85% accuracy,

Kent could guess which juveniles had committed murder

just by looking at their brain scans.

Do these differences mean some people are incurably violent,

or is there a saving grace

in the brain's capacity to change?

People are only really kind of beginning to understand this,

but the brain continues to change throughout your life.

All the experiences that you have,

they continue to shape and mold the brain.

But most prison experiences are not helpful for inmate's brains.

Unfortunately, in a correctional environment,

there's really no behaviors that get reinforced positively.

If you're quiet and you're good, and you don't do anything,

what happens? Nothing.

The only thing that gets these individuals

any type of social interaction is aggression.

It's a very dangerous environment for everyone.

That's called "compression."

It compresses them into a very limited set

of behavioral things that they do.

The term "compression" comes from diving.

As a diver descends into the depths,

he encounters greater and greater pressure

from the water.

After a while, his body adjusts.

But at this point, returning to the surface

actually becomes dangerous.

Kent thinks it is just as hard for imprisoned kids

to return to positive kinds of interaction.

The diving analogy is a good one because,

you know, you don't just pop right back up to the surface

and you're healthy again.

That can kill you, right?

Kent is now studying kids who've been through

a therapeutic program called "decompression."

It asks social workers and prison guards

to reward good behaviors

instead of just punishing bad ones.

And so, if the kids were good today,

and they talked to someone, and they engaged with someone,

and they didn't get in fights, they'll get some reward.

And they learn, through these

positive-reinforcement strategies, that,

good things can happen to them if they act better.

12 months after decompression therapy,

Kent conducted a second series of scans.

He saw that critical regions had begun to grow and change.

There's an area of the brain that helps to regulate

decision-making and capacity for decision,

and help you understand when you make mistakes,

and that area of the brain is called the "anterior cingulate,"

and we are actually seeing an increase in activity there.

These circuits that control or help to regulate your behavior,

regulate your thinking, they are getting better.

Many underage felons are ultimately released

and have to make the dangerous transition

back to a free society.

A group of inmates not treated with decompression

went on to kill 16 more people.

But inmates who received the therapy killed no one.

One of the things that the programs try to teach them

is how not to act impulsively.

Whether that's with the firearm or without,

it's likely to lead to better outcomes

if they don't act impulsively.

Kent may have found a way to cure those

who've been infected by the gun virus.

But this therapy can only reach a select few,

and only after they have already gone to jail.

Now, one young scientist is working on a different way

to solve the epidemic of gun crime...

Fire a different type of gun.

We've seen how the gun virus spreads.

Mass shootings move through the media.

Street violence spreads through social networks.

Holding a gun or seeing one

triggers the urge to commit more violence.

We all want to stop this pandemic.

One man decided to focus on a part of the disease

that has long been overlooked.

Howdy.

Hey, Kai, how are you?

Like many young people in Colorado,

19-year-old Kai Kloepfer grew up at the gun range.

Do you want the shoot the Ar-15 today?

Definitely. I'd love to.

Awesome.

Growing up in Colorado,

firearms were always a part of the culture...

Maybe not as much as, say, Texas,

but they're definitely accepted.

Most high schoolers don't dwell on the problems caused by guns.

Kai was no different, until four years ago,

when gun violence struck just down the road.

315 and 314 for a shooting at century theatres.

We got another person shot in the leg, a female.

I got people running out of the theater. They're shot.

In Aurora, Colorado, the century theatre

became a scene of horrific slaughter

when a young man opened fire.

He killed a dozen people and wounded 70 more.

Like all Americans, Kai was deeply shaken.

But in the dark days that followed,

he began to think about solutions.

At the time, I was looking for a project

that could have some societal impact.

And with the Aurora-theatre shooting,

I realized that I need to create a gun

that only works for certain people.

And so, that's why I'm working on smart-gun technology.

Kai thought that, by designing a gun

that will only fire for its owner,

he might help prevent some acts of mass homicide.

Then, he realized that, out of more than 30,000 gun deaths

each year, two-thirds weren't homicides at all.

There's an even larger problem of suicides

and accidental gun death with misuse of firearms

that almost nobody talks about.

21,000 firearm suicides,

children that, every 30 minutes,

are killed or injured with a firearm.

Kai knew many of these victims were using a gun

that didn't belong to them.

Would these people have died

if the gun had refused to fire for them?

Starting with a $3,000 loan from his parents,

Kai has now invested four years on this project.

He went through an extensive prototyping process

using a 3D printer in his bedroom.

There's a fingerprint sensor

embedded in the grip of the firearm

that captures an image of their fingerprint.

That image is processed and then matched against a list

that's stored on the gun... Encrypted and secure...

Of everyone who's allowed to use that firearm.

Once we have a verified fingerprint,

there's a little motor

that takes signals from the circuit board

and produces physical motion.

We then use this motion to lock and unlock the firearm.

What started as a high-school project

has become a business in the making.

But Kai has an uphill battle to get his prototype to market.

Smartguns are not a new idea. And about 20 years ago,

the government saw that it was an obviously good idea

and decided to just throw a bunch of money at the problem.

They gave out grants to some major firearm manufacturers,

like Smith & Wesson.

For the very first time, a gun manufacturer

will include locking devices

and other safety features, and will develop smartguns

that can be fired only by the adults

who own them.

The smartguns met with fierce resistance.

Gun-advocacy groups claimed their second-amendment rights

were at risk.

Smith & Wesson got boycotted

and almost lost over 40% of their business,

which is substantial for any company.

They basically abandoned the projects and swore,

more or less, never to work on it again.

Before a single smartgun could be sold,

the product was withdrawn.

A lot of the public, especially the gun-owning public,

perceived smartguns as the gun control or, like,

something that's gonna be mandated.

It's not gun control in any way.

It's not external control.

There's no government database.

Kai believes smartguns will help to inoculate some of us

against the virus that claims so many American lives

without compromising second-amendment rights.

With this technology, the owner is still free to do anything

that they judge they should do with a firearm,

but it will stop children from finding guns,

teenagers from using it to commit suicide,

and a solid portion of the over 30,000 gun deaths

that happen every year in the United States.

I might not be able to stop the next psychopath

who walks into a movie theater,

but there are lives that I can save.

Even if we can save one person's life,

that'd make the whole thing worth it.

A smartgun would make a dent in the gun virus,

but only a small one.

In fact, all the solutions are in their early days,

which is strange, considering how dire the situation is.

Guns claim over 30,000 American lives each year.

When Ebola threatened our shores,

the full resources of our public-health community

were called into service.

You know how many people died in the U.S.

From that devastating disease?

Two.

When the United States puts its resources to work,

we have great results.

But in 1996, a federal law

prohibited the centers for disease control

from funding anything that may lead to gun control.

The law has had a chilling effect

on gun-violence research across the country.

I believe in science, and I believe

it's only with the unfettered help of science,

and the answers it provides, that we'll have a hope

of ending this devastating epidemic.