Chattanooga Company Lodestar introduces new firearm safety mechanism

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) — A local Chattanooga firearm company is taking firearm safety seriously, and they’ve added a technological twist.

The Lodestar LNK 9 is a 9mm handgun based on the Glock platform. What makes it different is the biometric safety developed by Lodestar Technology. It uses a brass actuator to block the trigger from being pulled. They chose brass so it couldn’t be defeated by magnets.

Lodestar Technology CTO, Ginger Chandler tells us, “We made a fire control mechanism that puts this feature that stops the trigger from moving to the rear and I needed to pop up or pop down and so we use a biometric as one method to rotate that motor. We have a pin pad on the side with a four digit code, and we also have an app that you can open it. It’ll unlock and lock the firearm.”

The gun is designed to spend most of its time on the charging base, ready to be used by an authorized user.

Ginger Chandler continues, “…And we provide the consumer with Velcro to put into the squares so you could even you know you can hang it under a shelf. It could go on the bedside. It could go wherever you want.”

Lodestar says they do not store the biometric data of any of their customers. All of that information is stored locally on the firearm itself.

Ms. Chandler knows many will have trepidations about adding technology to a traditional handgun. She says “There’s people who go ‘I don’t wanna do this. I don’t want the electronics guns and complicates things’, and they’re worried about that, and we know and so we tell people ‘this gun isn’t for everybody.'”