When President Obama called for advanced research on “smart” gun technologies last week, Omer Kiyani thought, “I’ve already done that.”

The Detroit-based engineer has developed a technological solution he believes will appease both sides of the contentious gun safety debate.

He should know. He has been on both sides.

Kiyani survived a shooting when he was 16. An unknown gunman fired through the back window of the car Kiyani was in one night with friends and the bullet pierced through his left cheek. The sustained injury has inhibited him from eating on the left side of his mouth.

For Kiyani, improving gun safety is personal. But he’s also a gun owner and a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association. He doesn’t want to wade into the politics of it. He just feels passionately about developing a way for guns to be safer.

“I think gun violence is a problem. This is me doing my part,” he said. “I’m not a politician. I’m none of that. I am an engineer solving a technical problem.”

The general idea behind smart gun technologies is that only the owner of a firearm could unlock it. It’s not unlike how smartphones can be fingerprint protected. Other technologies have turned the gun itself into the smart technology.

For example, one German company built one with a chip inside that could be unlocked with a watch. But stores in California and Maryland that wanted to sell the guns faced death threats and protests so intense that they backed down.

The backlash is predicated on concerns that the technology will lead to the government mandating that only guns equipped with smart technologies be sold.

Kiyani has developed a solution that doesn’t require buying a new gun. He has created a lock that fits over the trigger of most existing firearms. It can be unlocked with the owner’s fingerprint almost instantaneously.

“I have a device which is an accessory that allows any gun to become a smart gun,” he said. “It doesn’t mess with any of the internals of the gun.”

He has had the idea in his head for many years, but after the shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 that left 20 elementary school children and six adults dead, he felt as though no one was doing anything actionable to curb gun violence.

“Now is the time, no one else is doing it, so I have to do it myself,” he said. “I have to do it because I felt helpless.”

In an e-mailed statement, Amy Hunter, a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, the group’s lobbying arm, said the NRA “is not opposed to smart technology.”

“If manufacturers make it and people buy it, that’s fine. We’re not in the business of advocating for products – any products,” Hunter said. “We’re opposed to government mandates that require consumers to purchase particular items. This became an issue in New Jersey when the state passed a bill that said, essentially, once smart gun technology is available, no one can buy any other kind of gun. We are absolutely opposed to that.”

She said that she was not familiar with Kiyani’s product, but that regardless, the answer would be the same.

Eddie Isler, who answered the phone at Gun Owners of America, said that the public should decide whether it wants the technology, but that he sees it as largely unnecessary. Most responsible people already lock their guns away, he said. He also worried what would happen if an intruder came in to your home and only your wife was there and her fingerprint didn’t unlock it, or if the battery died.

Skeptics also worry that if the technology had a glitch, it could cost a life.

Kiyani said the lock can store up to nine fingerprints and has a battery life of several months. As for possible malfunctions, he said, guns themselves are not 100 percent foolproof. They can jam. Relying on any mechanical device for protection is a risk.

He took his product, which costs $319, to the Consumer Electronics Show in Law Vegas last week. He couldn’t demonstrate how it works, though, because he couldn’t bring a gun inside.

A onetime developer of airbag safety technologies, Kiyani left that work last year to focus full time on his biometrics company, Identilock, after he received a $100,000 grant from the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation to develop it. He said the response from gun owners so far has been positive.

At Obama’s announcement of his executive actions on guns and again at his town hall meeting last week, the president said his administration will work with the private sector on new smart gun technologies.

It’s a goal he is likely to repeat during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, where one seat in the first lady’s box will be empty as a tribute to all the Americans killed by guns.

“If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should make sure they can’t pull a trigger on a gun,” Obama said during his Jan. 5 remarks.

A federal government study determined that 8 percent of unintentional gun-related deaths could have been prevented by a child safety lock. There were nearly 2,000 accidental gun deaths in 2015 and 59 in the first 10 days of 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

“That one email I get that says you saved my life, that will make it all worth it,” Kiyani said. “One life will be worth all this trouble and I know I will save more. Every time this product isn’t out there, there’s a life unsaved.”

The year 1492 is etched in history as the date America was discovered.

Christopher Columbus’s pioneering journey has, for centuries, been considered Europe’s first contact with the continent.

But, although there is a degree of evidence to suggest a Norse settlement some 500 years earlier, other discussions about prior discoveries have fallen into category pseudo science.
But now a team of scientists claim to have found evidence they believe could “rewrite the history” of America.

They say it was first discovered by the Romans.

The new study claims ancient mariners visited the New World more than a 1,000 years before Columbus set foot there.

Researchers from the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society (AAPS) say a Roman sword was discovered in a shipwreck off Oak Island on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Canada.

The research reveals that a Roman legionnaire’s whistle, Gold Carthage coins, part of a Roman shield and a Roman head sculpture have also been found on the island.

Lead historian Jovan Hutton Pulitzer insists the haul is firm evidence the Romans landed there first and is the “single most important discovery” ever for the Americas.

“The ceremonial sword came out of that shipwreck. It is 100 per cent confirmed as Roman.

"I began my forensic work into it using an XRF analyser – which is a leading archaeological tool for analysing metals.

"And we found all these other metals that tell you this was made from ore that came directly from the ground.

"It has the same arsenic and lead signature in it. We’ve been able to test this sword against another one like it and it matches.

"Some years ago, a man and his son were scalloping off Oak Island, which sees them hang a rake-like object off the back of their boat.
 
"They put it under the surface and when they brought this up, the sword came up with it.

"The father kept it for decades, and when he died it went to his wife, then his daughter.

"Then when she died many years later it went to her husband. It was he who approached me and said ‘I think you should know about this and where it was found’.

"The shipwreck is still there and has not been worked,” he said.

Oak Island is a privately-owned 57-hectare island in Lunenburg County on the south shore of Nova Scotia.

It has been at the centre of one of the biggest treasure hunts in history, which began in in 1795 centring on the infamous 'Money Pit’ – a 230ft booby-trapped shaft which is thought to contain valuable artifacts.

Since 1795, six treasure hunters have lost their lives trying to excavate the pit.

Mr Pulitzer thinks theories like his are too readily dismissed because they do not conform with traditionally held religious and political beliefs.

He added: "We have absolutely been lead to believe that nothing happened on this side of the pond before Christopher Columbus.

"That’s a church-induced concept. All the ancient records that exist make it very clear the world was circumnavigated and the world was round.

"But when the Catholic Church and the Romans came in, all those records were destroyed – so we had to kind of re-learn this stuff.”

The team plans to publish its report in full early next year.