These days, the human body gets even more enhanced with technologies designed for it to do more than it was originally designed to do, even for those who have lost a limb or two. We see great strides in prosthetics and exoskeletons that can give humans the super human strength, carrying much heavier loads and moving faster. But what is interesting these days are those in the body augmentation sector, technologies designed for even more capabilities for humans and these are actually body implants rather than being external tools that can be easily removed when not needed.

In short, to get more capabilities and enhancements, your body gets modified. You might think of cosmetic surgery and you’re not far from it. Mostly, you get chips like sensor chips for the hearing impaired, but some of the more extreme experiments in body augmentation are chip implants designed to make it more convenient and secure for people to open doors, manage controls, and even do transactions.

In this story, an example of such body augmentation is the implant-activated smart gun.

Vice.com sent us a heads up of a Motherboard story of the world’s first implant-activated smart gun. Whilst there are already smart guns activated via biometrics or proximity RFID devices, one goes more extreme. Amal Graafstra, a veteran biohacker has thought of gun safety can be done better via RFID implants.

In a way, he makes a point. Guns in homes can be dangerous to children when left unsecured and there many cases of children able to get hold of guns and shoot themselves. A criminal who manages to get hold of a gun may be unable to use it since the gun would need the RFID signal from the real owner for it to work. So from the point of safety, it can be a compelling technology to reduce injuries or deaths caused  by firearm accidents.

Motherboard was given an exclusive look of what Graafastra has been making in his garage in Washington State. He says that he is looking into gun safety more reliability as there are inherent problems in biometric and proximity device approaches to gun handling and the best approach can be the use RFID implant. The gun won’t fire without the implant and so the real owner of the gun is needed to use it.

There are still questions in making it a fail-safe system, like the RFID, even if being such a low-powered chip, will still run out of power after years in the body. What will happen to gun if the RFID is out of power? Will it remain locked or will it unlock? It was not indicated if the RFID chip is a passive one which will not rely on its power source and will be powered by electromagnetic energy radiating from an RFIDreader. For others, especially for gun owners in the U.S.A. who are very much wary of government intervention, this might provide an opportunity for the government to require gun owners to have RFID implants all in the name of gun safety.

It is still an interesting technology, especially if you are not averse to the “Mark of the Beast” that some religious people are saying that RFID or other sensor implants will be. Just like the smart gun before, this will be subject to a lot of debate amongst firearms enthusiasts.