How do we combat the scourge of school shootings? The distinctly cyberpunk gamble that some places of learning are taking: rapid response drones.
Multiple schools across three states will soon have their own veritable platoons of pepper-spraying drones to hunt down active shooters, The Washington Post reports, waiting to spring into action the moment they’re called on.
Traveling at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and capable of smashing through the windows, the so-called “Campus Guardian Angels” can reach a gunman within just fifteen seconds, the manufacturer Mithril Defense claims.
In addition to blasting a shooter with pepper spray, they can also distract them with loud sirens and flashing lights, and even ram into them at high speeds.
“Once I get the drones on you, you just can’t escape them,” Bill King, a Mithril cofounder and retired Navy SEAL, told WaPo.
It remains a fringe solution, but seems to be picking up steam. The state of Florida last year allocated more than $557,000 to a pilot program to deploy the drones at three different high schools. Georgia recently approved its own $500,000 pilot to test Mithril’s system at five public schools. And in Colorado, a new K-12 public charter school decided it would pay to use the drones on its own.
The drones aren’t autonomous and are instead remotely controlled by human operators at Mithril’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. Somewhere between 30 and 90 of the drones will be placed throughout a school in storage boxes, which helps them arrive quickly at the scene.
But the efficacy of the drone defense systems remains a big question mark — and hopefully we’ll never have to know — as is whether these solutions distract from addressing the systemic causes of mass shootings, like weak gun control and poor mental health support services.
Mithril has promised that its tech could help local law enforcement who respond to a shooting by locating the shooter and relaying critical information, but that would require a high degree of coordination in a hectic and dangerous environment. What if the drone operators target the wrong person, or cause law enforcement to mistake an innocent person for the shooter because the drones happen to be near them? Are these drone operators ready to make split-second decisions in a life or death situation for the people on the ground?
“It’s almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” Curtis Lavarello, CEO of the School Safety Advocacy Council, told WaPo. “I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools.”
It’s not the only tech-inflected solution being adopted to combat mass shootings. There are already numerous startups offering AI-powered gun detection systems, but their performance has been dubious. One called Omnilert called the cops on an innocent 16-year-old after it mistook his bag of Dorito chips for a weapon, and is being sued by a survivor of a Tennessee high school shooting after it failed to detect the handgun used by the shooter.
More on drones: We’re Admittedly Terrified That They’ve Now Invented Invisible Drones
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