Drones To Combat School Shootings

Drones are set to be deployed in schools to take out gunmen in a bid to end America's epidemic of horrific mass shootings.

‍

The aim is for the drones to confront an active shooter within 15 seconds, massively reducing the average time of three minutes that law enforcement currently takes to get to the scene.

‍

Swooping through corridors with sirens blaring, and able to smash through classroom windows, the drones will swarm an attacker, and a remote pilot will warn them to put their gun down.

‍

If they are already firing then the shooter will be incapacitated with non-lethal bullets loaded with pepper spray, or a drone will simply smash into them.

‍

Several schools in Texas and Florida are expected to be the first in the US to deploy the specially adapted drones by the end of this year.

‍

Campus Guardian Angel, the Texas-based company behind the plan, drew inspiration from the success of drones on the front line in Ukraine.

‍

It has hired some of the best drone racing pilots in the US, who have appeared on ESPN and been descried as the 'Top Gun pilots of the drone world.'

‍

Each already has over 10,000 hours of flying time, and they will be based in a nerve center in Austin.

‍

'We can fly through corridors incredibly quickly and up stairs and be on the shooter in 15 seconds,' the firm's CEO, Justin Marston, told the Daily Mail.

‍

'Then, we can distract them, start incapacitating them, so they're doing anything but murdering children.'

‍

Marston, who co-founded the company with retired Navy SEAL Bill King, added that the fast 'response time is totally unachievable any other way'.

‍

'We get there faster than police on site,' he said. 'In 15 seconds, you're going to be running away, you're going to be hunted, you'll kind of be humiliated because these things really make you look stupid.

‍

'If you continue to resist, you're going to experience pain. Our goal is to make it deeply unattractive to go and assault a school.'

‍

There were 337 school shooting incidents in the US last year, and 267 children were killed or wounded, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.

‍

Schools spend over $17 billion a year on security personnel, according to the White House.

‍

Backers of the drone plan say it would cost a fraction of the price of employing more human guards, response times would be dramatically quicker, and there would be no risk to the lives of law enforcement officers.

‍

It would also have bipartisan appeal, satisfying Republican demands to 'harden' school security, while also offering Democrats an alternative to the controversial method of arming teachers.

‍

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently approved $557,000 in the state budget for pilot programs in three school districts.

‍

Campus Guardian Angel hopes to be deployed there and in Texas by the end of the year.

‍

The issue of speed is particularly acute in Texas in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting in 2022, in which a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers inside a fourth grade classroom.

‍

Nearly 400 law enforcement agents rushed to the school but waited more than 70 minutes to confront and kill the shooter.

‍

The delayed law enforcement response was widely condemned as a massive failure, and supporters of drones say the killer would have been neutralized in seconds.

‍

The new system works by having units of three or six drones stationed in unobtrusive boxes in hallways and classrooms around participating schools. The drones cost $9,000 for a box of three, and $15,000 for a box of six.

‍

Between 20 and 40 drones are needed to cover a school of 500 children, depending on how open the layout of the building is - wider corridors are easier to fly through and need fewer devices.

‍

When a teacher presses a panic alarm, there is a 911 call, or an AI-enabled surveillance camera spots a gun, the drones will be released from their boxes within seconds.

‍

The remote drone pilots at the nerve center in Austin, Texas, have access to all the school's cameras, which helps to locate the gunman.

‍

During the chase, the drones can smash through double-paned windows and keep flying.

‍

'Sometimes you lose the first drone,' Marston told the Daily Mail. We just avatar into the next one.

‍

'It's like having a SWAT team or SEAL team in every school parking lot in the nation. We don't care if we get shot. We never chicken out. And we practice this all day long. It's the only thing we practice.'

‍

When a gunman is located, the drones swarm and 'mob' them. An audio says, 'Surrender Now. Drop the gun. Get on your knees.'

‍

'Then we escalate to the pepper mechanism so it's hard for them to see,' said Marston. 'Obviously, if we fly around the corner and we see a person with their gun raised, firing at kids, then we're going to immediately escalate to hitting them.

‍

'If you get hit by a drone at 60 or 70, miles an hour, it really sucks. It'll break ribs. It'll break bones. But our goal is to quickly incapacitate because they're trying to murder people.'

‍

Tests show that even body armor that won't protect a shooter from a direct drone strike, nor will the criminal be able to shoot the devices down.

‍

'It's like trying to shoot a mosquito,' said Marston. 'There's really no way to take all of them out. And if the shooter is running away, if they're hiding, if they're trying to hit a drone, then they're not shooting at children.'

‍

The pilots honed their skills on video games. 

‍

'They're incredibly good at flying very, very fast,' said Marston. 'And we say, look, we know you can be a hero in real life. Don't just do it in Counter-Strike and Call of Duty. Here, you can come and you can save actual lives.'

‍

'I think it would give everybody more peace of mind, from the parents to the whole school community, but for sure the teachers,' said Doug Rawlins, principal of Midland Christian high school in Texas, south of Uvalde.

‍

After watching a demonstration of the drones in Texas, student Tvisha Jindal said the idea sounds promising. 

‍

'My school campus is very large - we have an athletic facility, we have two stories,' Jindal said. 'If an active shooter situation were to happen in one area of our campus, it would be almost impossible for an officer to get to the other side of campus or different building, even within five to 10 minutes.

‍

'I definitely feel more protected knowing the drones can be deployed within 10 to 15 seconds, and after watching the demos, they're extremely fast, very agile, can go upstairs and in between corners a lot faster than a human can.'

‍