
AI aims to save kids from shooters - StreamdataIO
https://www.fastcompany.com/90214257/ai-gun-detection-school-shootings
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jstarfish
> While legislators and advocates wrestle over gun laws, a growing list of
> companies are joining Shielded Students to fill school security gaps.

Gross. While we refuse to adequately address the problem of gun control, and
while education continues to see its budgets defunded to the point where kids
are media-illiterate and the Bible is considered a textbook, let's sell school
districts million-dollar magnetrons that pretend to detect guns. "We need more
training data" will be a common refrain muttered over the bodies of dead kids
for a decade to come.

My kids' school had two lockdown events last year thanks to armed fugitives
being on the loose in the area. One of the worse local campus shootings we saw
recently involved a guy who literally shot his way into the building. "Firearm
detected!" alerts add nothing but noise to these situations. We already
fucking know he's got a gun. Money well spent.

And of the high-profile cases-- the Columbine kids supposedly had the
foresight to call in fake bomb threats to lure police away from the target
environment, extending their response time in the face of 911 alerts. The
Virginia Tech shooter padlocked all the doors before pulling out any guns-- it
was too late for "firearm detected!" alerts by the time he drew. And Sandy
Hook wasn't perpetrated by a student, so heavier scrutiny of students would
still have missed that.

And once the schools are locked into decade-long contracts with technology
that has classified images of every amorphous shadow that could possibly be a
gun, if chemistry class hasn't devolved into alchemical lessons on turning
water and fish into wine and bread, some enterprising student will realize he
can make peroxide-based explosives from common household materials and we
start the cycle all over again, with another tech-vulture coming to the rescue
to pick the carcass of our educational system clean.

Technology is not the answer. We built a much-too-efficient killing machine,
and are trying to counter it with more machines. Trying to engineer a solution
out of a social problem will just end up with our schools mirroring the
structure of maximum-security prisons-- and contraband _still_ gets into
those.

