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'Campus Guardian Angel' Drones Can Also Smash Windows And Ram Attackers
This is how the Campus Guardian Angel drone system is designed to work:
The drone defense firm's CEO underlined that “the first 120 seconds are incredibly critical, because that’s when most of the shooting happens.” That implies that he thinks Campus Guardian Angel drones could be successfully deployed within that very narrow time window. But Uvalde was quite unusual, as responding law enforcement seemed paralyzed, waiting over an hour to enter the classroom.
These school-based drone systems are not without their critics. Some say that the funds may be better spent on prevention than cure. Even Mithril’s founder and CEO’s opinion seems to be that if these drones aren’t prompted into action within two minutes, they aren’t living up to their promise.
There is also the concern that drones could misidentify students or protection officers when controllers are under pressure. Others say that military-style drone systems aren’t appropriate for schools, and will cost a lot more than simple measures and routines regarding locked doors.
With the three states proceeding with pilot programs this year, we may see the true value and capabilities of the Campus Guardian Angel drones. If these drone-protected schools don’t suffer any terrible shooting incidents, then it may be claimed that the drones are at least a deterrent.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Tuesday August 04, @12:48AM (13 children)
The rest of the world reads this and asks a collective what the fuck? How about asking why in the USA are school shootings happening so frequently?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04, @01:24AM (1 child)
Too many kids with bad upbringing? So bullying other kids and shooting other kids are nearer the top options in their things to do.
Have you heard the phrase "If violence is not solving the problem, you're not using enough of it", or "Violence is not the answer, violence is the question and the answer is yes". Seems a too popular concept in the US.
Conditioning an entire society to accept violence as the norm and you'll have such problems. Most humans are not that well domesticated. So conditioning and training humans is more important. Conditioning and training humans to have violence as a top option for dealing with solutions and you have stuff like this:
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/florida-man-says-he-punched-atm-for-giving-too-much-cash/30548/ [nbcmiami.com]
Like WTF? In saner countries, the worst is someone would try to repeat what he did to see if he'd get even more cash.
I guess in the US you might conceivably have people shoot a goose that lays a golden egg.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04, @10:05AM
In saner countries maybe. In good ol' USA that guy was likely to get arrested for bank robbery if he just took the money and walked away. It's why he was so pissed off, he was already late but knew he couldn't take the money and go.
(Score: -1, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday August 04, @01:35AM
My take is that if we programmed these drones to attack all the scary things people worry about, everyone would end up with a face full of pepper spray. At least all the broken windows would be good for the economy! ;-)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bentonite on Tuesday August 04, @02:03AM (8 children)
School shootings do not happen frequently - the numbers are purposefully inflated by counting;
- Gang shootings that occurs a block away from a shoot.
- Some idiot firing bullets at a target on (the US governments really) property without considering where the bullets will end up, which landed on school grounds, injuring a school student.
- Some idiot accidentally blowing his balls off in the school carpark.
- Many idiots carrying around a pistol loaded and then negligently discharging into the ground on school grounds.
- Some idiot carrying around a pistol loaded and then negligently discharging into a staff toilet, shattering the porcelain.
- Some idiot firing rounds into the air at a school.
- Some idiot bringing a gun to school for show and tell and of course it's loaded and they pull the trigger - injuring someone.
as all as school shootings, even though in none of such cases were school students targeted and in almost of such cases, school students weren't shot.
The US is a big country full of idiots, thus something stupid will regularly happen.
Going off population, only the whole EU and the USA are really comparable and it seems school shooting happens at a similar rate in the EU, to the US.
The only groups that have achieved excellence in school shootings are governments - but nobody will call for governments to be disarmed.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday August 04, @03:23AM (7 children)
Do you have sources for your statistics?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bentonite on Tuesday August 04, @04:23AM (6 children)
It came to me in a dream.
As you can see from this Wikipedia article, mass shootings targeting school students (school shootings) aren't as common as you've been lead to think in the USA; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_by_death_toll?useskin=monobook [wikipedia.org]
Although even that cut down list, still inflates the count, by listing violence, that wasn't against school students, as school shootings.
An almost complete list of negligent and violent incidents with firearms at or near a school has been tallied up here, which counts idiots that shot and killed themselves accidentally, gang violence, a constable who negligently discharged into a school highway, idiots who negligently discharged into the ground in a school car park and a car thief that fired a shot into the air in the car park and fled and much more, all as school shootings;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)?useskin=monobook#1990s [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)?useskin=monobook#2000 [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2010s)?useskin=monobook [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2020s)?useskin=monobook [wikipedia.org]
The USA does have a major problem with violence - but not particularly with school shootings (even though each one is a tragedy, those don't happen that often).
There is also a listing of negligent and violent incidents with firearms at or near schools in the EU (that I suspect is incomplete, due to less reporting and less effort to tally them), that also lists school shootings (it also lists non-EU countries); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_Europe?useskin=monobook#21st_century [wikipedia.org]
The EU seems to have less problems with violence, but school shootings do still occur, at a somewhat lower rate.
The real experts at school massacres (including school shootings) are governments; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_massacres_by_death_toll?useskin=monobook [wikipedia.org]
But no-one ever calls for governments to be disarmed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Tuesday August 04, @11:13AM (5 children)
That's seven in 2025 alone
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Tuesday August 04, @11:35AM (3 children)
And? How much of our freedom should we destroy to reduce that number somewhat? My view: there's always going to be stupid people and mean people. And they occasionally will do stupid and mean things. Show there's a real problem here that requires us to curb the freedom of hundreds of millions of law abiding citizens.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Bentonite on Tuesday August 04, @11:45AM
Destroying freedom further in the land of the nonfree, isn't going to reduce the number of school shooting deaths - as those are the result of violence, not freedoms exercised.
Trying to end violence, with more governmental violence, is doomed to fail.
(Score: 4, Flamebait) by epitaxial on Tuesday August 04, @12:48PM (1 child)
Therein lies the problem. You love guns more than you love children.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 05, @02:51AM
Rather I support the freedom of three hundred million people over shallow ideological signaling.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Tuesday August 04, @11:42AM
I count 2 mass shootings against school students in 2025, out of 7 recorded acts of violence.
There were 7 tragedies in 2025, but that was not a leading cause of death in the USA.
What killed many more people in the USA in 2025 was vehicles (after all, a vehicle has a lot more energy in it than a bullet); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year?useskin=monobook#By_year [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Spam) by VLM on Tuesday August 04, @04:21PM
We're forbidden from discussing engineered demographic change, forcibly untreated mental illness, and profitable medication side effects.
Compared by race and ancestry, apples to apples and oranges to oranges, schools in the USA are considerably less violent than the rest of the world. It's just some parts of the world being imported are hyper-violent compared to others and as a punishment we're forced to accept infinite immigrants from those areas. For example, some of the least violent ethnic Somalians on the planet live in MN. It's just their rate of violence is maybe 10000x higher than ethnic Swedes, perhaps even more. Schools full of Somalians in MN have a much lower rate of violence than schools in Somali and schools full of Swedes in MN have a somewhat lower level of violence than schools in Sweden, but the rates are WILDLY different such that from a white perspective, schools today seem incredibly violent, which they are, compared to schools in Sweden.
Then there's situations like the humiliation ritual of certain mental illnesses forcibly being redefined as a lifestyle choice, and sometimes that lifestyle choice involves going out with a bang together with numerous unwilling participants at a school. Lots of dead kids from that one.
And there's the situation of several profitable mental illness meds have this sort of behavior as a side effect, and there's been a society wide decision we'd rather have the pharma profits than safe schools. May as well sell certain antidepressant meds along with 9mm ammo in a package deal.