School shootings are currently a serious social problem in the United States.
According to data from the K-12 School Shooting Database, there will be 330 school shootings in 2024, the second highest number ever after 349 in 2023.
Furthermore, data released as of January 2024 shows that the number of injuries and deaths from school shootings will increase by a whopping 715 percent when comparing 2004 and 2024. Schools, which should be a safe place to send children, are becoming dangerous places where lives can be taken.
Various technological measures are being considered to address this situation, one of which has brought this story to our attention.
The armed drone.
Sigh.
More likely, it will a kind of first response drone, albeit one that uses weapons to neutralise school shooters before putting human responders in danger.
But still… sigh.
Developed by Texas-based start-up Campus Guardian Angel, this drone is reportedly laptop-sized, weighs approximately a kilogram and can fly at speeds of 48-80 kilometers per hour within school hallways and up to 160 kilometres per hour outdoors.
Crucially, on the drone will be mounted a gun that fires pepper balls (tear spray grenades), whose aim would be to neutralise gunmen.
The drone is activated by simply pressing a panic button, and its goal is to neutralise gunmen within 60 seconds of a shooting, covering the critical first two minutes when the most casualties occur.
Campus Guardian Angel was founded in December 2023 by former defense industry entrepreneur Justin Marston and military veteran Bill King. The company is working on everything from conceptual design to implementation of armed drones, responding to the strong demand for emergency response following the Uvalde shooting incident in Texas in May 2022 (which killed nineteen students and two teachers).
Remote operations are carried out 24/7 from the company's central command center in Austin, and each response unit is staffed with a team of eleven experts, including former Navy SEALs, SWAT veterans, and professional drone racers.
The "armed drone" system is designed to deploy multiple drones in stages: the first wave attracts the attacker's attention with strobes and sirens, the second wave deploys pepper balls from a safe distance, and the third wave impacts the target directly at speeds of 80-96 km/h. Schools that sign up for the service will be outfitted with multiple boxes containing six drones.
The company's services are already being offered to several schools in Florida and Texas at the price of . A$4 per student per month, after an initial fee of $15,000 charged for the installation a box containing six drones at campus.
The question to ask though is; will this work? Are armed drones in schools effective in fighting off shooters, at that cost?
Few schools will be able to afford that, and if the situation was in Africa, the number of schools that could implement armed response drones could be really less than one percent. Costs of several thousands of dollars per year for just one school are simply not something that can be easily approved.
One superintendent in Tallahassee, Florida, who was considering the company's services, was impressed with the service, but reportedly pointed out that the implementation would cost approximately $1million per year, making it an unreasonable request for a school district already facing budgetary difficulties .
And of course, there will be safety concerns. It will be drones flying presumably over school children after all.
The biggest concern is the kinetic energy released by a drone collision at high speed. If a 1-kilogram drone flying at 80 kilometers per hour accidentally crashes into a student, it would generate approximately 250 joules of kinetic energy.
According to one study , the kinetic energy required to fracture a human skull is 14.1 to 68.5 joules, and the kinetic energy required to fracture multiple skulls with a baseball bat is 80 to 100 joules.
In other words, a drone collision could generate twice the force of a powerful blow to the head with a bat.
If any problems occur, legal damages should be awarded, but the issue of legal liability when operating drones within schools remains unresolved.
While US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations enacted in 2018 prohibit drones from carrying dangerous weapons, it is unclear whether this definition applies to non-lethal systems like Pepper Ball. It has been pointed out that indoor environments like schools are not part of the airspace regulated by the FAA, and therefore Angel's service does not fall under the FAA's jurisdiction.
For services like Angel's to become more widespread, these issues must be clarified and clear liability guidelines established.
Some experts even question the very idea of using drones to confront shooters.
David Liedman, an emergency management expert and founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database, pointed out in a video that "drones create more new risks and complexities than defensive measures," and said that drones are not a panacea for school safety and should be used in conjunction with other security measures.
However, from the perspective of parents, the more efforts to keep schools safe, the better. Many parents hope that not only will improvements be made to the ability of the system to repel shooters, but also to surrounding issues such as safety and legal issues.
The idea of armed drones within American schools is not unique to only Campus Guardian Angel: In July, Taser developer Axon said it was working to build drones armed with the electric stunning weapons that could fly in schools and "help prevent the next Uvalde, Sandy Hook, or Columbine."
But the company’s own technology advisers quickly panned the idea as a dangerous fantasy.
The publicly traded company, which sells Tasers and police body cameras, floated the idea of a new police drone product last year to its artificial intelligence ethics board, a group of well-respected experts in technology, policing and privacy.
Some of them expressed reservations about weaponising drones in over-policed communities of colour. But they were not expecting Axon's Thursday announcement that it wants to send those Taser-equipped drones into classrooms to prevent mass shootings by immobilizing an intruding gunman.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Axon founder and CEO Rick Smith said he felt compelled to make the idea public after the mass shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, saying he was "catastrophically disappointed" in the response by police who didn't move in to neutralise the suspect for more than an hour.
But he stressed that no product had been launched and any potential launch would be down the road. The idea, he felt, needed to be shared now because of the public conversation about effective ways for police to safely confront attackers and how schools can increase safety.
"This is an idea that should get into the public's consciousness while our minds are open to it and I felt if I wait another six months, the world is going to change and people are going to forget this pain and we're going to see a shift in sentiments where people are going to focus a lot more on what could go wrong, rather than the pain of this problem we need to solve," he said.
At the time, Axon's stock price rose with the news. But the announcement angered members of the ethics board, some of whom are now likely to quit in protest.
"This particular idea is crackpot," said Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor who sits on the Axon AI Ethics Board.
"Drones can't fly through closed doors. The physical properties of the universe still hold. So unless you have a drone in every single classroom in America, which seems insane, the idea just isn't going to work."
Friedman said it was a "dangerous and fantastical idea" that went far beyond the proposal for a Taser-equipped police drone that board members — some of them former or current police officials — had been debating in recent months.
"We begged the company not to do it," Friedman said of the company's announcement.
"It was unnecessary and shameful."
The product idea had been kicked around at Axon since at least 2019 and the company has been working to try to figure out whether a drone with a Taser was even a feasible idea.
Over the last year, the company created computer-generated art renderings to mock up a product design and conducted an internal test to see if Taser darts — which transmit an immobilizing electric jolt — could be fired from a flying drone, Smith said. He added that he had discussed the possibility of developing such a product with the ethics board.
Board members who spoke with The Associated Press said they were taken aback by the school drone proposal — which they got notice of only earlier this week — and cobbled together a unanimous statement of concern that described Axon's decision as "deeply regrettable."
The company tweeted out the board's dissent shortly after its own statement in a Thursday announcement.
"I wouldn't be surprised if there were resignations," said another ethics board member, Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington.
"I think everyone on the board has to make a choice about whether they want to stay involved."