American Schools Are Getting Pepper Spray Drones to Fight Mass Shooters
· Vice
You’ll never see a nation work harder on the wrong homework assignment than the United States. America has had a gun problem for a long time now. Mass shootings happen with a frequency that most Americans don’t seem to understand is not normal, yet instead of addressing the disease, we keep inventing increasingly expensive and absurd Band-Aids.
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The latest example comes from schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado, where, according to The Washington Post, officials are rolling out pepper spray drones designed to respond to active shooters.
The remotely piloted aircraft can race through hallways, smash windows, blast sirens, flash strobe lights, spray pepper gel and even slam into a gunman at up to 60 mph. The idea was reportedly inspired by the effectiveness of inexpensive drones in the war in Ukraine, with supporters arguing that the first two minutes of a shooting are the most critical.
It is just so on-the-nose for Americans to look to an active war zone for inspiration on how to protect kids in schools, a problem which was itself caused by the proliferation of wartime weaponry among the populace. Trying to fix the problem by adding more of the problem is the American way.
We’re now discussing whether every high school should have its own fleet of SWAT drones instead of asking why schools need battlefield-inspired gadgets in the first place, and then doing something about that problem. None of the others. That one. You fix that one, everything else more or less solves itself.
Critics and Supporters Alike Have Concerns About the Pepper Spray Drones
Critics, including school safety experts and advocates who lost loved ones in or themselves survived school shootings, tell the Post that they worry about adding what feels like wartime technology into schools when it hasn’t even been tested in an actual school shooting. Even supporters speaking to The Post acknowledge the drones are more meant to buy time until the cops arrive and not solve the larger problem of how someone unwell enough to carry out a school shooting was even allowed to have a high-powered rifle in the first place.
It feels like a real-life version of the most cynical vision of the United States, one where the military-industrial complex has so thoroughly taken over that they invent problems and try to sell us the solution. There is no greater example of this than in the article when you find out that the people who make drones are a company called Mithril Defense, a company that makes weapons of war, which it plainly states in big bold letters on its website: “Smart Attritable Mass for Modern Warfare.” The biggest red flag here is the word Mithril. Like Palantir and Anduril, it’s another defense company run by angry nerds who name their companies with words stolen straight from the pages of The Lord of the Rings without realizing (or, more likely, not caring at all) that J.R.R. Tolkien would’ve absolutely despised every one of them.
We should have never put the nerds in charge.
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