> While legislators and advocates wrestle over gun laws, a growing list of companies are joining Shielded Students to fill school security gaps. Gross. While w

> 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.