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Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters
- cyanydeez 2mo agoto waste money instead of education or gun control. the miracle of propaganda
- wildzzz 2mo agoThese are being bought at the county/district level or even the individual schools. Gun control is legislated at the state or federal level. The people making the decision to buy these have effectively zero control over gun laws.
- valleyer 2mo agoThe article mentions that, in Georgia, funding for these came from the state budget and even quotes a state legislator on the committee on the education appropriations committee. It also mentions that the effort is "spearheaded" (whatever that means) by the state legislature in Florida.
- cyanydeez 2mo agoyeah, no, i get the grift.
- nonethewiser 2mo agoHow is a school corporation supposed to implement gun control?
- AngryData 2mo agoInstead of spending money on educating people and making society better, lets spend our money on worthless highly overpriced gimmicks that achieve nothing. /s
- Havoc 2mo agoGenuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids
- jrflowers 2mo ago> Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids They already sell Kevlar backpacks
- Joker_vD 2mo agoA top seller in Libya, Somali, Iraq, and that one particular first-world country which our lawyers from that country advise us to refrain from naming! Buy one today!
- bestouff 2mo agoAre you sure it still deserves the "first world" label ?
- Joker_vD 2mo agoWell, until it has a glorious socialist revolution — yes, it is a first world country.
- Tadpole9181 2mo agoBeyond the obvious fact nobody really uses the cold war definition anymore, are you really insinuating those countries are socialist?
- gmueckl 2mo ago"Thoughts and prayers". It's always "thoughts and prayers" and invoking an inaginary "good guy with a gun". Can it get much more magical/mystical/performative than that?
- rockskon 2mo agoETA until a drone pepper sprays an innocent student or teacher?
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago...or perhaps one guilty of thoughtcrime.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- fhdkweig 2mo agoETA until a shooter brings a mask? They spend weeks if not months gathering guns and bullets. Oh noes, they have buy one more thing off the web.
- jimt1234 2mo agoDoes Polymarket allow wagering on school shooting?
- vibrio 2mo agoWtf world do we live in that this sentence exists.
- blooalien 2mo agoThe world where entirely too many of our "leaders" and their "cult members" wish for the "Mad Max" future rather than the "Star Trek" one.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agomad max has aesthetics; they're hoping for 1984
- blooalien 2mo agoMad Max + 1984 + Terminator + Fahrenheit 451 all rolled together into one fantabulous dystopian death planet.
- UltraSane 2mo agoThis is a incredibly US specific headline.
- neom 2mo agoArmed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon 693 points by antongribok 9 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45684934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45684934
- kazinator 2mo agoThis idiotic idea that must have come from a Gemini chat session will backfire in a real incident. Of course the perpetrator will know about the drones and be prepared for them, e.g. with a face mask. Conveniently for them, the pepper spray will confuse and incapacitate their targets, leading to more casualties. If you're going to accept not being able to take guns away from the perpetrators, the only thing that will "work" is their targets being likewise armed, as well as trained in firearm combat in close quarters and outside, as well as psychologically trained to handle the real situation and not freeze, tremble or hesitate. No passive gimmicks will stop an armed perpetrator, unless he doesn't know about their existence and is not prepared for their deployment, which is a foolish assumption to rely on.
- hyperhello 2mo agoIf a person truly, really, honestly wants to kill soemone then they will be dead. The benefit of the Swiss cheese model is that most people who have that level of focus tend to be producing benefits to their lives somewhere else.
- tokai 2mo ago>be prepared for them Hasn't that been a problem with active shooter drills? That future shooters also get drilled.
- kazinator 2mo agoIt's all pretty absurd, of course. Then we are calculating that the shooter will be outnumbered, which won't guarantee that there are no casualties on the defending side. I'm saying that's what stems from accepting that there are going to be shooters with easy access to guns, such that we're not gonna do anything about that.
- nonethewiser 2mo agoWhether they will be effective or not I dont know. But something tells me you dont know more about this than the people deploying them.
- hungryhobbit 2mo agoThe real question here isn't "why are we sacrificing the education of the next generation to buy tools that make us feel safe but (logically, statistically) will only prevent one in a million child deaths?" ... the answer to that is a Simpsons meme ("won't someone think of the children?"). The real question is ... who is stoking the irrational fear in the first place, and how do they benefit by doing so?
- nonethewiser 2mo agoWhat are you talking about? Schools are targets for shooters. Sad but certainly not fake.
- pjscott 2mo agoThere are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather than to focus on the things that make for the most lurid news stories, then there are boring things like road safety that loom much larger in the numbers than they do in the public imagination. Here are some numbers on causes of death for children and adolescents in the US, reported by the CDC: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/ Figures for deaths from school shootings are harder to come by, since it seems like all the sources are trying to push some political narrative or other, but the highest numbers I could find were in the low double digits per year (on average). Preventing those doesn’t strike me as a high-priority use of limited death-prevention resources.
- rationalist 2mo agoFor a lot of people, emotions are more important than pragmatism.
- Tadpole9181 2mo agoFrom your own link, there are 12,000 injury related deaths. Of those, over 1/3 are firearms related and 1/3 of those are homicides. They may not be school shootings, but damn does that seem related to the second word. Anyway, to answer your question: because we already do a lot to stop the other causes. Cars have oodles of safety regulations, for instance. Home pools have rules on covers in many states, lifeguards are placed at water features. But we can't just snap our fingers and stop all car deaths, or cure all disease. Meanwhile shooting deaths are an entirely artificial problem, which we actively do less than nothing to solve. Both by avoiding root cause fixes - not only avoiding addressing mental health, but actively encouraging bullying of minorities like trans students - but also avoiding regulation of the most effective tools (guns). And, just a final point, humans are human. A kid dying in a tragic accident or disease is heartbreaking. But a dozen kids being eviscerated on Live TV repeatedly for someone's entire adult life, with tens of millions of people having the audacity to say "get over it, we refuse to talk about this" or "even "it's a hoax"? That's enraging. We are emotional animals, but I'm more than happy that we try to leverage our empathy to make the world a better place. We can do more than one thing at a time, after all. For instance, under your argument, nobody should have bothered inventing amber alerts because it doesn't save hundreds of kids per year.
- diego_moita 2mo ago> Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters Schools in the U.S.; this is what the U.S. are getting into. Meanwhile, the majority of the civilized world solves this with gun control. Americans can't do gun control just because of fetishism for their obsolete Constitution. Try to explain to Americans that their Constitution was written before the Industrial Revolution and cheap ubiquitous guns, during a war, when the overwhelming majority of the population was rural. Try to explain that when Americans try to do nation building (Japan, Iraq, Afghanistan) they choose political frameworks completely different from the American Constitution. They won't accept it. They venerate their Constitution just as blindly as the Bible, another obsolete document.
- nonethewiser 2mo agoIdk, I think the constitution is pretty awesome.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- AaronAPU 2mo agoOur country is better than yours because of the constitution
- rationalist 2mo agoProud American here, I don't think your comment is particularly helpful. Better can be very subjective and a country is not going to better in every single aspect; the other country will certainly have some aspects where they will be "better".
- diego_moita 2mo ago> Our country is better than yours because of the constitution Well, thank you twice: * first for confirming my criticism that Americans venerate their constitution blindly * second for staying in your country and not coming to mine
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- adolph 2mo agoUkraine war inspired school safety subsidiary of Mithril Defense of Austin, TX. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/28/school-shootings-pepper-spray-drones https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/28/school-sho... https://www.campusguardianangel.com/ https://www.campusguardianangel.com/ https://www.mithrildefense.com/ https://www.mithrildefense.com/
- tokai 2mo agoIts impressive that US schools are adopting drone warfare quicker than some NATO allies.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- NopIdoN 2mo agoDon't those schools have sprinkler systems they basically never use?
- morninglight 2mo agoIs there any way to buy guns online and have them shipped directly to your doorstep? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bKu4c2Y405E https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bKu4c2Y405E
- Dwedit 2mo agoShooters or protesters?
- ranger_danger 2mo agoAnd what happens if a parent disagrees with this policy and does not want their child in a school with weaponized drones?
- fhdkweig 2mo agoParents homeschool or private school their children for lesser reasons.
- theGeatZhopa 2mo agoEquip them with explosive load and make them pursue the shooters like kamikaze drones. That would be effective and with less side effects like with pepper spray & wrong eyes of unrelated /s And then, you need communicating 3 drones at least. If the shooter decides to run away and run into a room locking the door, then the first drone is making the hole,the second it's job and the third is waiting outside for the shooter who possibly might escape the room. I see it as natural evolution of this. Weapons can't be forbidden. It's a human right /s
- soco 2mo agoWhy not putting weapons on the drones themselves? Little ground tanks with revolving turrets spewing bullets (and fire!) in the approximate direction of the shooter and their hostages, now that's a powerful deterrent image, yeehaw!
- theGeatZhopa 2mo agoWith bullets you won't get them all in the same way as an explosion would /s But your suggestion with little ground tanks is a constructive one :)
- majorchord 2mo agoWhy is it always a Lord of the Rings-named company that has some seemingly-evil authoritarian agenda? I've seen Palantir, Anduril, Rivendell, Durin, Sauron, Valar, Lembas, Ereborn, and multiple Mithrils.
- phs318u 2mo agoBecause their CEO's all want to be Sauron (or Morgoth). Vote #1 Aragorn.
- fittingopposite 2mo agoUS is just entirely broken. Why don't you fix the underlying issues (guns) and not trying to ducktape the symptoms.
- thefz 2mo agoAh, if only other countries resolved this problem successfully.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agoone step away from Slaughterbots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg
- wookmaster 2mo agoOh god this is too real to watch
- red-iron-pine 2mo agoalready too real in eastern Ukraine. the chickens just haven't come home to roost in the rest of the first world, yet.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Ekaros 2mo agoWhy not instead focus on issues that cause people to choose to become shooters? Isn't that the fundamental issue. Not the tools used?
- roody15 2mo agoThis is just a waste of tax payer money and will have zero impact on safety. If anything malfunctioning pepper spraying drones is more likely than an active shooter.