#gun detection

Jeffco Public Schools in Colorado are once again talking about metal detectors in the wake of last year’s shooting at Evergreen High School, where a student shot two classmates before turning the gun on himself. It’s the kind of conversation that follows almost every school shooting. Something visible has to be done. Something people can point to and say, “That will fix it.” So now there’s been…

State lawmakers are back at it, proving once again that when it comes to school safety, the preferred solution is buying technology instead of confronting reality. This time from the state of Georgia. A new proposal moving through the state Capitol, House Bill 1023, would require weapons detection systems at every student point of entry in all Georgia public schools. The bill is sponsored by…

Hey everybody. Sorry I’ve been quiet for a few weeks. I’ve been on what I’ve been calling an executive dysfunction sabbatical. If you know, you know. I’m not even fully back yet. I’ve still got about 500 emails sitting in my inbox from late December onward that I haven’t touched. And that’s before factoring in how badly the murder of Renee Good rattled me. I tried to avoid the video. That only…

Oviedo, Florida, delivered yet another entry in the ever-expanding catalog of “school safety stories that write themselves.” At Lawton Chiles Middle School, an automated weapons-detection system triggered a full Code Red lockdown after a student walked down the hallway holding a clarinet as if it were a rifle. Yes, an AI system, because of course it was. That’s it. That’s the story. A woodwind…

Some stories read like satire even before you write them up. Case in point, the October 20th incident at Kenwood High School, where police drew guns on a teenager because an AI system thought an empty bag of Doritos might be a firearm. Except, we’re now being told it wasn’t the Doritos at all. No, according to Maryland’s Inspector General for Education, Richard Henry, the real culprit was the…

Recently, Baltimore County had its second Omnilert-triggered police response in under a month, this time at Parkville High School. The AI claimed it detected a possible gun. Students were relocated, police swept the building, and, again, no weapon was found. If it feels familiar, it’s because it is. Weeks earlier, Omnilert misidentified a bag of chips at Kenwood High as a gun, leading to a…

When a company that profits from school shootings publishes a report about how to stop them, you already know what’s not going to be on the list: getting rid of the guns. Omnilert’s new “School Shootings 2024” report reads like a self-congratulatory white paper from a corporation trying to sound like a public health agency. It lists every possible “solution” to school gun violence, including…