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Texas Schools Add Attack Drones To Protect Students

www.dallasobserver.com

Texas Schools Add Attack Drones To Protect Students

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/34511710

154 comments

  • If this gets any visibility, I do have some familiarity with the weapon on board.

    They call it a "pepper spray bomb" but more accurately pepper spray is generally not what your want because it sticks to walls. The "pepper" in the spray is an oil and imagine cleaning an oil off walls and stuff. If it gets into ventilation you will be breathing it for a week afterward.

    No, what's on board these is probably Pava Powder. Think Baby Powder, but s p i c y. Pava has many of the same reactions as pepper sprays, coughing, watery eyes etc. But it works better IN enclosed areas like hallways and enclosed spaces. Prisons love this stuff for incidents bigger than like 3-5 people. It can be packed into a paintball, and works in normal paintball guns (it also comes in a 40mm grenade featuring timed release!) Pava is much easier to clean, you just have to have good ventilation, as it will dissipate normally. It also doesnt trigger allergies like pepper spray can, and all it takes is a nice shower to wash yourself of it. Its really a great choice for the intended settings in which it is often deployed.

    In a mobile form like drones, I can't see the drone loading more than 10 balls due to weight, and if you've ever been paintballing you'd know 10 ain't shit. A normal paintball hopper holds about 80, and for pava powder you need to score a fair number of hits or just paint a hallway with them to reach effective saturation. If each drone can hold 20-30 maybe it becomes feasible. It only takes a couple to actually do the work, but in a prison theres nowhere to run. You sit and take that accumulation. But school hallways can be 14 feet wide or more and a shooter has access to the entire building, so any misses simply...miss and begin saturating an area the shooter is leaving.

    The alarm on the drone giving the shooters position away is a great touch.

    Thats the fact side of things, opinion wise? Man we will do anything but fix the problems. These drones and pava are a great uh...answer for the locale, but it doesnt answer why you have a problem you need a prison grade solution. Pava dissipates into the air and its not that hard to begin to choke on your own breath. A deployment of these will give away the positions of students in adjacent rooms to the shooter. And you can fight it (you can fight pepper pray too), it's just a matter of willpower to fight through choking air. It also guarantees a shooter will attempt to relocate in the building to outrun the pava clouds. Unless theres a way to quickly reload these drones in their ceiling mounts, the low ammo count is going to get them to fire around the halls, and will be more of a deterrent and could be effective at getting a shooter to stay away from populated rooms than actually subduing them and getting them to surrender. The alarm however i like at face value acting as a clear warning for where the shooter is at that moment. A drone following the shooter giving their position away is a fantastic solution if we aren't going to address actual shootings.

    7/10 nonlethal solution, with some side effects. I like the idea but the obvious workarounds like a mask, and causing entire rooms to start coughing and alerting the shooter to empty/full rooms, on top of the shooter wildly taking shots at the ceiling to kill an alarming drone causes a host of additional issues. For the pricetag the school could hire like 3 off-duty cops who do their job when a shooter arrives. So thats also a factor. We could also like...address mental health issues or access to firearms but this is America where we pray for evil things to stop rather than actually adressing it so, that wasn't an answer anyway

  • I mean, considering the cops are just going to play on their phones and actively stop people from trying to rescue children (Uvalde was more fucked up than most people remember), it makes sense to consider alternatives.

    In all seriousness, this is actually a ridiculously hard problem and a horrible "solution". Drone weapons work best against unaware/unattentive enemies in a target rich environment. While a bunch of russians are goofing off and not even bothering to close the hatch on their tanks you fly forward with a couple pounds of explosives duct taped to the drone and detonate when you get in range.

    Against a shooter who is already having an endorphin high from murdering a bunch of kids and is on high alert for if/when the cops will stop their fun? They'll hear the motors echoing through the hallways even louder than the kindergarteners bleeding out and crying for their parents who have been handcuffed for daring to try to help. They'll shoot more kids in the time it takes the drone to get to them and children gasping for breath will likely die as their airways close up from the pepper spray bombs. Or the drone will hit a kid anyway since aiming those at high speed needs VERY good reflexes and skills.

    Again, we all know the actual way to reduce the number of children murdered in school shootings. But clearly The Second Amendment is more important than the death of a few thousand kids.

    • I’m going to disagree with you here. I think this is an excellent use of drones. If anything, Uvalde taught us that human versions of policing have one major defect/feature…they also don’t want to die.

      You throw a swarm of drones whizzing into a high pressure scenario, the shooter’s fight or flight response is going to be triggered. They’re either going to pop off a few last shots…which they likely were going to do anyway before getting caught, or they’re going to run to the nearest open door and shut it to hide.

      No lethal explosives needed for this use case. A few flash bangs, maybe some tear gas, a taser or two would likely do the trick in all but the most dire of situations.

      Now, what this says for our constitutional rights on the other hand…at some point we as a collective society are going to have to decide whether we want to be “free” or whether we want to be “safe”. Personally, I’m none too happy with the way I’ve seen things progress over the last 24 years.

      • You throw a swarm of drones whizzing into a high pressure scenario

        You might be over estimating the capabilities of drones to navigate interior spaces and closed doors. And don’t forget simple jamming devices should these systems be publicized.

      • We've become less of both, free and safe. I don't see this helping either of those. Btw, I just learned that the Ben Franklin quote of liberty or safety is actually out of context and was concerning a specific situation in Pennsylvania. The general idea was, don't take away our freedom in the name of safety, give us the freedom and ability to make ourselves safe. I see these drones as an arms race to let the police do what they want to do without being in danger themselves. Oh, the kids? Well, sorry about that, shooting people is all the police are trained on.

      • I have a nasty feeling that getting hit by one of these is going to be very traumatic in the medical sense. A 10-20 pound object with fast spinning blades flying at up to 100mph in an enclosed space? The tragedy practically writes itself!

        Kid pulls a gun in a classroom, shoots a couple of classmates before another kid starts wrestling him for the gun, ultimately the shooter and 3 students are killed a couple more wounded. Meanwhile the drones are automatically deployed in the hallways by the sound of gunfire. Their pilot is on vacation today so it goes to the on-call pilot who's currently chilling in the pool when the call comes in and therefore doesn't answer immediately. The drones are fully automated for the first 15 minutes of the incident because of this delay. One has its AI interpret a kids fortnite shirt depicting a sentient banana throwing a grenade as the assailant, flies through a window to get to them shattering it and blinding one kid, the drone however is damaged by the window and flies erratically hitting a few students in the heads giving them head injuries before crashing into the floor and shooting it's entire payload in all directions. Another drone clips a wall and crashes into the face of another student severely lacerating their face. Another interprets a pair of crutches as weapons that a kid with a broken leg is using to get to his next class, and pepper sprays him and blares alarms at him causing him to fall and break another limb, meanwhile the cops arrive on scene and pile onto the incompacitated and even more injured kid as obviously the assailant because the drones AI identified him, one trigger happy officer shoots him, and this is the moment the drone pilot finally comes online and starts powering them down since he could see from the drone that went to the source of the gunshot and related it's camera feed that the incident is cleared. Ultimately the gunman killed 3, and injured 3 more while the drones killed 4, injured 20 and police shot one more innocent because they trusted the drone's identification (oh and the innocent who was shot is initially blamed as the shooter while the cops try to cover their asses, and 20 more schools order drones due to this "success")

    • Uvalde was not what most think. It was an absolute clusterfuck of communication, not so much cowardice. Several people in charge at once, conflicting orders, no one in charge, wait, you're not in charge?!

      If someone, anyone, would have said, "Fuck this, fuck you, fuck you, fuck all y'all, I'm in command! ON ME!", and charged, it would have been over in 1 minute flat. Many of those cops were champing at the bit to get in there, but comms and leadership was a fucking mess.

      If your heart can take it, this PBS documentary is excellent.

      I can never watch it again, bit I wish anyone with an opinion on the event would give it a spin.

154 comments