You got to understand: the gun lobby is strong, especially at the local level. The amount of money to elect someone locally is pennies compared to nationally.
Not only that but often these "solutions" like metal detectors have lobbies of their own.
Gun control doesn't make the line go up.
The only way we'll get gun control is if Luigi's start making a more common occurrence.
That'll be great fun when it starts spitting out false positives and the coppers get called out several times a day because someone was carrying their pencil case in their hands rather than in their bags. The only reasonable solution there will obviously be to ban pencil cases.
I feel like this article is discrediting AI to shift blame away from the failure of law enforcement and governing bodies, and place it on AI. It literally says in the article it didn't work because the shooter didn't take out his weapon or use it in view of cameras, but when the cops came and drew their weapons it immediately worked. So it sounds like the AI works fine and we want to blame something other than bad policies for school shootings...
The AI doesn't work fine if it can only tell you there's a shooting while a shooting is taking place. It's a waste of resources and on its face is stupid and useless. It might be working as intended, it might be working to its capabilities. But that doesn't mean it should be there in the first place.
I don't blame the AI for not doing better here. I blame it for being snake oil and I blame those in charge for buying it and I blame society for constantly creating this fucking scenario of doing anything but what is needed.
The basic concept isn't a bad idea, assuming it works and you already have the cameras. If it ran locally at a negligible cost, I'd say it would be a potentially useful tool. But even then, it wouldn't solve the problems, just help identify them more quickly, especially in situations where a gun is in the school but isn't being fired yet. Less useful for an active shooter, more useful for spotting someone flashing a gun, brandishing, showing off to their friends, or even selling.
It would be like a smoke detector, good to have but only as part of a larger plan, and also not something you should be dumping a ton of money into.
Admittedly not having read the article but I think the idea for the AI is not really to stop or alert anyone to an active school shooting. Maybe it could give a little heads up depending on how the shooter starts.
I think the bigger idea is for it to pick up firearms a kid might flash or have brought in to show off or otherwise brandish but not use at the time. That way you can intervene before a gun gets used but that's just my theory.
Agree on society though, it's very obvious the proliferation of firearms and ease of procuring one is a huge contributor to school shootings and gun violence in general. God forbid we try to rein that in. Let's just treat guns like cars. I have to get a license to drive a car because of how easy it is to kill myself or others with an automobile. When I turn 18 I can go buy an AR-15 with a simple run through a fed background check - maybe not even that, depending on the state and where you buy it - and waltz out the same day with a tool specifically made to kill people. No training, no oversight, no lessons just here's a tool to kill other humans and have fun!
I love how we're just cramming this unproven tech into everything with no regard for efficacy (never mind what might happen if it all gets away from us).