Texas Schools Add Attack Drones To Protect Students
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
114 comments
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✅ Don't fix the underlying program
✅ Give $557,000 to a miltech company
We did it Patrick! We saved the city!-
Criminals have invaded the schools in lego city!
Build the attack drones!
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You may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful drone?" You may ask yourself, "Where does that attack drone go to?" And you may ask yourself, "Is this right, is this wrong?" And you may say to yourself, "My God, what have we done?!"-
🎶letting the days go by ... something something let me drown.. 🎶
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Dunno about you but i've seen robocop
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Some people take dystopian sci-fi as a guide and not as a warning.
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A bunch of little flying ED-209s, what could go wrong?
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So uh... what stops someone just disabling all the drones first in a plausably deniable way? Because you know kids are gonna use those things as target practice already.
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Ah, yes, absolutely nothing could go wrong here.
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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
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“If you've got something that's preemptive, that's immediate, that's already there, you just can't kill that many people in 10 to 15 seconds,” Marston said.
That's their bar? Killing people for up to 15 seconds That's not so bad?
How much you want to bet it's using AI to determine who the shooter is. How much you want to bet is capable of false positives....
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How much you want to bet is capable of false positives…
Confidently wrong false positives, but only more than 60% of the time.
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"The high-tech drones, which are piloted by a team of former military men and nationally ranked professional drone racers..."
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But on the upside the drone fleet will always be monitoring and collecting data as far away as their little robot eyes can see
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Watch out, he's not carrying a bible!
zzzzZZZZZZZZ Z Z Z ZZ Z Z ZZ Z ZAP
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Or if it could handle a case where someone manages to disarm a shooter and tries to turn their weapons on a second shooter.
Though I don't have any confidence someone in that case would survive cops either, assuming they don't just sit outside.
Heh, on that note, how well will the automated drones be able to differentiate shooters from police? Especially if it ends up being an off duty officer like in the case where they just sat around outside.
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Hell if it's not automated like others claim, how quickly can those pilots discern? Cops have been known to pull up and shoot people with weapons, holding assailants at gunpoint.
I also wonder what they're planning on arming the drones with. I suspect a single shot would disable them... or a tennis racket.
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I can hear this image.
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Fantastic sound design!
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High speed LETHAL Drones flying through schools DOESNT effect Children! DRAG Queens EXISTING does!
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You wait and see how quickly these things are repurposed to go after a man in a dress reading a book within 100 yards of kids.
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Repurpose? You mean they are not set to DragNet from the factory?
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You nailed it. True patriots understand that this country will never be free until people of any gender identity can legally operate high-speed jetpacks in schools.
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That reminded me of https://dogparkdissidents.bandcamp.com/track/rainbow-drones-2
Rainbow drones with lesbian pilots
B stands for bomb in LGBT
Let's go!
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can fly through double-paned glass
um, how
Also I wonder how long it will take before this tech gets used for situations other than mass murder events
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What a shithole country.
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And we're ignoring that radio control is a vulnerable technology
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Or that someone could shoot the drone.
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Entities hiring private drone security to fill in for demonstrably unreliable police is so cyberpunk
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It's frightening that this is the state of gun ownership in the US, and that the companies making the poison are probably now also selling you the cure. But all things considering, this might actually be a useful application of the tech.
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Sure thing, buddy, corporations, and police forces and governments never overreach or do things they’re not supposed to do or get hacked or have crazy fucking leaders telling them what to do, I want you to think about what you just said and tell me again if it’s a good idea https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU
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I literally prefaced it with a bunch of skepticism, and yes, I could have added potential misuse. If you just want to argue for argument sake, Reddit is a better place for you.
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When will they hit a student? It's not a matter of if, but when. This is so fucking idiotic.
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I mean it fires pepper spray bombs. Even when it does its job correctly, and hits an assailant, it is a wide area weapon that takes time to dissipate, particularly in an enclosed space. It will almost certainly effect other people to some degree, including those fleeing.
I don't have a problem with pepper bombs being autonomously fired on an armed assailant, in itself, by which I mean it's better than an autonomous pistol firing slugs into "assailants". I would even accept some minimized-as-much-as-possible risk that it incorrectly targets the wrong person with pepper spray if they are not in immediate danger. The problem will be when the pepper bombs slow down those fleeing or divert them towards the gunman or leave someone incapacitated and unable to flee or sense danger, and hinder emergency response teams, school staff, or other individuals trying to rescue kids. A clever gunman with a gas mask could even use the drones to corral victims into easy targets. It's just not a reliable fix to the problem and creates opportunities for whole new problems.
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drones can soar through school halls at 100 mph [...] and can fly through double-paned glass
Ah yes, let's fly a deadly projectile through the hallway ... maybe shatter some glass for extra shrapnel. What could go wrong?
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It's probably safer than other solutions that other countries have tried... Certainly safer than, say, banning firearms.
So many countries tried that option and have you seen their school shootings statistics?
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So many countries tried that option and have you seen their school shootings statistics?
Have you seen the size of their firearm and miltech industries? Pathetic! Guns are a tool for wealth accumulation through creating an arms race where one didn't previously exist!
(I'd sarcasm tag except I'm starting to be convinced that the above is in fact the motivation behind it all)
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and get sliced to bits by a drones rotor blades.
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Well, Texas cops aren't gonna do it...
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Fair enough. Maybe we could close the police department and just have drones.
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All operated by ICE. Get rid of all local police. (They’ll just be re-hired by ICE, except they will report to the king rather than locally elected officials.)
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Especially not at high speeds. At least not if there aren't some glazed doughnuts involved.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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")
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When I was a kid I used to joke about school being a prison.
This was back when doors weren't locked during the day and when a friend of mine took a joke hand grenade to school it was confiscated and he was told to pick it up at the end of the day and don't do that again.
Schools have been asymptotically approaching prisons to the point where they will be indistinguishable in the near future.
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Agreed. Fuck this shit.
My kids' school is surrounded by a giant chain link fence.
Solve societal.problems leading to higher levels of violence? Nah, let's just lock the kids up during the day - it's for their own protection.
Something is very fucking wrong with people who want to solve our problems this way. Don't let them pretend this is normal or how this shit should he handled. What the fuck are we doing?
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My school was the same thing as a prison since it was sped ed back in 2005, public schools had it lucky.
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The bigger question is when they'll have these patrolling the streets... At least they're human-operated, for now.
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The article doesn't actually specify that they're human operated. From the way it's described it could easily be just one human managing a swarm of 100 autonomous drones and taking control or issuing commands to individual drones as they see the need to
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Before the end of next year? Like maybe they’ll use police drones prowling streets to distract voters and get them to vote for republicans.
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So a school shooter can defeat the drones with an army surplus gasmask .....got it.
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And some earplugs.
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Oh hey I've seen this one before
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Ooo banana!
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I can still hear her screams ...
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So an unskilled operator is going to blow up the wrong student.
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what gives you the idea there's explosives involved anywhere?
I mean it's an absurd, shit plan, but there's no explosives mentioned I can see. their plan is to just yeet drones at the bad guys until they give up in shame I guess.
anything, anything, but address the ease of people ammassing guns and ammo.
beer, titties, guns, dead kids, and trucks: the 'merikan way
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Given the depth of the thinking here, and the desire to have guns in all situations, it's only a matter of time until they add a 4th box with the "armed response unit" that's only "supposed to be used in the most dire of situations".
Anything other than dealing with the underlying problem means anything.
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Texas is Alabama levels of stupid, but because they have money no one ever makes that connection.
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Can't wait for students to start bringing Flipper Zeroes in so they can mass pepper spray the cafeteria
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Wouldn't have to if they'd actually season the food but no reasonable person expects a miracle.
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I just can’t tell these days.
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I seriously read half the article before I realized it was real.
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And the moment one of these gets hacked and mows down some kids….?
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From brown people? I mean… This is Texas…
114 comments
Anything but trying to solve the underlying problems. Bonus: someone makes bank.
There's literally no number of children that can die before reasonable action is taken.
It's not the number that matters, it's whose kids it is getting killed. If someone were to shoot up a school filled with politicians' kids you'll see some change rapidly.
I suppose it is better than thoughts and prayers... but avoiding addressing the root cause is all politicians do.
Pray for your drone overlords to suicide bomb the mentally disturbed with too many guns before it’s too late!
Just waiting for the reports of privacy violations, and noise issues, let's just hope that's as bad as this gets.
I actually saw a news segment on the demo, and they said they would be thrilled if they were able to put these in every classroom and never have to use it. Im sure you would, buddy...
I grew up in a racist environment and parroted what was around me most of my young life. It’s all I knew, I didn’t change until I experienced the world and broadened my world view. Many of these “bigots” are ignorant and exploited. They are not evil people that should be eliminated. Your way of intolerance is the same type of ignorance you claim to hate. Dehumanizing any person or group as below you and therefore justify violence against is the worse part of society and the thing that needs to be cured. Racism is just one facet of that beast.
What do racist have to do with school shootings?