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US School Installs 'Shooter Detection' System
An anonymous reader writes: A school in Methuen, Massachusetts has demonstrated the first installation of an automated detection system for active gunmen. Sensors placed throughout the building are activated by the sounds of gunfire. The sensors relay data on the shooter's real-time location directly to police, who can then track and subdue their target. The system was developed for the military to detect the location of enemy fire. It will cost school districts between $20,000 and $100,000 to equip each school with the gunfire-detecting sensors. Methuen's police chief said, "It's amazing, the short, split-second amount of time from identification of the shot to transmission of the message. It changes the whole game. Without that shot detection system, we wouldn't know what was going on in the school ... Valuable, valuable time can be lost. Unfortunately, with school crisis situations, it's about mitigating loss."
Just remember, whatever you do, don't ever drop your books in the hallway.
Trust me. Don't do it.
3 - 2 - 1 .. Some kid brings a speaker plugged in to a cellphone/whatever plays gunfire gets school shut down for the day...
It'll be the new pulling the fire alarm/calling in bomb threat (taken way too seriously these days) =)
Just play CoD or any other FPS very loudly in the hallway.
One problem was solved. Now the other problem needs to be solved. Namely, what causes students to snap and to do that in the first place.
No doubt it can be defeated with loud recordings played from cell phones, etc. How long before students conspire in many locations to do these simultaneously at dozens of schools, thus making the millions spent wasted?
In every school shooting, the problem has been resolved well before the time it takes the cops to get there. Either the shooter has run out of bullets, killed himself, been subdued by another, or barricaded himself in a room. It wouldn't have changed anything if the police got there a few minutes faster. Now the taxpayers have to pay for a pointless device.
While this is a nice idea, and it will of course reduce the response time of law enforcement, it misses the point.
People take guns to school because schools are "gun free zones". They even have big signs posted around them saying, "You are in a gun-free zone".
So... the bad guy is assured that he is the only person with a gun...
How many people walk into police stations and start shooting? Ok, ok, I'm sure it has happened once, somewhere... Does it happen NEARLY as often as school shootings?
Armed teachers, armed parents, would solve this problem. Heck, armed teenagers would solve this problem. When my father went to school, you could still bring your .22 rifle to school, they had a shooting club and people had gun racks in the pack of their pickup trucks. No one would have dreamed of shooting up that school, 20 or 30 kids had guns there.
Of course, the REAL issue isn't even guns, it is mental health. We have kids who are unstable, unbalanced, and unloved, and the system does nothing for them. There is no way to identify problem or challenged kids and get them some help before they go off the deep end.
This isn't limited to kids, we have the same problem with adults. The mental health care system in this county is sad, we don't offer help early enough to those who need it and as a result, we have people who go crazy and do stupid stuff.
Ahhh, the wonderful future were societal problems are solved with technology. Fast forward ten years and the system is being enhanced to immobilize the shooter or tranq them in some fashion – works so well it gets rolled out to every store and fast food joint. Pretty soon everyone everywhere is constantly monitored for signs of aberrant behavior and an automated response ready to be applied. The future will be wonderful.
Letter To Iran
Clearly, if they have time and money to spend on these very rare events, they have too much money. I see budget cuts in the future.
Wow... what a waste. Now they can notify in seconds the police who will be there in minutes. Amazing.
Take that $100k per school and add those auto-closing door that they have for fire separation to every classroom.Have them be locked for outside access. And throw a layer of ballistic material down the inside. Add some ballistic material to the walls.
When someone pulls the "shooter" alarm, just like a "fire" alarm, the doors will close and the sirens will sound.
Now, this wont stop all deaths, but it will prevent the shooter from moving from room to room. And it will make the "bunker in place" method that most schools employ actually viable.
But no, instead some podunk school district gets suckered in by a scam of a system in SDS/ShotSpotter.
We need to divert resources away from teaching and put more resources into preventing students from getting any actual learning done. An educated populace is a nuisance to the establishment oligarchy's military-industrial-finance-media complex.
spree shooters are also rare. this is an over reaction to a small problem
School shootings are bad. They are also rare on a per-school basis. Chicago for example has about 613 elementary and high schools - is it a wise use of resources to spend up to 61 million dollars for this type of system? I bet we would save more lives by hiring an extra crossing guard per school, or putting in traffic speed bumps around the school.
>>>just f**king arm the teachers
What if it is teacher, or someone known to teacher that goes postal?
>>>If you're not meant to be here
Why would anyone want to send kids to a place where potential for mistaken judgment call, no matter how unlikely, will result in getting shot? Consider this, on a national scale incidences of school shooting are rather low, but incidences of bone-headed decisions by stuff and teachers are not.
That equates to something like $2B to $10B to equip all the public schools in the US to stop a very small number of deaths. Such a system would have done nothing for the kids in the school in Washington State a few weeks back. I think very few of these school shootings last long enough for a system like this to make a real difference. But it makes people feel safer to think their kids are protected. I just wonder how much more effective that money could be at helping the potential perpetrators and preventing the shootings in the first place. It's amazing to me how stupid we are in this country that $20K+ per school to react faster to a catastrophe is so much more palatable than helping distressed kids and preventing the catastrophe in the first place.
The big assumption is that the gunman is continually firing shots that will allow the system to work. Alternatively, off the shelf wi-fi enabled cameras could be purchased that would provide real-time video feeds throughout the school allowing law enforcement to not only "hear" where the gunman is but to be able to actually see the gunman and potential victims as they move (or hide). Estimated cost: $5,000 - $10,000 depending on how many cameras are installed. (The prices are retail so I bet the schools can get an additional 30% off as they would probably be considered a wholesale customer.)
Sure the technology is cool but it doesn't make it the best choice for taxpayer dollars especially given the relative rarity of school shootings. During the 2009 - 2010 school year there were 98,817 public schools. Let's say they were all equipped with this system at $50,000 / school it would cost $4,940,850,000 to retrofit all the schools. I wonder what else can be done with 5 billion dollars... Perhaps some significant development work in vaccines? Perhaps cancer? Heck, I bet more lives would be saved simply choosing random people that need medical care and making sure they get the very best treatment possible.
it hasn't come up yet, but im pretty sure if someone (including the voices in my head) said 'kill a bunch of people in this room without using guns or knives' i'd figure out an effective way to do it pretty quickly.
that's ignoring the fact that this gun detector is circumvented by maximum rounds fired per however long it takes the cops to get there. i realize they know this too, but since you can kill a hell of a lot of people with automatic weapons in a few minutes, someone truly dedicated to shooting up a school is going to make a game of it now.
Starting pistol?
From TFA:
Yes, we're at a point where the level of violent crime is at its lowest in 40 years but apparently a crazy response is needed regardless.
Needless to say, there's no discussion in this article. Simply a visit to the school for the demonstration, a quick chat with the cops, and a thoughtless quote from the neighbor.
I have a kid in school and frankly I think all this pseudo "security" is more dangerous for shaping future civic involvement than the anhistorical gibberish in the history books.
Should they install barriers in case of Zombie attacks?
Should they install anti-aircraft artillery in case of air attack?
Should everyone wear hazmat suits in case of anthrax attacks?
What, exactly, is the threshold for buying things to cover a hypothetical situation? Should all schools have gunfire detection systems installed?
Maybe all schools need an assigned SWAT team so there's no transportation delay if this ever happens?
I understand the source of the fear, but the idea that some company is going to make zillions in selling this to school boards on the off beat chance it ever happens there just seems a little shady.
You could drop metric butt loads of cash on this kind of problem, and it seems like it's going to be mostly wasted money. Because most places where you install it will never need it.
This sounds like an awesome outcome for the companies who sell these things. Very lucrative, good for shareholder value and executive bonuses.
Is it money well spent for the school?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The shooter will just go to a different school.
Amazing how much the pro-gun lobby wants to waste on expensive crap like this, rather than simply allowing for effective laws. Hell, for most of what we need, we don't even need to create new laws, just start enforcing the current ones - in part by firing idiotic state government employees that refuse to comply with with federal reporting requirments
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What percentage of gunshots will it detect? What is the rate of false detections? Can you trigger the detection by slapping the flat side of a ruler against the table?
And to pay for this, they only have to fire 5 teachers. And they have to hire 5 more administrators. Pretty soon, the number of administrators will be double the number of teachers.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I believe this is an idiotic boondoggle.
fuck this high tech solution bullshit, just fucking arm the teachers with a "If you're not meant to be here you WILL GET SHOT" policy.
Have we suddenly switched to discussing prisons or we are still talking about schools - you know, place full of kids who will happily do whatever you are forbidding them to do.
Without that shot detection system, we wouldn't know what was going on in the school
I would think that the loud bangs, screaming, and fleeing people would be a dead giveaway.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What are there, maybe 4 school shootings per year in the US ? And 98,000 public schools. What does that make the odds of a school actually having a shooting, about 1 in 25,000 ?
I am unimpressed. Call me when they tied the detectors into a system that mag-locks the doors and windows shut to confine the shooter in one location. False alarm? Minor inconvenience in that area until a school constable or principal investigates and signals the all-clear.
-AlPhAbEt
or sets off a firecracker
What else can they do? Should they do nothing?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that students injured by slipping in the hallways far surpasses those injured by gunfire. Why are they not putting in advanced anti-slip floors and mandating that shoes have Velcro closures rather than laces?
Yes. They should probably do nothing about the school shooting scenario and focus on education.
For a few more thousand, they could get ED-209 to roam the hallways.
Gently reply
As a previous poster said, close the doors (like the fire system did back in the '80s in my school). It shouldn't be too hard to tie the detectors into the fire alarm system, just basic electronics.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I've bought tons of IP cameras in the past - all of them have varying degrees of crappyness. Do you really want to lean on WiFi during an emergency?
Direct cabled SDI cameras to a network connected DVRs are they way to go - but it's doubtful those would be any cheaper in a large scale installation. I've priced out systems in the $30k range for a mid size building. A large building could easily cost $100k.
The real issue is whether or not these costs are acceptable for what is a statistically rare event.
hundreds of kids with cellphones seems to be working fairly well...at giving an eyewitness accounting too. saying "Valuable valuable time will be lost" is a scare tactic aimed to sell a false sense of security. Imagine if we can sell all this 'war stuff' at home??? Wall street will love it and post whatever it takes. A sad statement for our fear mongering sales side of it. Don't buy it and call them out..
See our war on drugs, or revisit the prohibition of Alcohol in the US if you doubt me.
Just because you would give up guns, does not mean that bad people would.
Police hung around a couple hours outside while waiting to decide it was safe and where to enter. They are more proactive now.
Honest question ... have they done anything? Or given themselves the illusion of doing something?
This is like buying a rock which keeps tigers away. If in 5 years you've seen no tiger, you can declare it a success.
If every school installed one of these systems, the company which makes them would make a crap ton of money.
And easily 90% of all installations will be a complete waste of time and money.
But, really, what's the response time of your police, and how many people can be killed in that time?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So, for the low cost of $20k-$100k multiplied by the number of schools this is installed in, we can limit a gunman with an assault rifle to only a few minutes of rampaging. While it's true that with many problems, mitigation can be very valuable even if a complete solution can't be found, I can't say that allowing someone minutes to mow down children with an assault rifle is all that much mitigation, especially for the cost to implement it.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
(techicallly there have been five since Columbine) In the December 2013 Arapahoe High School shooting and the July 2012 Aurora theater shooting the student gunmen's anger was well known to school mental health officials. The evidence for both cases is under court seal while the various lawsuits work their way through the system.
In each classroom, installing a exit door to the outside instead of having door(s) that lead back into the school might be quite a bit less expensive and more effective at keeping the "bad person" away from potential victims.
Passionately Indifferent
3 - 2 - 1 .. Some kid brings a speaker plugged in to a cellphone/whatever plays gunfire gets school shut down for the day...
Ever wonder why you need hearing protection at the range and not in the movie theater?
Earlier this year, researchers at BAE Systems and the FBI published a comprehensive paper on gunshot forensics. In their study, Steven Beck and colleagues explain that a gunshot is made up of two primary sounds --- there's a crack and there's a BANG!
The bang is the 'muzzle blast' --- the sound of pressurised gases escaping as the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun. The initial sound only lasts a few milliseconds, but it's louder than a jet engine and can reverberate for over a second.
The crack is the shock wave created as the bullet breaks the sound barrier, like a miniature version of the sonic boom created by a supersonic jet. The shock wave forms a cone which trails behind the bullet, and you hear the crack when the shock wave passes by.
Gunshot Forensics: what's in a bang?
Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!!
But no doubt someone here will say that this is an infringement on children's right to bear arms/go hunting during break times/indulge in harmless firearm-based fun in the canteen.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That I can't quite put my finger on. I'm pretty sure it means our society is broken.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
that's why its not a solution.
it is, at best, half a solution.
the other half of course being that sinsible commons ense gun control that they so completely oppose.
Mandatory training and psych evaluation as part of getting a license.
Background checks. Etc.
They want to give people tons of power, ie, more guns...but they dont want to make them take any of the responsiblity that goes with.
This is why I cannot support the NRA or any of hte Open Carry movements, even though I personally support the right to gun ownership.
I just believe that that ownership should come with more restrictions and responsibilities than owning a car does.
We shouldnt HAVE to arm the teachers.
But if we do, its not enough to simply say "here's your chalk, your gun, the textbooks, and assembly is at 9am. Have Fun!"
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Does it detect crossbows?
1) Inflate bag with a lungful or two of air
2) Hold firmly in one hand, smack hard with other hand
3) Repeat with additional bags
4) Watch SWAT team disrupt the entire school
5) Get arrested for blowing up lunch bags
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Oh Crap!! The cops just shot the Jazz band drummer!!
Cop: Well, the gunshot detector for this room was going off, and this kid was in here swinging sticks violently in the air... I thought they were nun-chucks, so I had to protect my fellow officers.
Yes, a good rim-shot hit on a short Yamaha snare drum is just as loud as a Ruger .22-LR. Don't put these stupid sensors in the band room. In fact, just scrap this whole idea before it goes anywhere. It won't work.
Unfortunately, with school crisis situations, it's about mitigating loss.
The police largely prevent crime only by accidentally being in the right place at the right time or by use of inside information. Otherwise all police work is about filing reports and mitigating loss. The fact that it's an incident at a school isn't relevant.
load "$",8,1
That is a good question.
There are roughly 100,000 schools in the US, which means this would cost $2-10 billion.
Could that money be better spent on programs that deal with the root causes of school shootings?
Or the first time a teacher puts on some in-class movie to entertain the kiddies while he marks papers, and there's a scene with gunfire...
Thousands of dollars per school would mean a system just won't be provided to poor schools, a simply unconscionable form of economic discrimination. Fortunately there's a way better answer.
Put an app on many of those smart phones, enabled by the reverse 911 lockdown message. By the time the cops show up on scene, each such phone can have responded to report its GPS position and a half-second timestamped audio clip of the sound of (presumed) shots as heard through each classroom door. Centrally process those clips to determine the time offsets as the sound goes down the hall from one classroom to the next. You don't need to put any special hardware in the school, though having a floorplan on record would improve accuracy. Once the approach works, it can be rolled out for nearly no cost, practically overnight, everywhere that reverse 911 is in place.
I'm happy to release this idea into the public domain for anyone who'll code it as free (Libre and beer) software. Who wants to put together a quick little project?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
"...click. Forward units report multiple shooters, armed with long rifles ... uh, ... dancing, click..."
I know this is crazy but what if we just addressed the mental issues that were causing people to run into schools and start shooting. I imagine in the long run this is a better solution that deploying mechanisms to stop shooters. What's next? Ceiling mounted turret guns to neutralize shooters? Remove all the windows and build the school as a bunker?
At some point this becomes a perfect attacker / defender death spiral?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
The only valid legislation on this matter would be to abolish the Second Amendment.
Until you've accomplished that, any and all attempts to illegalize the keeping and/or bearing of arms would remain unconstitutional.
Whether you think this state of affairs is fortunate or otherwise, you can not argue with this fact.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Wouldn't a *smart* shooter, likely a student that knows the layout of the school, try to first disable such a system before their rampage?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Smart isn't what we get. It will be "Smart assed". As in: I wonder how long before we get some kid trying out different fireworks to see which one brings out the SWAT team?!
I suspect the system isn't looking for a "supersonic" signature as a pretty common setup is a pistol with subsonic rounds. (45 ACP)
So time to break out your crossbows or just go "full boat Hunger Games" on them!
So my father grew up on a dairy farm near Frederick, Maryland in the 1940's. After the Columbine massacre I commented that that kind of thing, students shooting each other in school, seemed new and wondered what gave rise to it. He said he did not know, but that when he was in grade school, the boys brought rifles to school so that they could hunt squirrels on the walk home. There was never a problem.
Some time later I ran into ESR somewhere or other, up on his gun rights hobby horse. I mentioned the thing about the squirrels. His only comment was, "that's a healthy gun culture."
I grew up in rural Ohio where hunting was an excusable absence from school. Many of my classmates owned guns. There were never any problems with threats or gun violence.
Children own guns. And that has been going on for a while. The student massacre thing is new. Which suggests that the underlying cause of these student-on-student gun massacres is not caused by the introduction of guns.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Your proposed "more guns" solution to a random gun violence is indeed strange for anyone not immersed in American gun culture. What are you going to propose when everyone carries a gun at all times, yet innocent people still get gunned down?
... Government.
Just forget actually having anything make any sense. Just come up with something the bureaucrats will like and make it.
As to the cost... the best part is that apparently you can just add zeros to the end of your concept and the check will always clear because hey... its not really their money after all is it?
A comparable system could be built for well under 5k. That is including installation costs assuming you allowed people to bid on the contract rather then just handing it to the same people every single fucking time and assuming them to have competitive pricing when they know you never bother to even look at the invoice before signing it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Folks in Massachusetts: you already have this in your schools. They are called EARS and telephones that call 911! Unless this is being installed where there is a chance that everyone in the school is completely deaf, it is a complete waste of money!
While you're at it, you'd better install a $100,000 rain detector there too. We'd better protect our children from the risks of getting wet from walking outside without their raincoats. (After all, no one wants to rely upon a visual inspection of the sky through a window.)
Somebody is laughing their ass off as they count their money from these stupid school administrators...
The noted gun rights advocate John Lott, Jr. makes a point here.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Wuss. Guess what my new ringtone will be?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Maybe I'm wrong but the x factor in all these shootings seems to be mental health problems. If we took that 100k per school and instead invested it into mental health services I think we'd get the most bang for our buck, pardon the pun.
It's fascinating to see all the bogeymen this problem gets blamed for:
No prayer in school.
Toxic masculinity.
Firearms.
Video games.
Violent movies.
Are we really that uncomfortable with the possibility that these perpetrators are also victims?
Have cost-benefit analysis been done to show this is the most effective way to increase kids safety? Will this save more lives than having epi pens on hand, or more modern school buses?
The only way this makes sense is if these are paid for by taxes on gun sales. It seems reasonable to require buyers to pay taxes to combat potential misuse of their purchase (and that this money should not be used for other things like epi pens).
Literally. It's Bow and Arrow time. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to mandate that school uniforms include bulletproof vests or something just slightly less crazy. Whatever happened to metal detectors at all entrances? --- On a slightly different note, the actual tech for detecting the shots is pretty cool, when used in its proper context.
Wow, $100,000 to not protect themselves from silencers, knives, bombs, or chemical attacks. What a bargain!
...so the police find out about the shooting about a minute earlier. If police turn up 5-20 minutes after the first shot has been fired, is there any real benefit to this device?
SURELY NOT!!!!!
is so much easier than placing restrictions on the ownership of guns.
is that if you are so concerned that a school shooting is imminent, that you are fine with $20,000 - $100,000 of your tax dollars going toward something like this... why the HELL are you sending your kid to this school every day?!
Nevermind the ridiculousness of "Without that shot detection system, we wouldn't know what was going on in the school". I'd bet you anything, that even in schools that forbid cellphones, enough students have cellphones that multiple are going to avoid getting shot, call the cops and tell them where the shooter is. Stop the forbidding of cellphones, and there you have a schoolwide "shot detection system" at no additional cost.
That make sense.
Do they still make M-80's...with the waterproof fuses? We made more than one toilet explode with those back in high school days....of course back then, you didn't worry about terrorists in schools and the like...just mischief.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yes, they should do nothing. This is a case where doing nothing is much better than doing something. They are wasting money better spent on actual educational resources, and they are promoting fear.
The alarm will probably never go off, how well will the police react to it if/when it does? Are they prepared for false alarms? Will the first responders get the data in time? Even with data showing where the shooter is the police still have to proceed with caution, there could be multiple shooters, the shooter could move. Once the police are in the school, if the shooter is still firing, it should not be difficult to determine their location without the system. You are going to have everyone calling in on their cell phones, are you going to go by the system and not the caller when they give different locations of the shooter?
It seems even if it works flawlessly in a best case scenario it really has limited benefit.
but I feel that the level of gun violence in the US is absolutely despicable.
Can you imagine what someone from 100 years ago would think if they knew that in the year 2014 they would have to install computerized sensor equipment in schools to deter/prevent/monitor/apprehend/kill a person who is going into the school to kill completely innocent children. And that events of that nature are common in the 21st century?
Really?!?!
Why are people(children...) randomly killing other children in schools?
Well my friend from 1914, we have a sickness in this country.
A sickness that pervades all levels of society, all classes and races.
A sickness uniquely American, that has encouraged, engendered and approved of violence.
This sickness has been allowed to fester and grow, especially with those in poverty ridden neighborhoods left to deal with this on a daily basis, with little attention from the media or those more "well off".
This sickness has mutated in the last twenty years, with the blame not easily laid on one party, but on several, and really on American Culture itself, and it's continuing approval of violence, from the highest seats of government and corporate power to the lowest street thug.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
You have to disaggregate statiustics before you use them to evaluate a policy.
For example, I think we can agree that forcible rape is a violent crime. Violent crime rates are down, does that mean we should be less concerened about forcible rape? No, because we need consider the specific rape statistics, which might possibly have risen even if the overall rate for violent crime has dropped.
In this case, you need to show that the rate of school shootings has dropped. You can 't lump them in with all violent crimes and then use statistics about the larger group to reasonable about the smaller; that's the fallacy of overgeneralization.
Which is not to say your conclusion is wrong, only that your argument is specious.
School shootings are "black swan" events. It's a near statistical certainty that you won't have one in your community. This does not necessarily mean, however, that communities shouldn't prepare for them. How far to go is a complex question that depends among other things on what *else* is on the community's plate.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
System: 2 shots on floor 1 room 1.
System: 3 shots on floor 1 hallway main
System: 15 shots floor 1 main commons
System: 5 shots floor 2 main stair well
System: 9 shot admin section
Sure helps a lot with those people getting shot doesn't it? Nothing will stop the shooter until the people with guns arrive on the scene.
This is nothing more than security theater. This will prevent nothing and is dubious as to how useful the info will be to the security responders.
Let's not forget this will do nothing to help with people walking around with Molotov cocktails or a bow/cross bow, or a blade, etc.
Arm the teachers, if they don't want to do it, then maybe they are not really serious about the welfare of their students.
It's a worse problem, this installing idiotic 'safety' systems, than simply wasting money. (Or opportunistic companies trading on fear for their bread and butter.)
It raises the anxiety level, the hystericisation of a population. It's a way of telling kids and their families that the Threat Is Real! -Can you imagine going to a school every day knowing that there is a Real Danger of being shot that the adults are taking seriously enough to install monitoring systems?
The point of all these shootings is keep people in a traumatized state where rational thinking becomes increasingly difficult to the point where it's just easier to let the authorities do your thinking for you. -And yeah, I'm the guy who thinks that there is some dark side social engineering going on.
Have gnu, will travel.
Aren't most (if not all) "active shooter" type incidents of the sort that end long before the police have a time to show up?
Even if there are police officers on site, are there going to be enough officers to go after a shooter?
How many school shootings actually happen, and how many people actually die from them?
I find this utter waste of education department money un-acceptable, and I can no longer take anyone in the public education system who would ever agree to this system seriously if they are asking for a biger budget again.
Of all the major problems facing our schools today, random shootings by "crazy" or disgruntled students is not one of them.
We all easily laugh, at either FOX News, or Alex Jones, but this is something so paranoid, it belongs in the same catagory as Alex Jones.
There is niether a problem with guns, nor a problem with mental illness, outside of course the paranoid delusions of politicians, some business people, PTA members, the media, and of course the private prison industry.
The actual numbers of shoot deaths, per actual statistics paint a far diffrent view than what gets reported in the news.
Even if it did, 30,000 Americans die from guns every year, total, from all causes, with around half being accidents. another 40,000 die from drug abuse related causes. All drugs including heroin and speed.
Both of them combined, still are barely more than half the 110,00 Americans that die every year from obesity.
We often complain that our schools are horridly underfunded, and spending $100,000 a school for this is dangerously irresponsible, and will take money away from things children actually need to learn, or perhaps eat better.
Yes, spending that $100,000 per school aimed at improving the nutrition of school lunches would do more to protect the children against a horrible death than all the anti-shooter mechanisms in the world. I am also guessing that is not politically correct enough.
Niether is spending that $20,000-$100,000 per school in a computer lab, where we can teach kids skills that would lead to more American workers in technology. If we really need H1B visas, then surely American students would have no trouble finding well paying jobs if so trained?
Next is the hideous conversation we have on "mental health", in the US. It seems soley around funding the law enforcement aspect of it. Identifying, and incarcerating criminals before they commit crimes. With this, comes the hideous bias and stereotypes of what we percieve social enemies to be. Certainly not about helping people with ADD, OCD, anexiety disorders, through their lives, or making things easier for them.
Before we can even begin to have a conversation on how absurd the notion "protecting against school shooting" is, we are forced into the "guns vs mental health debate", and agreeing with a false premise.
I put my foot down no more. This is nothing more than a continuation of the war on the poor, war on crime, war on drugs, and war on terrorism. Enough already, I had enough of living in a prison state. I am asking my fellow slashdot to combat this nonsense, by raising their voices and refusing to accept it.
I understand the source of the fear, but the idea that some company is going to make zillions in selling this to school boards on the off beat chance it ever happens there just seems a little shady.
the source of this fear is media driven hysteria, nothing more. This company is going to bilk public education billions of dollars when many schools lack proper funding for educating related functions. but aparantly, the only public spending in the US that is acceptable is on defense and police. Then its "hog wild". Even when they talk about "mental illness" they talk about from the stand point of a law enforcement standpoint. fucking disgusting.
Hmm, unlike, um, every other situation that police are involved in? Kinda the nature of the beast, I woulda thought.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
An alarm system that goes off when someone opens a can of pop may be better.
Coke etc. affects the brain and mental state.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Of course, the REAL issue isn't even guns, it is mental health. We have kids who are unstable, unbalanced, and unloved, and the system does nothing for them. There is no way to identify problem or challenged kids and get them some help before they go off the deep end.
Actually, it's easy to identify violent children. Teachers see them acting violent. The problem is that nobody knows what "help" would be. Interventions like DARE, where a cop comes around to a school and plays male authority figure, actually make kids more likely to get arrested. We know that sending kids to work camps and prisons makes them more violent.
Some preschool programs, which teach kids to interact with each other, make them less likely to have problems later on. Most violent kids come from families that are disrupted and low income. Since there's a strong correlation between violence and poverty, it seems plausible that eliminating poverty would also reduce violence.
I think studies found that giving people better housing, under certain circumstances, made their kids more likely to succeed in school.
Past behavior predicts future behavior. But a quick Google search of "predicting violence" will show that there's no scientific evidence of any screening method other than past behavior that can predict future violence. And there's no way to predict a school shooting.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"There is no instrument that is specifically useful or validated for identifying potential school shooters or mass murderers," said Stephen D. Hart, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver who is the co-author of a widely used evaluation tool. "There are many things in life where we have an inadequate evidence base, and this is one of them."
The only thing that can predict shooting is access to a gun. If kids can't get guns, they can't shoot up schools. They often get their parents' guns, or get older friends to buy them. A lot of doctors who deal with these shootings say that the best way to stop them would be to reduce access to guns.
Unfortunately, we don't have good research or evidence on gun violence because the NRA lobbied Congress to cut funds to any federal agency that paid for research on gun violence.
So the NRA has guaranteed your right to say, "There's no evidence for that."
Trenton council rejects expansion of 'ShotSpotter' gunshot detection system
“That body was shot there in the head and it stayed there for five hours with ShotSpotter being only a few blocks away. This product does not work, at least not for Trenton.”
http://www.nj.com/mercer/index...
Shotspotter gun sensor technology halted in Birmingham after failed trial
http://www.birminghammail.co.u...
Gunshot detection system in Delaware comes up blank
600 reports of shots fired, 175 actual shootings, shots detected only five or six times, a camera only turned toward the shooting once and it was unable to see anything due to foliage in the way.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
Broward sheriff dropping gunshot detection system
"the system was picking up noises such as firecrackers or a backfiring car and registering those sounds as gunfire. The sensors were also triggered by helicopters and the roar of downshifting trucks from nearby Interstate 95...the problems at BSO with the gunshot detection system mirror findings of a 2008 report...called the system useful but took issue with an apparent high rate of false calls."
http://articles.sun-sentinel.c...
This is a sensible comment. Although I disagree with your conclusion (since they are so rare, almost any precuationary defense is a waste of effort - and I say this as a parent), your reasoning is good.
Most of the wireless cameras I've dealt with also do wired. Just wire them all with Ethernet. Cheaper than a "real" system, and doesn't rely on wireless.
Learn to love Alaska
you forgot Derek Bird and Raoul Moat, to name two right off the top of my head, there are more. From your much-loved WSJ: "Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is." source. "Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven't made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don't provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems."
A few comments from me to close down any further idiocy from the anti-gun crowd:
When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
Criminals DO NOT CARE about the Law. That's why they were once called "out laws". From the old English literally meaning vermin, wolfsbane or wolfshead, which were basically fair game for anybody with a weapon and the brass bollocks to go take him down, nobody was allowed to offer an outlaw food, water or shelter. Presenting a local sheriff with a wolfsbane usually attracted a reward. Outlawry was abolished in England in 1861. The Castle Doctrine, however, still stands in English law which means that I would be perfectly within my rights to shoot an intruder into my home in the face, but if I shoot him in the back, that's murder (Tony Martin case: [2001] EWCA Crim 2245).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'm not trolling at all, thank you very much. This is a serious solution to a serious problem.
Most school shootings do not involve explosive devices. Of course there are a million ways to hurt people and you can't ban all of their components but guns are a no-brainer considering they have no other purpose than to kill.
...it's a bit cheaper.
We really need 100k of tech to tell that someone is inside a school building shooting? Really? This is just stupid. Also, this system was designed for use in the field and relies largely on many channels of audio from different sources to converge and tell where a shooter is at a distance. The application here is way, way more simplistic. All they need is a sensor with microphone in each large open area with a trigger to alert for it's sector alone not a massive, complicated computer driven system meant to triangulate point of origin for a bullet moving through though the air. You could build something like this easily with one raspberry pi or old sun microsystems sunspot per open area with a microphone attached to it and one central server.
First of all, school shootings are not that common but more importantly, as described, I am not sure this system will be able to save even a single kid.
This can make arrest easier but by the time the police arrive, even if it is ready and positioned right next to the school, the criminal would have already unloaded his weapon. Arresting criminals is a good thing but it won't get anyone back to life.
Perhaps, if this system helps getting faster medical assistance, it may save a few lives but it would cost a disproportionate amount of money. When we talk about safety, a human life is valued at about $7M in the US, it means that if deploying this system on a large scale costs $700M, it has to save at least 100 lives to be considered money well spent. Otherwise, there are better things to do with it, like improving road safety.
I think it's an interesting counter-intuitive scenario. Consider:
Crime goes up:
1) Society expects bad things
2) Society learns to deal with them, both directly and with the aftermath in general
3) Something bad happens
4) Good forces help those they can
5) Society marches on
6) GOTO 1
Crime goes down:
1) Society gets comfortable
2) Society rests on its laurels, not planning for anything bad to happen because they neither want nor expect it to happen
3) Something bad happens
4) Society completely freaks out, over-reacts with entrenching laws and requirements, but doesn't investigate or look into underlying causes
5) Society feels good that it has done something
6) GOTO 1
One might expect a logical society to operate in the opposite: systemic problems beget severe response to fix them, while a stable and peaceful society is able to spare resources to consider potentially bad situations and how to cut them off or react to them.
Our children are in schools that have completely inadequate meteor defense systems! Something must be done! They could be mashed flat in an instant!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last