“New gun-detection system uses Wi-Fi to sense concealed weapons,” Statescoop reported Wednesday. “Chartiers Valley School District, near Pittsburgh, is the first to deploy a new technology that relies on Wi-Fi signals and AI to detect firearms hidden in bags, under clothes or in other hiding places.”
“The technology is being installed across the district’s four school buildings: two elementary schools, one middle school and one high school,” the report notes. “The district plans to monitor two entrances per building, for a total of eight devices.”
What could go wrong?
Start with privacy concerns. And while the public has pretty much accepted schools, as legally-mandated “gun-free zones,” with special scrutiny often akin to airport TSA checkpoints, it’s not hard to imagine such surveillance becoming “normalized” in Blue City “sensitive areas” by Democrat administrations that won’t let minor impediments like the Fourth Amendment get in the way of their compulsive obsession to eviscerate the Second.
Then there’s the matter of false alarms with potentially deadly consequences for students, as happened just last month.
“Police officers swarmed a 16-year-old high school student last week after an artificial intelligence (AI) gun detection system mistakenly flagged his bag of chips as a firearm, leaving officials and students shaken,” Fox News reported.
As AmmoLand readers have seen time and again, there’s a lot of garbage in/garbage out with AI, and trusting it with life-and-death decisions is not the panacea those politically and financially motivated to promote it would have us believe.
For starters, there are physical constraints of the system, most obviously due to the limited number of detection devices that cannot cover every possible means of entrance into the building—think loading docks for classrooml, office, and cafeteria supplies, furniture, and equipment, or windows that an enterprising would-be school shooter could exploit if s/he wanted to badly enough. Or an armed and determined assailant could just blow through the checkpoint.
And wifi signals can be jammed.
But that would be illegal, and a serious violation of federal law, some may counter.
Shooting up schools isn’t?
As the adage goes, “Foolproof systems do not take into account the ingenuity of fools.”
None of this is to say that technology can’t be used to help harden targets and that such systems cannot play a role in helping that to happen. The cautions are against over relying on technology and misapplying it to the detriment of freedom. That and deliberately overlooking what works.
Let’s not forget the reason all of this is a priority in the first place: School safety in an era when certain aberrant elements of society manifest a fixated evil response to their perceived grievances: slaughtering defenseless innocents. As long as they have reason to believe they can succeed they will continue to try.
And the best way to keep killers from succeeding is by being able to stop them.
How receptive do you think the decision makers at the Chartiers Valley School District would be to a multi-tiered approach to school safety that would include introducing a pilot program like Faculty/Administrator Safety Training & Emergency Response (FASTER)?
Armed schools staff do not replace Law Enforcement/EMTs.
They add one additional layer to your school’s existing safety and security plan.
They are first responders right at the point of attack.
Their role is to protect your kids and provide critical aid until outside professionals can arrive.
They’re not allowed to do this in Pennsylvania, where in 2019, Democrat Gov. Tom Wolfe signed a law that “ensures that teachers cannot be armed in schools.” Still, even allowing armed private security contractors was too much for an indignant David Hogg, CeaseFirePA, the Education Law Center, and Democrat apparatchik teachers unions, all joined in their commitment that when seconds count, someone capable of stopping a monster from having his bloody fill of precious, terrified, and agonized children will be nowhere around.
No AI-enhanced Wi-Fi system will prevent that, and anyone who argues otherwise is an incentivized liar.
AI Gun Detection System Mistakes Bag of Doritos for a Pistol
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
Looks like the only way to eliminate false hits on Doritos bags is to outlaw them or check them in at the beginning of the school day and then check them out for lunch, eat them and then turn the bag back in afterwords.