School Drones?

It's amusing that anyone thinks this might actually work:

• Schools in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado will begin deploying drones designed to confront active shooters.

  The drones will be put into play as soon as the upcoming school year, marking one of the latest efforts by school officials to use emerging technology to bolster campus security, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

  At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia, and one in Colorado — will be equipped with nonlethal drones developed by Austin-based Mithril Defense.

How "non-lethal" are these allegedly going to be?

• The drones, stored in on-campus docking stations, can be activated by teachers through a mobile app or classroom panic button and are designed to reach a reported shooter within 15 seconds.

  Operated remotely by professional drone pilots, the aircraft are equipped with flashing strobe lights, sirens, pepper gel dispensers and the ability to ram a suspect at speeds of up to 60 mph. They are also capable of breaking windows if necessary to reach a target.

A couple thoughts here - such as "What determines the schools that these drones will be deployed?" Schools with a history of violence? Because the schools that get labelled as violent aren't the schools that end up with mass shooters - look it up. And then this:

• "....stored in on-campus docking stations..." We'll give it 72 hours before some of the little angels damage, steal or hijack the drones;
• "Operated remotely by professional drone pilots..." It's a government program, so there will be government unions in play, meaning breaks, lunch hours, limited OT, along with failed maintenance schedules, outdated software/hardware, inevitable breakdowns going un-repaired by other union shops, etc. For obvious real world examples, look at Fleet Management here;
• "...ram a suspect at speeds of up to 60 mph." Really? A hunk of plastic, ceramic and metal ramming a human body at high speed is going to be "non-lethal." By the way, we've got a bridge to sell you.

Now it's time to roll out the lying statistics:

• According to a Washington Post tracker, nearly 400,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, with 435 school shootings recorded during that period.

Bullshit - those numbers cover all incidents on (or near) a campus, even those that occur at 0200 hours on a Saturday night that had nothing to do with school or students from a particular campus. The real numbers are closer to under 100 per year.

And it's not gun violence....it's gang violence.

• Two additional Florida schools — one near Fort Lauderdale and another in Tallahassee — will participate in the state's $557,000 pilot program funded by lawmakers.

Could you name the lawmakers and how much each contributed? Oh, it isn't lawmakers? It's TAX PAYER money and it's being shoveled to someone who does a flashy presentation, but is short on the details for this fantasy experience.

• Mithril Defense founder and CEO Justin Marston said the idea grew out of the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed while law enforcement officers waited more than an hour before confronting the gunman.

  Marston said seeing inexpensive drones used extensively in the Russia-Ukraine war convinced him that a nonlethal version could help save lives during the critical first moments of an active shooting.

That is one helluva leap, seeing as how all the Russia-Ukraine footage involves drones carrying either a grenade or a shaped charge, designed to have a sizeable lethal blast radius....and someone thinks they can reduce that to a non-lethal response with any sort of accuracy?

It would be far cheaper to install reinforced doors, better security screening, and :::gasp!::: armed teachers. 

But it's newsmax.com and they're retarded in the extreme.