Modern systems have a lot of problems and you get a lot of false positives. But honestly let's think about it more. If you can walk through a crowd with a visible gun, it's pretty unlikely that you'll be able to identify one with a camera. So if you only see the guns when they are drawn, well I'm not convinced this is meaningfully different because now the gun is being announced. I have serious reservations about using gait analysis for determining carrying weapons.
I do want to draw attention to Destin from Smarter Every Day's gun detection system[0], where he even mentions part of the above situation. Maybe this could accelerate police response and automate it, but this honestly sounds like an over engineered system.
Its dark, but I can envision someone giving a version of this bad boy to someone they would like to prank. Kids will be kids...
There is no need for this razzle-dazzle anyhow.
The more ethical solution is to add a beacon to the id card or bracelet or whatever you need to move around the school, like an EZ-Pass. You can use a shielding bag or turn them off or leave them at home when you aren't at school.
You can use human presence sensors to identify people in general and where they aren't. When theres another tragic shooting, you can failsafe open the maglocks or access controls except where people are taking shelter, and either track the person directly or track where there is a person without a beacon.
Then, give cops the regular camera feed for situational awareness.
I would add that even IF the technology allowed to "scan" a crowd and actually detect instantly and reliably a (visible) gun, what "remedies" do you have handy?
I mean, it is not like at any school there is (or can be) a sort of SWAT team on alert and capable of an intervention in - say - 5 minutes.
And - cannot say on the specific 2018 shooting at that school - from what I understand the typical sequence is:
1) someone enters a school (or church, etc.) with a gun
2) as soon as a suitable target is within firing range, the shooting starts
and there is no more than 1, 2 or 3 minutes between #1 and #2 above, if the detection of the gun happens before (let's say outside when the shooter is approaching the building) you can maybe have a couple minutes more time.
And - even if you actually had this fast intervention armed team ready - can you only imagine the risks of false alarms/incidents with perfectly innocent people, it cannot possibly work.
Besides, there is no real need for facial recognition in this scenario, i.e. anyone, no matter who he/she is, should be detected if carrying a gun.
I agree there's no need for facial recognition in this scenario and I'm not an advocate for its use, but think of how many times you can point a gun at someone and pull the trigger in 30 seconds. With each shot potentially representing a life, a couple minutes really would matter.
Sure, but what is "normal" or "average" intervention time from the moment the police is alarmed?
I would guess something between 10 and 15 minutes at the very least (not counting the hypothesis of a local presence of policemen or military personnel).
If what you want to prevent is that kind of unconditional mass shooting this doen't seem to be effective, by the time the police (early alerted by the automatic system) arrives, the shooter will very likely have fired all the ammunitions and already killed all the people that happened to be at range.
It doesn't prevent all mass shootings, no. It may improve police response times, or if there is an officer at the school it may alert him. Improving police reaction time may save lives.
It could also sound a warning for the school so that students could preemptively run or hide. Imagine this system hooked into the lighting and lights in the immediate vicinity of the shooter could turn a dangerous red, yellow nearby and green along routes that would escape the shooter. Students could evacuate more easily if they could trust that system. Another innovation might be strobe lights that could focus on the attacker to disorient and distract him.
I think there's a huge responsibility to such technology and much danger to it, but there are potential uses.
Yes, but the reaction time is "after" the alarm, the point I was trying to make is that this surveillance/weapon recognition approach may trigger the alarm earlier (of a couple minutes, maybe 5) but if the reaction time is in the tens of minutes range, it would make no particular difference in the actual outcome as all the shooting will happen anyway before the police can arrive.
About the trust on the system, it's tricky business, as always, the amount of false positives need to be reduced to 0 or next to 0 to gain trust, and it is very unlikely, besides the errors of the system, like innocent maintenance people - say - plumbers or electricians carrying pipes or tubes, or some power drills, etc. (let alone carpenters with nail guns) I would bet that the new rage among the school kids would be finding perfectly legal items (let's say for the sake of reasoning antennas, cactuses, umbrellas) that would triggger the alarm, just for the fun of it.
Good point about alternative "distracting" means (lighting colours, strobe lights etc.) but again, when (hypothetically) such a system will be installed I doubt that it can avoid daily, weekly or monthly false alarms and after a given number of them happens, usually the system is disabled or - if possible - set to very low (ineffective in practice) sensitiveness.
A big reason that the false positive rate needs to be around zero is actually how uncommon school shootings are. Just a few false positives erode trust in the system and make people turn it off.
The problem is black swan events[0] are really hard to predict
