Gun Detection Tech Fails To Detect Gun, Prevent School Shooting
from the yeah-just-keep-throwing-AI-at-it dept
There are lots of things we could be doing to limit school shootings. But none of those have been tried because most people, lobbyists, and politicians continue to believe issuing “thoughts and prayers” statements while standing on children’s graves is the absolute utmost they should be expected to do.
Instead of common sense measures that have managed to keep every other First World country almost completely free of school shootings, the US continues to take a hands-off approach… I mean, not counting the pallbearers asked to deliver innocent children to their final place of rest.
One of the so-called solutions is making tech companies richer while not actually making kids any safer. Lots of firms are offering “gun detection tech” to schools which seem to be more prone to false positives than life-saving gun detections.
While a lot of recent attention has been directed at Evolv — due to its failures pretty much everywhere (hospitals, schools, subways) it’s been deployed — this recent tragedy adds another tech company to the list of entities that are well-meaning, but ultimately useless, when lives are on the line. Here’s the latest bad news/worse news, as reported by Nashville (TN) Fox affiliate, WZTV.
The technology system meant to prevent school shootings failed to detect the Antioch High School shooter’s gun, an official confirms.
A Metro Nashville Public Schools’ spokesperson says based on the camera location and the shooter in relation to the camera, it did not detect the weapon.
MNPS adds the camera did activate an alarm trigger when law enforcement and school resource officers arrived with their weapons.
The technology, Omnialert, is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) gun detection used in all Metro Schools.
Gun detection tech isn’t much use when it only detects weapons carried by law enforcement officers deployed to neutralize an active shooter. Obviously, everyone in the building and the underperforming AI expected an armed response to a school shooting. “Detecting” blatantly obvious things isn’t anyone’s definition of “detection,” a term that’s normally associated with acts of intuition where things not immediately apparent are sussed out by instinct, skill, or… I don’t know… reliable tech.
I’m sure Omnilert appreciates the inadvertent typo, which will help muddy the search results and brush a bit of its earned shame off its shoulders. The company is Omnilert and it claims it’s the ultimate blend of military know-how and AI magic. (Omnialert is a brand linked to other non-gun detection products.)
Our expertise in AI has roots in the U.S. Department of Defense and DARPA related to real-time target recognition and threat classification. That military focus on high reliability and precision carried through to the development of our AI threat detection that goes beyond identifying guns to finding active shooter threats.
We employ a data-centric AI methodology that prioritizes high-quality training data. While traditional methods focus on data volume, sourcing millions of gun images, we take a quality-over-quantity approach. Our training data is hand-curated with rich annotations that improve accuracy and increase reliability.
Cool cool cool. Thanks for letting us know your failure was bespoke (“hand-curated”), rather than just off-the-shelf “hey man is that a gun” detection algos that aren’t backstopped by human assistance. If nothing else, it lets us know the company has a bit of blood on its “curating” hands before we even have to enter the discovery phase of post-school shooting litigation.
The sales pitch includes up-to-date reporting on school shootings that opens with this…
503 mass shootings in the U.S. and 330 incidents in schools highlight the ongoing need to provide layers of protection including technologies such as AI visual gun detection
… and ends with this:
Protect your people, facilities, and operations with Omnilert’s AI-powered visual gun detection. Act now to transform your security cameras into proactive, life-saving tools.
Maybe the tech is better than this very limited sample size shows. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, it failed when it mattered most, resulting in the killing of one student and the wounding of another. And only the most extreme cynic would claim that’s an acceptable loss in comparison to other mass shootings.
Taxpayers were asked (although not explicitly) to pay for a product that didn’t do the only thing it’s supposed to do when it mattered most. And most likely they’ll be expected to keep paying for it because it might do the job the next time around. There are many useful ways to limit gun violence, but this nation will never go for them. Instead, we’ll just keep sacrificing kids to the AI gods because somehow that’s more acceptable than asking citizens to subject themselves to a bit more scrutiny before being allowed to purchase and carry deadly weapons.
Filed Under: gun detection tech, school resource officers, school shooting, tennessee
Companies: omnilert
Comments on “Gun Detection Tech Fails To Detect Gun, Prevent School Shooting”
These systems are easily defeated by a rather obvious strategy
I’m not going to post it because I would prefer that they’re not defeated. But it took me two minutes of reading and three minutes of thought to come up with an approach that will work beautifully, so I presume that other people who invest some effort in the problem will come up with the same thing.
Meanwhile, more children will die in the bullet-riddled blood-soaked US so that ignorant hillbilly shitstains can hold onto their precious guns to defend themselves from imaginary threats (which don’t exist) and real threats (which will kill them well before they get a shot off).
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Now do “Gun Control Fails to Prevent School Shooting.”
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That would require one to totally disregard the impact of conservative policies. That impact being more school shootings.
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That’d be difficult since it hasn’t been tried in the US yet.
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Sure.
Kid got access to poorly secured guns. Gun control laws requiring more secure storage weren’t imposed, and so a reckless parent or neighbor passed access controls and a kid got access to guns and shot their mother/father/sibilings/extended family/school/bully/et al. Its a tale as old as time.
No solution solves gun crime. The question is the impact it has on crime. Only having access controls locally will fail to significantly impact rate of access, as there is an easily accessible bypass (new locality). Like putting a masterlock on your bike – its only going to deter the laziest of criminals. Not addressing the security of weapon storage will eventually defeat access controls. But the question is how much it helps or harms.
The tech in question didn’t work to detect a hidden gun. At all. We don’t have cases of real world cases of this tech working against an opponent trying to defeat it. The only cases I’ve seen discussed, the opponent was successful in hiding the gun from the tech. Zero benefit. Increased harms in the form of reduced education budgets and reduced vigilance as the staff relies on the Tech.
“Gun control has also failed” is not a meaningful analysis, and is simply an emotional outburst from someone without the rhetorical skill to form a cogent arguement.
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To add, regular troll Koby’s surprisingly reasonable arguement that the tech could never have worked even if it performed as advertised is key to this analysis. Its over way too fast.
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Sorry hun this isn’t a fan fiction blog.
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Well, let’s get some gun control going first.
To be fair, he shot with a 9mm Taurus, a small pistol that is much harder to detect on camera than classical riffles.
But I’m sure the next AI-detector generation will detect guns from the way killers walk or scratch their balls.
Of course, if the school had had a metal detector, this may have been prevented…
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One of these days, someone’s gonna light up a building doing nothing but New York reloads with snub-nosed revolvers. Then maybe we can have a real conversation about this shit.
Which common sense measures? Please name them, so we can implement them immediately. And describe, for each, whether or not they impact 2nd amendment rights, so we know which ones we will have to prep our lawyers on.
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For starters: gun control and measures to curb poverty.
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Fixed that for you.
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Hey you are excluding the middle there. Gun control doesn’t mean only complete elimination of all guns.
As you may or may not know, people in France or Canada are not just bereft of guns, the state removed by statute their cock and balls, forcing all of them to be women save for women police officers. Even they don’t carry guns all the time: my research at the AV store shows they must often resort to teabagging criminals to death if attacked while off-duty.
Thanks to President Trump’s EO everyone has been assigned woman at conception: furthermore, every conservative man has handed in their cock and balls, and many are showing great initiative by voluntarily feminizing themselves into shrill, gossipy nags who do nothing but complain about their TV shows. Slowly, we are being brought in line with those more civilized countries.
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Wow! I’d heard of precocious puberty, but fuck me, that’s early!
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You can just say you back the blue as your little hyperbolic diatribe proves.
Really, it’s humorous the same peanut gallery decries police abuse, in one breath but cries for them to be given move exclusive power in another.
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It’s okay to be flooded with guns because one of those guns could be used to kill a cop one day. Maybe I just didn’t eat enough glue as a kid
Nope. Statistics about countries and shooting deaths speak a rather clear language. As long as the elephant is in the room, there is no point in pondering the fine points of minimizing breakage.
It’s like discussing the impact of a balanced diet on lung and throat cancer in a tobacco smoker club.
The U.S. needs take the Second Amendment serious, namely the bit where it talks about a “well-regulated militia”. Switzerland has a well-regulated militia, with lots of households having government controlled guns in safety-inspected locations with government-issued ammunition that has to be accounted for.
That is not what the NRA wants. But it is clearly the idea expressed in the U.S. Constitution. The idea that guns should be everywhere without regulation or thought runs counter to the premise of the Constitution that every human has ingrained rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Indiscriminately spreading guns like candy across the land interferes with all three.
You can put lipstick on the pig all you want, but you still look silly complaining about being covered in mud after the bridal night.
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And just like that, the same gang who call out the authorities for being able to murder and abuse civilians with impunity are once again begging for said authorities to have exclusive access to tools used to murder and abuse civilians.
Because kiddos, who do you think is going to enforce your bans?
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I recommend you take a look across the borders. Yes, police in general have access to handguns (there are exceptions like the England Bobbies). But without the expectation that everybody else may have guns, the incentive to shoot first and the usefulness of this incentive as a blanket exoneration in courts goes away.
That changes the risk of police interaction significantly and makes it considerably more effective to police the police.
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You are actually mentally stunted to the point where I’d question if you’re even allowed to dress yourself because you might strangle yourself in the process.
The police have been shooting people who clearly have no weapons, and have no way of being a threat to them in any way.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-police-kenosha-wis-shooting-black-man-back-n1237819
The incentive for the police to shoot first is because they know they will get away with it you insanely idiotic waste of carbon.
Well there’s your problem right there! None of the students was carrying a self-propelled gun, rocket launcher, or war plane! If they had, the detection system would have preemptively launched counter-missiles right away!
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Those don’t even matter when the tech, the drone pilots, fire control officers, the entire intelligence apparatus of the US consistently fails to not kill non-targets.
Collateral damage is our #1 business, not in spite of, but because of, such tech and the morons behind it. And we’ve exported and “legitimized” this bullshit to the world.
So yeah,detection tech coming out of that background should be highly suspect.
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Deceptive Advertising
Even if the system had detected the firearm on camera, it likely would not have prevented a shooting from occurring. The whole incident was over in 17 seconds, and even the two school cops that were inside the building could not arrive onto the scene fast enough.
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Are you feeling alright, Koward? It isn’t like you to make a reasonable post like this.
Re: Never thought I'd defend Koby of all people
It bothers me that someone flagged this.
I know he’s got a reputation- & not for no reason!- but if the guy wants to actually make a sensible point it shouldn’t be discouraged.
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This is a site where one week it will rightfully call out law enforcement for being a giant violent crime and extortion ring, but then spend the next crying how those same criminals need to be the only people in the country who are allowed to carry weapons.
Sensible points aren’t allowed for this topic.
Re: Re: Re: Try missing the point harder
If you’re going to purposefully read nonsense into things, things are gonna sound nonsensical.
This complaint you have is a you problem.
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Yes, it’s such nonsense that police are murdering people daily with impunity, and yet the peanut gallery is crying for them to have even more opportunity to keep doing it.
The cheapest, most effective, method to prevent school shooting is gun control.
My advice is to simply ban any guns with a magazine size larger than 1.
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And who enforces gun control exactly?
Oh, those guys in blue uniforms who regularly murder people at a whim and get away with it because they can just tell judges, “Well they COULD have been dangerous!”
Yes! Great idea! Give them even MORE power! Nothing could go wrong!