There’s no need to fear, for emergency drone swarms are here.
To combat school shootings, three districts in Florida are set to trial a drone response system that’s designed to subdue an assailant and buy time before law enforcement can arrive at the scene, Newsweek reports.
It sounds like something you’d see in a satirical ad in a “Robocop” movie, but no — it’s real. The drones can spring into operation within five seconds of a silent alarm being activated, and confront the shooter within fifteen, the Texas-based manufacturer, Campus Guardian Angel, claims. While not in use, they’re stored on charging pads across the campus, and once deployed, are piloted remotely by a team of employees in its headquarters in Austin.
CEO Justin Marston ambitiously compared the drones to a modern fire protection staple: sprinkler systems.
“The sprinkler system is able to put water on the fire in seconds because it’s already there,” he told Newsweek. “You still want the fire trucks to come, you still want the guys with hose pipes to show up — but since sprinkler systems were installed, there hasn’t really been a mass fire in a school that killed a bunch of children,” he claimed.
The outrageously quick response time that the company claims the system has is in large part down to the sheer presence of the drones on each campus. In an interview with CBS News, Marston revealed that the company places as many as 30 to 90 drones in every school. And they’re nimble, reaching indoor speeds of up to 50 miles per hour, the company claims, with a glass breaker to help burst through potential obstacles.
Each drone is equipped with pepper spray pellets to blind or slow down an attacker. And if those measures fail, the drones themselves can be a weapon.
“If somebody persists in wanting to murder children, then our answer is we’ll just continue to hit them with drones until law enforcement is on scene,” Marston told CBS.
But ideally, the drones will work alongside local law enforcement and help them by clearing corners and distracting the suspect.
“We feed live video to police, show exactly what’s happening, where the suspect is, and even smash through windows with a glass punch to create distractions,” Marston told Newsweek. “This tactic, like during the SAS’s famous hostage rescue [at the Iranian Embassy in London], can give officers a huge advantage.”
That may sound helpful, but the reality of coordinating the use of drones piloted by someone hundreds of miles away with local cops, SWAT teams, and whoever else is responding to the scene — which could waste precious seconds while a gunman is on the prowl — is almost certainly going to be far more messy and complicated than the company is letting on.
Moreover, the use of armed drones in schools raises a whole host of glaring logistical and ethical questions. How familiar will the drone operators be with each school? What kind of training will they receive, and should they be in a position to make life or death decisions? How secure are the drones, and how susceptible will they be to a bad internet connection? Could the drones actually cause a shooter to panic and become more desperate in their actions?
There’s an awful lot of uncertainty here, and it’s a grim indictment of the state of affairs that Florida is quickly going ahead with letting its schools and children be turned into unwitting test subjects for dubious security hardware.
Other tech-based solutions to combat school shootings haven’t panned out; a ludicrously expensive AI gun detection system deployed in Nashville completely failed to detect the firearm used in a shooting that ended with two students dead, including the gunman.
Campus Guardian Angel recently demoed the system at two Florida high schools, funded with $557,000 in state money recently approved by Governor Ron DeSantis as part of the 2025/26 budget.
According to Newsweek, the company aims to install permanent systems in September and October, with a fully operational live service at the trial schools in January. Hopefully, none of these will ever have to be tested.
More on drones: This Country Is Teaching Children How to Build and Operate Deadly Drones
