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."
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