this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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[–] movies@lemmy.world 194 points 4 days ago (14 children)

Anything but trying to solve the underlying problems. Bonus: someone makes bank.

[–] Dadifer@lemmy.world 77 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There's literally no number of children that can die before reasonable action is taken.

[–] 37piecesof_flare@lemmy.world 36 points 4 days ago (6 children)

It's not the number that matters, it's whose kids it is getting killed. If someone were to shoot up a school filled with politicians' kids you'll see some change rapidly.

[–] Tower@lemmy.zip 11 points 3 days ago

When a dude's gettin' bullied and shoots up his school

And they blame it on Marilyn and the heroin

Where were the parents at?

And look where it's at

Middle America, now it's a tragedy

Now it's so sad to see

An upper-class city havin' this happenin'...

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[–] RobotZap10000@feddit.nl 96 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

✅ Don't fix the underlying program
✅ Give $557,000 to a miltech company
We did it Patrick! We saved the city!

[–] renamon_silver@lemmy.wtf 14 points 3 days ago

Criminals have invaded the schools in lego city!

Build the attack drones!

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 14 points 3 days ago

Yes more weapons instead of tougher laws on existing weapons.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)
You may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful drone?"
You may ask yourself, "Where does that attack drone go to?"
And you may ask yourself, "Is this right, is this wrong?"
And you may say to yourself, "My God, what have we done?!"

🎶letting the days go by ... something something let me drown.. 🎶

[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago
[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I just hope your constitution protects drone rights.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a drone swarm is a good guy with a drone swarm.

Murrka yippekayeee mothafucka or something like that (never been on that continent).

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[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Dunno about you but i've seen robocop

[–] ours@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

Some people take dystopian sci-fi as a guide and not as a warning.

[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

A bunch of little flying ED-209s, what could go wrong?

[–] Shiggles@sh.itjust.works 53 points 4 days ago (2 children)

How long until someone hacks one and terrorizes a school that way?

[–] RobotZap10000@feddit.nl 21 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I'm sure that there are state-sponsored actors trying to do just that this very moment.

[–] Shiggles@sh.itjust.works 14 points 4 days ago (13 children)

State sponsored actors? I’m 30% on that, 70% on one of the kids doing it. Maybe I have too much faith in today’s youth and their capacity for tech.

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[–] MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 31 points 3 days ago (1 children)

what a great use of tax dollars. I'm sure the super rich asshole who owns this drone company has no personal relationship with with the legislators supporting this BS whatsoever.

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[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

So uh... what stops someone just disabling all the drones first in a plausably deniable way? Because you know kids are gonna use those things as target practice already.

[–] TemplailloAhi@lemmy.zip 9 points 3 days ago

Ah, yes, absolutely nothing could go wrong here.

[–] Exusia@lemmy.world 43 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

If this gets any visibility, I do have some familiarity with the weapon on board.

They call it a "pepper spray bomb" but more accurately pepper spray is generally not what your want because it sticks to walls. The "pepper" in the spray is an oil and imagine cleaning an oil off walls and stuff. If it gets into ventilation you will be breathing it for a week afterward.

No, what's on board these is probably Pava Powder. Think Baby Powder, but s p i c y. Pava has many of the same reactions as pepper sprays, coughing, watery eyes etc. But it works better IN enclosed areas like hallways and enclosed spaces. Prisons love this stuff for incidents bigger than like 3-5 people. It can be packed into a paintball, and works in normal paintball guns (it also comes in a 40mm grenade featuring timed release!) Pava is much easier to clean, you just have to have good ventilation, as it will dissipate normally. It also doesnt trigger allergies like pepper spray can, and all it takes is a nice shower to wash yourself of it. Its really a great choice for the intended settings in which it is often deployed.

In a mobile form like drones, I can't see the drone loading more than 10 balls due to weight, and if you've ever been paintballing you'd know 10 ain't shit. A normal paintball hopper holds about 80, and for pava powder you need to score a fair number of hits or just paint a hallway with them to reach effective saturation. If each drone can hold 20-30 maybe it becomes feasible. It only takes a couple to actually do the work, but in a prison theres nowhere to run. You sit and take that accumulation. But school hallways can be 14 feet wide or more and a shooter has access to the entire building, so any misses simply...miss and begin saturating an area the shooter is leaving.

The alarm on the drone giving the shooters position away is a great touch.

Thats the fact side of things, opinion wise? Man we will do anything but fix the problems. These drones and pava are a great uh...answer for the locale, but it doesnt answer why you have a problem you need a prison grade solution. Pava dissipates into the air and its not that hard to begin to choke on your own breath. A deployment of these will give away the positions of students in adjacent rooms to the shooter. And you can fight it (you can fight pepper pray too), it's just a matter of willpower to fight through choking air. It also guarantees a shooter will attempt to relocate in the building to outrun the pava clouds. Unless theres a way to quickly reload these drones in their ceiling mounts, the low ammo count is going to get them to fire around the halls, and will be more of a deterrent and could be effective at getting a shooter to stay away from populated rooms than actually subduing them and getting them to surrender. The alarm however i like at face value acting as a clear warning for where the shooter is at that moment. A drone following the shooter giving their position away is a fantastic solution if we aren't going to address actual shootings.

7/10 nonlethal solution, with some side effects. I like the idea but the obvious workarounds like a mask, and causing entire rooms to start coughing and alerting the shooter to empty/full rooms, on top of the shooter wildly taking shots at the ceiling to kill an alarming drone causes a host of additional issues. For the pricetag the school could hire like 3 off-duty cops who do their job when a shooter arrives. So thats also a factor. We could also like...address mental health issues or access to firearms but this is America where we pray for evil things to stop rather than actually adressing it so, that wasn't an answer anyway

[–] MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 11 points 3 days ago (6 children)

the only things this shit is going to do is waste money and prevent law enforcement from entering schools in a timely manner. They would just start sitting back and letting the drones "secure the area" before they move in. It would do a lot to help cops be bigger pussies than they already are though.

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[–] Bubbey@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

How long until the Manhacks are flying around?

[–] vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] LowtierComputer@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Fantastic sound design!

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 27 points 3 days ago (7 children)

“If you've got something that's preemptive, that's immediate, that's already there, you just can't kill that many people in 10 to 15 seconds,” Marston said.

That's their bar? Killing people for up to 15 seconds That's not so bad?

How much you want to bet it's using AI to determine who the shooter is. How much you want to bet is capable of false positives....

[–] 01189998819991197253 8 points 3 days ago

How much you want to bet is capable of false positives…

Confidently wrong false positives, but only more than 60% of the time.

[–] SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 9 points 3 days ago (3 children)

"The high-tech drones, which are piloted by a team of former military men and nationally ranked professional drone racers..."

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 21 points 3 days ago (1 children)

former military men

Cops.

nationally ranked professional drone racers

Jimmy is one of the cops' kids and needed a job. He's nationally ranked #2863883.

Gotta learn to read between the bullshit 😁

[–] SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

This was in response to someone talking about the drones being AI-piloted.

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[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 3 days ago (3 children)

can fly through double-paned glass

um, how

Also I wonder how long it will take before this tech gets used for situations other than mass murder events

[–] SereneSadie@lemmy.myserv.one 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Oh it'll be used for mass murder events.

Just not preventing them.

[–] Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If they can be hacked, school shooters can stay home and kill people.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Why hack them when the company that makes them will sell one to you?

Why buy one when its probably going to use the same administration password as the rest of the entire district. Completely hack proof.

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[–] BigMacHole@sopuli.xyz 42 points 4 days ago (4 children)

High speed LETHAL Drones flying through schools DOESNT effect Children! DRAG Queens EXISTING does!

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[–] badbytes@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago

I thought Texas didn't care about school children. CoughUvaldeCough

[–] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 35 points 4 days ago

What a shithole country.

[–] Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 27 points 3 days ago (1 children)
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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

And we're ignoring that radio control is a vulnerable technology

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[–] orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 4 days ago (1 children)

When will they hit a student? It's not a matter of if, but when. This is so fucking idiotic.

[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I mean it fires pepper spray bombs. Even when it does its job correctly, and hits an assailant, it is a wide area weapon that takes time to dissipate, particularly in an enclosed space. It will almost certainly effect other people to some degree, including those fleeing.

I don't have a problem with pepper bombs being autonomously fired on an armed assailant, in itself, by which I mean it's better than an autonomous pistol firing slugs into "assailants". I would even accept some minimized-as-much-as-possible risk that it incorrectly targets the wrong person with pepper spray if they are not in immediate danger. The problem will be when the pepper bombs slow down those fleeing or divert them towards the gunman or leave someone incapacitated and unable to flee or sense danger, and hinder emergency response teams, school staff, or other individuals trying to rescue kids. A clever gunman with a gas mask could even use the drones to corral victims into easy targets. It's just not a reliable fix to the problem and creates opportunities for whole new problems.

[–] remon@ani.social 27 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

drones can soar through school halls at 100 mph [...] and can fly through double-paned glass

Ah yes, let's fly a deadly projectile through the hallway ... maybe shatter some glass for extra shrapnel. What could go wrong?

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[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 20 points 4 days ago (8 children)

I mean, considering the cops are just going to play on their phones and actively stop people from trying to rescue children (Uvalde was more fucked up than most people remember), it makes sense to consider alternatives.

In all seriousness, this is actually a ridiculously hard problem and a horrible "solution". Drone weapons work best against unaware/unattentive enemies in a target rich environment. While a bunch of russians are goofing off and not even bothering to close the hatch on their tanks you fly forward with a couple pounds of explosives duct taped to the drone and detonate when you get in range.

Against a shooter who is already having an endorphin high from murdering a bunch of kids and is on high alert for if/when the cops will stop their fun? They'll hear the motors echoing through the hallways even louder than the kindergarteners bleeding out and crying for their parents who have been handcuffed for daring to try to help. They'll shoot more kids in the time it takes the drone to get to them and children gasping for breath will likely die as their airways close up from the pepper spray bombs. Or the drone will hit a kid anyway since aiming those at high speed needs VERY good reflexes and skills.

Again, we all know the actual way to reduce the number of children murdered in school shootings. But clearly The Second Amendment is more important than the death of a few thousand kids.

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 17 points 4 days ago (3 children)

When I was a kid I used to joke about school being a prison.

This was back when doors weren't locked during the day and when a friend of mine took a joke hand grenade to school it was confiscated and he was told to pick it up at the end of the day and don't do that again.

Schools have been asymptotically approaching prisons to the point where they will be indistinguishable in the near future.

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[–] merdaverse@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (8 children)

It's frightening that this is the state of gun ownership in the US, and that the companies making the poison are probably now also selling you the cure. But all things considering, this might actually be a useful application of the tech.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yes instead of actually tackling the problem let's give the tech bros more money to solve it.

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[–] dickalan@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Sure thing, buddy, corporations, and police forces and governments never overreach or do things they’re not supposed to do or get hacked or have crazy fucking leaders telling them what to do, I want you to think about what you just said and tell me again if it’s a good idea https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU

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