American schools choose drones over gun control

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:32:34 +1000

Watching this from Australia, it’s hard to overstate how strange it is: schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado are installing pepper-spray drones built to ram an active shooter at up to 97 km/h. Nobody in the story proposes making the guns harder to get.

Nine schools so far. Each gets a storage box housing a plastic drone from Austin firm Mithril Defense, branded Campus Guardian Angel. A teacher hits a panic button. A remote pilot flies the drone down the hallway toward the gunfire.

The escalation ladder

Strobes and sirens first. Then air poppers and a verbal order to surrender. Then pepper gel rounds at up to 113 km/h. Then a ram at up to 97 km/h. Co-founder Bill King, a retired Navy SEAL, doesn’t undersell it: “Once I get the drones on you, you just can’t escape them.”

Founder Justin Marston built this after Uvalde, where police waited over an hour while 19 students and two teachers died. “The first 120 seconds are incredibly critical,” he says. He’s right about the maths. Wrong about the question.

What it costs

Florida’s three-school pilot: US$557,000, plus US$564,000 already approved for next year. Georgia’s five schools: roughly US$500,000. Colorado’s John Adams Academy is self-funding. None of these drones has faced a real shooting. All of them have been tested only in simulation.

Half a million dollars a pilot, spent on the two minutes after a shooter is already inside. Nothing spent on keeping them from getting inside at all.

The pushback

Curtis Lavarello, who runs the School Safety Advocacy Council, worries a remote pilot could mistake a fleeing student for a shooter, or a responding officer for a target. “It’s almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” he says. “I have some really serious reservations.” Axon reached the same conclusion about weaponised drones in 2022, when its ethics board resigned en masse over the same risk.

Parkland survivor Jaclyn Corin, now running March for Our Lives, put it best: “School districts have finite budgets and limited attention. If we spend significant resources on technologies designed to respond after shooting begins, we have to ask what we’re not investing in instead.”

What nobody proposes

No administrator, legislator or drone executive in this story raises the option of making the gun harder to get. Nearly 400,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine, across 435 shootings, by The Washington Post’s own count. That number is the input. The drone is the output. Nobody selling the drone is trying to shrink the input.

Georgia parent Nicole Lawrence found out her child’s school had been offered the program from a TV news story, not the district. Her reaction: “I’ve put $100,000 toward worse things.” Not confidence. Exhaustion with the alternative, which is nothing.

Australia had one mass shooting, in 1996, then a buyback and laws that made the next one structurally harder. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked: the country stopped generating the demand these drones exist to manage. American schools are buying robots to fight a fire nobody upstream will turn off.

Sources:

Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters - The Washington Post
Schools to tackle active shooters with pepper-spraying drones that can ram attackers - The Independent
School shootings: US schools deploy pepper-spray drones to counter active shooters - The Guardian

Rambling Rows

American schools choose drones over gun control

The escalation ladder

What it costs

The pushback

What nobody proposes