“There’s no system that’s going to 100 percent capture everything a person has on them.”
Gun Intended
An expensive AI gun detection system appears to have been a massive waste of money after it failed to detect the weapon used in a school shooting.
As NBC News reports, the $1 million contract that Nashville’s Antioch High School paid to a gun detection software company called Omnilert has come into question after a student managed to sneak in a gun and open fire in his high school’s cafeteria.
The 17-year-old gunman shot and killed one 16-year-old classmate and wounded another before turning the gun on himself, which he did not survive.
Omnilert’s technology used the school’s security cameras and added AI that was supposed to detect hidden weapons. It didn’t recognize the shooter’s gun, NBC notes, in a news conference after the massacre, Metro Nashville Public Schools chief technology and communications officer Sean Braisted pointed out that the Omnilert system did activate when police entered with their own weapons.
“It is designed to activate immediately once it detects [a weapon],” the school system’s CTO said, per Nashville’s WBIR broadcaster. “It did not detect that weapon in this instance… because of the location and where the cameras were positioned.”
Fail Not
In a statement to NBC, Omnilert echoed Braisted’s comments about the system’s cameras failing to find the gun in question.
“The location of the shooter and the firearm meant that the weapon was not visible,” said Omnilert CEO Dave Fraser in an email. “This is not a case of the firearm not being recognized by the system.”
Braisted — who was also quoted in Omnilert’s press release announcing the $1 million deal back in 2023 — said during the news conference that the system had worked well in the past, and had detected police weapons before.
MNPS superintendent Adrienne Battle also seemed to defend the expensive and apparently not watertight weapon detection software.
“There’s no system that’s going to 100 percent capture everything a person has on them,” Battle said during the same press conference.
While these school and company officials work overtime to defend their wasteful investment in the sort of AI-powered technology that has for years now been known to fail, two teenagers are dead in the latest tragic school shooting.
Slapping AI on top of shoddy weapon scanners doesn’t make them work — and in this case, the false sense of security they provide ended in tragedy.
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