- Schools in Georgia, Florida, and Colorado will install nonlethal active shooter drones
- Drones can confront shooters within 15 seconds and aid law enforcement response
- Teachers summon drones via app or panic buttons, operated remotely from Austin
Amid the persistent threat of gun violence, several schools across the US are set to install drones that can zoom through halls, smash windows, and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat. Five schools in Georgia, three in Florida and one in Colorado will be armed with the plastic, nonlethal drones manufactured by Austin-based Mithril Defense, which described the invention as the 'first active shooter suppression device'.
According to the company, the drones can confront the shooter in 15 seconds and buy time for the law enforcement authorities to arrive on the scene. They can be flown from thousands of miles away and support two-way communication through an embedded speakerphone.
Teachers will have an app or classroom panic buttons to summon the drones. They can remain airborne for about eight minutes on a single battery charge and operate at 900 MHz.
"Our drones are already on site on charging pads in the school, and are flown remotely by our team as part of a managed response service. Our elite team in Austin can cover every school in the nation from a single operations center," the company said in a statement.
"Our drones cruise at 30mph to 50mph inside the building and sprint at 100mph outside. We place multiple boxes of 6 drones at locations throughout the school ahead of time, so we can select the closest box to the shooter and get there faster."
Bill King, a retired Navy SEAL and Mithril Defense co-founder, said the drones are designed to distract the targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph, according to a report in The Washington Post.
“Once I get the drones on you, you just can't escape them,” King said.
As per the company's tactical operations director, Khristof Oborski, a former team leader with the Austin police department's special weapons and tactics (SWAT) unit, the concept was inspired by the use of small drones on the battlefields in Ukraine after Russia invaded it in February 2022.
