Is computer vision the cure for school shootings? Likely not More than 250 mass shootings have occurred in the US so far this year, and AI advocates think they have the solution. Not gun control, but better tech, unsurprisingly. Machine-learning biz Kogniz announced on Tuesday it was adding a ready-to-deploy gun detection model to its computer-vision platform. The system, we're told, …
But simple "banning" things is not a straight-forward solution ... look what happened when the government banned smoking weed, snorting cocaine, and amphetamines with heroin - a massive increase in everyone taking the drugs and making money from them. Certainly banning guns in the UK reduced the number of shooting but then the number of knife attacks increased and banning knife has done virtually nothing. Banning drugs has created far more crime than it eliminated.
We need to look at society - it's the mental issues in people that lead to bad addiction issues and weaponizing. As a boy scout I carried an 8 inch long knife all the time and so did most of the other scouts but no problems anywhere. Why? We lived in the countryside and spent our days walking in the fields watching the crows, not posting on Facebook.
When we grew up and became students we all smoked hash - rolling a joint and then sharing it with everyone and spent our evenings listening to the Pink Floyd, Jazz, Bob Marley and the Tangerine Dream etc. It was a different world back then with virtually no violence, the only "bad" thing I remember back then was dropping a little orange sunshine in a beer and giving it to a cop in a pub.
That. Will. Not. Work.
1. Define 'assault weaponry'. Be very careful how you do it; many common definitions mean that M-1 carbines and M-1 Garands from WWII are 'assault weapons'. If you squint, a SMLE Mk 3* from 1917 (such as my grandfather's old rifle) would be an 'assault weapon'. (Officially a SMLE is a 'battle rifle' and so is a Garand. A M1 carbine is definitely an 'assault weapon' though. The difference is... most don't give a damn.) The US had an 'assault weapons ban' a few years ago; they banned certain features, such as flash-hiders and bayonet lugs. Gun vendors removed those items. Hoo-rah.
2. 'semi-auto' weaponry would include almost all pistols which aren't revolvers, and some revolvers. (Yes, really.) It would still leave other revolvers. May I suggest that being shot by a 9mm Parabellum semi-auto is slightly more survivable than being shot by a 0.44 magnum revolver?
It's been tried in the US. It won't work there. This is not news. Bonnie and Clyde used Browning Automatic Rifles; the BAR was the standard US Army and Marines squad machine gun in WWII and Korea, and would have been in WWI except that the US Army wanted to keep their wonderwaffe Utter Top Secret. (The US Army and Marine in WWI used a French machine gun which was so bad that the French refused to use it, instead. Things did not go well. They should have used Lewis guns instead. By WWII the BAR was no longer such a wonderwaffe.) Federal law was set up to make it difficult and expensive to access machine guns, especially including BARs. The result was that those who had the Federal Class 2 license were very law-abiding indeed, they didn't want to lose the license, it was hard to get and very expensive. Those who just wanted to use machine guns didn't care, and still don't. It's trivial to convert a M-1 Garand from semi-auto to full auto (the Official Government Version is, basically, the M-14) and there are a lot of Garands out there. It's just as easy to convert semi-auto AR-15s. Or even Colt 1911s. There are literally hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of various rifles and pistols which can be converted to full auto in the US. Prying them out of private hands, particularly when the vast majority are in the hands of people who have always been law-abiding, would cause serious problems. It literally cannot be done. The time to do it would have been some time in the past, probably near the end of WWI, before the easy availability of Thomson guns and BARs and more.
Note that the posse who got Bonnie and Clyde were also armed with BARs.
Yes, really.
In every one of those cases, news was made because they were unusual almost to the point of being unique. There had been no comparative cases for years beforehand, and none since. Not "250 mass shootings* so far this year"!
Banning - or as I prefer to think of it, "de-normalising" - guns cannot prevent every single mis-use of weapons, but it sure as heck can reduce the likelyhood by making it more difficult for people to get hold of such weapons (they become more expensive because of the risks the sellers / renters run) and (perhaps crucially) meaning that anyone seen procuring such things or - heaven forbid - carrying them in public instantly trips several "what is going on here?" processes in anyone witnessing such. No need for AI if the only people legally allowed to carry guns are specially-trained police (that's another issue in the US) and "sporting" users who carry deactivated weapons safely from one location to another.
Possibly the US has gone too far for a simple ban. There are simply so many guns "out there" such that even if there were an outright ban and an amnesty, more than enough weapons would stay in circulation to cause problems for decades to come.
And as for the "well knives are still out there" straw-man argument. Hardly worth considering. A knife can be used against one victim at a time and requires a level of mental and physical strength to use that simply isn't necessary with a gun which as the examples in the article show can kill and injure dozens of people before response has even been dispatched.
I read somewhere that somewhat ironically, the National Rifle Association - which held its annual conference mere days after the Uvalde shooting - bans attendees from bringing their weapons to the conference. Doesn't this tell you everything you need to know about the NRA? They can't even trust their own members to be safe around guns.
*I believe this is defined as three or more victims, not counting the shooter?
"Define 'assault weaponry'."
Anything that keeps spitting bullets for as long as you hold the trigger down is banned.
Anything that has more than, say, 12-15 bullets in a magazine is banned.
Anything that has a barrel longer than (X) has to be kept at home, at a range, or used only for hunting and has to be unloaded while in transit.
You still haven't defined "assault weaponry".
And neither has anybody else who is calling for the ban, nor has any law-maker who has actually written bans. All we see is hand-waving and waffling.
Free clue: the term "assault rifle" does not actually have a defined meaning. The so-called "assault rifles" that people are whining about are mostly poor quality rifles gussied up with flash hiders, larger clips, perforated barrel covers, skeleton and folding stocks, optic and light rails, and other bits of glitter that do absolutely nothing for the actual business of pushing lead down a tube. These purely visual bits are about as useful to the utility of the tool as racing stripes are on your average teenager's first car. So why are the politicians trying to ban them? Simply because they look scary and appear quite menacing in a photo lineup on the evening news. Quite frankly, most of my hunting rifles are far more lethal (in the right hands) than any of the so-called "assault rifles" on the banned list.
For example, take a look at the lovely Ruger 10.22. It's a wonderful little carbine in .22 Long Rifle. An excellent choice for a first rifle for the kid on your xmas list. Small, lightish, accurate, durable (mine was a gift from an Uncle in 1967, and still looks/works like new) ... an all around great tool to learn the basics with. Including safety, maintenance, cleaning, etc. What's not to like?
However, should you want to spend some money, you can easily buy the parts to make it look like an "assault rifle". Like this. Way scary, aren't they? WE MUST BAN THEM!!! ... despite the fact that they are the same exact carbine under the superficial crap bolted on top. THIS is the kind of bullshit that the anti-gun set are screaming at the GreatUnwashed who don't know any better. Brainwashing is ugly, but it works.
"You still haven't defined "assault weaponry"."
" the term "assault rifle" does not actually have a defined meaning. "
I didn't define assault weaponry exactly because there is no concrete meaning for the term. Instead, I specified criteria that can be easily measured - does the gun keep shooting if you keep the trigger squeezed? How many rounds in the magazine? How long is the barrel? I'm no gun expert so anyone more qualified, feel free to come up with better measures, but the point is exactly to have clear objective definitions that are related to how many people can be killed by that gun, and in how short a time?
This is where we are going wrong.
Instead of trying to ban bigger guns we need to ban small ones. If the right to bear arms is to protect against a tyrannical government then we need decent weapons 105mm recoilless minimum, although anything under 120mm is a bit gay.
We should also relax the ridiculous restrictions on driving an M1 Abrams as your regular commuter. It gets better gas mileage than your RAM pickup, and we have 1000s in storage so improving the shortages of new cars
OK, I appreciate that your post was in jest (maybe use the 'joke alert icon' next time), and I'm probably being a 'Snowflake' here but could you also avoid the casual homophobia next time too? *
"anything under 120mm is a bit gay"
I'd point out that three of the most famous warriors in history were gay or bisexual: Achilles (sacker of cities, lover of Patroclus), Alexander the Great (defeated only once, but the sight of Hephaestion's thighs) and T E Lawrence (of Arabia).
*Yes, I'm gay. I've been beaten up for being seen walking out of a gay bar. I've been spat on, jostled on stairs, hit on the head and called 'an abomination before God' and so many other things I've lost count, just for being honest about myself. Two of my friends have been murdered for being gay. I have to live with this, so should you.
>"anything under 120mm is a bit gay"
Nothing to do with sexuality, we are merely reclaiming the word 'gay' to describe the exuberant joie de vivre that has always been associated with the recreational use of heavy artillery.
>Achilles (sacker of cities, lover of Patroclus), Alexander the Great (defeated only once, but the sight of Hephaestion's thighs) and T E Lawrence
So another bunch of white western imperialist aristocratic elites then ?
It’s illegal to have a fully automatic weapon without a proper license and has been for more than a century. You can’t get a license for a chaingun, period. Anyone trying to carry a chaingun around Walmart will quickly become either a guest of the Sheriffs Office or a permanent resident of a graveyard.
Let me say that again: it is illegal to own/operate a machine gun in the United States without a very specific license and has been for a long time. Any fully automatic firearms used without a license are illegal. This does not stop criminals from modifying legal weapons or otherwise obtaining fully automatic weapons, but changing the law won’t make them any more illegal than they already are. Go ahead. Ban them. You better ban machine shops; Afghani weapons makers make AKs with the same tools others use to make truck parts. Are you really saying that the average Yankee redneck can’t build a weapon that it has been shown that Afghans in caves can? Really?
That's a machine gun. You need a special, very expensive, very hard to get, license to get one legally, and that's a requirement going back nearly 100 years, specifically due to the widespread use of machine guns by assorted criminals in the 1920s.
Banning a magazine size is utterly useless; it's trivial to make large-capacity magazines. Worse, they're not bloody necessary if you want to shoot a lot of people in a short time. Example: At Mons in 1914, British infantry armed with Short Magazine Lee-Enfield Mk III rifles, with 10-round fixed magazines (you have to charge them with clips, you can't just change magazines) engaged the Germans with heavy, accurate, aimed, rifle fire such that the Germans thought that they had run into massed machine guns. Normal British infantry could and did fire 20 to 30 aimed rounds per minute using 10-round magazines reloaded with clips and a blot-action rifle; the Foot Guards could do up to double the rate of fire of non-Guards units. Seriously. Up to 60 rounds/minute, aime fire, 10-round magazine, bolt-action rifle. You don't bloody need a large capacity magazine if you know what you're doing! Full auto is merely a way to waste ammunition! The family still has grandpa's old SMLE III*, the RN issued rifles to everyone on his cruiser and then for reasons of N avy didn't want them back after the war, so we still have it (if the RN wants it back now, we'll be charging them for storage). I've fired it. I can't get 30 rounds per minute out of it, that would take more practice and 0.303 SAA ain't cheap. I can get 20 round/minute, 20 _aimed_ rounds per minute, I can hit a man-sized target, in the torso, at 1000 yards with all 20 in a minute. It's not hard to do, and a hit anywhere from 0.303 SAA will be noticed. A torso hit will almost always be fatal. You'd damn well better consider a SMLE III* in competent hands to be an 'assault weapon'. Despite it not being even semi-auto and having just 10 rounds in the magazine!
Define 'assault weapon'. Be careful how you do it.
James O'Shea: "if you know what you're doing"
That, surely is part of the point. People who really do not know what they are doing, who have not had the training in marksmanship and safe handling of weapons can get a semi-automatic rifle and use it to kill lots of people the same day as they bought it. People who have used a bolt action rifle at a gun club over a period of months or years will have had training and someone, hopefully, will have noticed whether they seem a bit strange or likely to be of unsound mind, angry etc.
James O'Shea: "I can hit a man-sized target, in the torso, at 1000 yards with all 20 in a minute"
Frankly I'd prefer it if only the military and armed police were allowed to use targets based on the human form. If you want to shoot at real people, go to laser quest or paintballing. But that's just my personal opinion.
> The US had an 'assault weapons ban' a few years ago; they banned certain features, such as flash-hiders and bayonet lugs. Gun vendors removed those items. Hoo-rah.
A disingenuous reply in the extreme - you forgot to mention the effects:
https://theconversation.com/did-the-assault-weapons-ban-of-1994-bring-down-mass-shootings-heres-what-the-data-tells-us-184430During the 1994-2004 ban:
In the years after the assault weapons ban went into effect, the number of deaths from mass shootings fell, and the increase in the annual number of incidents slowed down. Even including 1999’s Columbine High School massacre – the deadliest mass shooting during the period of the ban – the 1994 to 2004 period saw lower average annual rates of both mass shootings and deaths resulting from such incidents than before the ban’s inception.
It's been shown that any time there is talk of banning, sales shoot up as potential buyers 'stock up'. So while I support bans of automatic and semi-automatics, it should be acknowledged that it's not a silver bullet, and that in fact these types of weapon will be in circulation long after a ban gets enacted.
What could work to get guns off the streets is a stepped approach with 1 year+ between steps...
a) compel registration of all guns sold, including every intermediate sale between manufacturer, distributor/wholesaler and retailer, and private transactions (buyer has to register gun and serial number within X days of buying)
b) ban the sale of automatic and semi-automatic rifles
c) initiate a buyback program where government is paying you to buy (and destroy) your automatic weapons
d) prohibit ownership of automatic and semi-automatic rifles with a grace period allowing people to sell them under (c)
Of course can't work in the US because what is lacking is the political will to do so in a country where guns are not only normalised but glamourised.
Take your time and watch all of this through. Is it still so simple...
Paul Harrell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihQ-j6eALGc
Typically for Paul it's well reasoned and thoughtful with examples, yahbuts, strawman debunking etc.
Please do watch to the end, it is worth it.
Every time there is mention of a ban the sales of guns sky rockets......
Ok lets say that you make a ban on weapons, how do you intend to enforce a ban on more than 300 Million arms... Yes, there are more than 300 millions arms in the States, most of them legal and most have never seen combat/fight/shootouts etc..
The guns are not the problem, the problem is the culture, and/or serious mental health problems, due to a multitude of reasons. Start by tackling the culture, and start addressing the mental problems then we might start to see a difference.
"The guns are not the problem, the problem is the culture, and/or serious mental health problems, due to a multitude of reasons. Start by tackling the culture, and start addressing the mental problems then we might start to see a difference."
Nice try, but both Australia and the UK had gun attacks and when legislation was put in place gun crime dramatically fell. I think I saw a stat where 75% of homicides in America were the result of shootings, where as 2% were attributed to shootings in the UK.
The thing is, in the UK, it took some nonce to walk in to a school and shoot dead a load of innocent children, much the same age or younger as those in Ulvdale. Yet America has yet another shooting in a school, with yet more good guys with guns doing nothing, and all you backward knuckle draggers in bum fuck America are blaming culture.
Jesus christ, get a fucking hold of yourselves and wake up.
Well the second amendment was there to protect US citizens against the British Government, so in a sense you are both right.
Keeping a weapon at home for the purposes of being a member of your local defence militia and the out of ocntrol gun ownership culture that currently exists in the US are 2 completely different things, and I don't think anyone could argue legitimately that the latter is what was intended by the authors of the second amendment. It's still the wild west unfortunately.
Here's an idea tho, if you can't ban the weapons, why don't you ban the ammunition? I await your flames and downvotes!
The cops here in Northern California, where we have gun buy-backs quite regularly, say that they do absolutely nothing to curb violence because criminals can always get a gun if they want one, and pay no attention to the law (kinda by definition ... they are criminals. DUH!) All the buy-backs do is make for feel-good media clips, along with politicians saying "look, we are doing something!". The psychos are still at large, though.
Buybacks won't work if it's still possible for anyone to walk into Target or Walmart and buy more guns.
Step 1, stop selling. Step 2, buybacks. Then and only then will number of guns be limited.
"criminals can always get a gun if they want one"
Of course they can because there are more guns than people in the US. Sales ban and buybacks must be on a national/federal level and be in force for many years to begin to make a difference. It's a problem on a massive scale, it won't be solved quickly. But simply shrugging and saying it's not going to solve all teh problems immediately isn't a reason not to start somewhere.
The prevalence of arms in the US, its historical attachment to arms (via its constitution), widely held attitudes in favour of gun ownership, and a great many social issues give the US a very large set of problems in making a change.
There will always [for the foreseeable future] be incidents of gun violence; these can be found in most countries (examples were cited elsewhere in this thread) - but the number of incidents and the number of deaths in the US are staggering.
Limiting any consideration to "psycho's and criminals will keep their guns" overlooks a significant number of "avoidable" killings:
- Children killed because they got hold of parent's gun (which was not securely stored);
- Fender-benders and other minor altercations that turn into shootings because a gun is readily accessible;
- "Going postal" events;
- Suicides;
Yes, other issues are also involved in these cases, but widespread gun ownership is a contributory factor.
Making a start on gun control to address these areas would save many lives and needless tragedies. There will be setbacks, and the numbers will not magically drop to zero - but surely there is a need to see the statistics drop to something more akin to those found in Europe.
its historical attachment to arms (via its constitution)
I'm probably being thick here, but if the constitution has historically been amended, why can't those amendments now be amended themselves? What is is about the constitution that means that a slightly ambiguously-worded (in a modern context) amendment is now set in stone and the only viable interpretation is the widest possible (in the case of gun control) or the narrowest possible (in the case of reproductive rights)?
Is there anything legal which prevents lawmakers making further amendments or amending those amendments?
M.
Aside from the obvious "2nd amendment is already an amedment" ...
Well up until recently one might have thought that it was not possible - but recent SCOTUS rulings seem to make the overturning of settled law a practicality. Unfortunately it is not likely that the current ruling clowns would ever consider overturning _this_ one - in fact they seem to be overturning "sensible" restrictions on public carry.
The constitution can be amended and probably should be amended. But for all practical purposes there is no way 2nd amendment can itself be amended, as that would require broad political support that you currently couldn't get in Washington for free ice-cream.
Incidentally, though, it's funny how in the US the constitution and founders are given so much respect even though they were clearly not right about everything, and lived in a reality far different from the present. One of the overriding priorities that went into the US constitution (for people who declared independence of the tyrannical Albion) was exactly that no one person or small group could ever exert enough influence to extend to tyranny. Hence all the checks and balances between executive, legislative and judicial branches, and how difficult it is even for a majority to make laws. It's by design.
The 2nd amendment (including the reference to militias) has to be seen in this context - US citizens are allowed to carry weapons so that the US government cannot restrict their civil liberties by force, back in the day when citizens had access to the exact same weapons (basically muskets) as the government. That's why the amendment is incredibly anachronistic - weapons technology has come so far that whatever arms the people can bear are no match for armoured vehicles, helicopters, drones etc not to mention warships, airplanes and rockets.
At the same time, you do see government use military or paramilitary force against citizens who are protesting the abrogation of their civil rights. Ironically (or maybe not), that (para)military force is usually directed at unarmed civilians whose political persuasion is against guns.
"- Children killed because they got hold of parent's gun (which was not securely stored);"
I know of two instances where children shot adults dead.
One was a toddler, who found his mom's gun in her handbag and shot her dead with it.
The second was a 5 year old girl who was given - for fuck sake - an automatic weapon at a gun range. She shot it, and the power of the gun pulled it upwards and behind her and she shot the instructor - sorry, "instructor" - dead.
Yes - there are cases like these, and others such as family members being mistaken for an intruder and shot, people knocking on doors [albeit 5:00am] being shot through the door, various escalations based on "stand your ground" doctrine .
Whilst not a fatality this is an illustration of the level of improper gun handling problem faced: [military.com].
And there are further classics amongst the Darwin Awards.
"Why you would give a 5yr old an Uzi, well that's another question"
People are idiots. My reenactment group once got some folks thrown out of a Scottish Games because they showed up with an American Civil War cannon and were letting people's kids fire it with a 6 ounce black powder charge for $20 a literal pop. (I am actually an expert in safe use of period artillery, and this was wrong on so many levels.) Not only did all the kids end up crying, one was actually slightly injured by the cannon bucking back into him and knocking him over. Before these folks were made to pack up by the Games security people, there were parents arguing with the authorities about their right to have their kids fire a cannon. Go figure.
" Children killed because they got hold of parent's gun (which was not securely stored);"
Ok then there are a hundred other items that we should remove from houses thenm, Bleach, Gasoline , Medication etc etc .. Again the gun is not the cause it merly the catalyst. Why were the guns not locked up correctly.. It's a case of stupid people not dangerous items0
"Suicides"
Again , remove the gun and they will use Drugs, Alcohol, Pieces of rope. Gun's don't make suicide easier, it's just a tool as that moment.. All suicides are not done by shooting oneself.
"Making a start on gun control to address these areas would save many lives"
Gun Control already exists as it does in other countries where there are not the same problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
Have a look at the deaths related to firearms and firearms per capita... Why does Finland, Germany, Norway, Switzerkand, Kuwait etc not have a huge amounts of firearms related deaths yet they still have a high number of guns per capita...
It's a culture problem no matter how you try and wind round it.
Sheesh! This is why things will not get better!
Over the years the problems with the other items you have mentioned have been recognized and steps taken to reduce the risks to children whilst also accepting that the items have general household utility. Things like child-proof tops on medicines and chemicals, restrictions on selling petrol/gasoline (only dispensed into approved containers); coupled with parental education programmes that raise awareness of dangers and steps that can be taken to protect children. Yes, guns should not be left where children could get hold of them - but that requirement is at odds with the perceived need to have a gun loaded and ready to hand in case "some shit happens".
Even for suicides things are done to reduce the risk. Back in the day you could buy paracetamol in jars of 100 - and suicides could chug a jar. Now they can only be bought in blister packs of 16 (and you are restricted to 2 packs). The limited numbers and blister packs slow people down enough that impulse suicides using paracetamol (and other non-prescription medecines) have been reduced. A determined and committed person can still do it, but someone having a crisis moment has their risk reduced - and it shows up in the numbers.
I said in my original post - the US has a range of problems that all stack up, but guns and the US gun culture are [IMO] part of the problem. The other countries you mention - less so; and they adjust their laws when problems emerge.
"The guns are not the problem, the problem is the culture, and/or serious mental health problems, due to a multitude of reasons. Start by tackling the culture, and start addressing the mental problems then we might start to see a difference."
From what I've seen on US tv, everyone seems to have their own personal therapist on speed-dial. Have I been mis-lead by Hollywood?
"Have I been mis-lead by Hollywood?"
What kind of dumb-ass question is THAT?
Virtually everything you have seen on TV about America is either made-up to sell a script, or an anomaly that is so far out of place and abnormal that it makes the news as far away as your jurisdiction.
Remember, horrendous acts by psychopaths aren't "normal". That's precisely why they are "news". You never actually hear about what normal people are doing, day to day. Which is pretty much exactly the same thing as every other human on the planet does day-to-day.
For example, I'm about to go pick some veggies for our evening meal. Tomatoes, chilis, squash, salad stuff, some onions .... whatever looks tasty at the moment.
SHOCK! HORROR! Yanks eat food! Details at 11!!!!!11!!one!!!111!!!!!!eleven1!!!!
"What kind of dumb-ass question is THAT?"
A tongue-in-cheek one as indicated by the icon :-p
On the other hand, never having been there, my world-view of the US is strongly coloured by US TV shows and films, PBS, CNN, MSNBC etc. and some interactions on t'internet with US people over the years. (To be fair, I have a few US friends I've known online for many years, and most of them are quite normal.)
"A tongue-in-cheek one as indicated by the icon :-p"
I don't see icons, nor "thumbs" (unless I turn them on for some reason). I can, however, offer you a beer.
"On the other hand, never having been there, my world-view of the US is strongly coloured by US TV shows and films,"
Presumably you also believe in cartoon physics?
"most of them are quite normal."
I'm sorry.
Let's just remember that even highly trained police officers can mistake harmless items for firearms. Harry Stanley was carrying a chair leg wrapped in a plastic bag, but was still killed by armed police officers who had been told it was a shotgun (an anonymous telephone tip off). I doubt that AI is yet the answer to this problem.
A good system does more than identify a gun. To Eclectic Man's comment on the chair leg, in this case, policer officers had bad information from a telephone call. A complete AI Gun Detection solution would provide policed with the exact location of the incident, a photograph and a video snippet. They come in responding to a situation with so much more intelligence vs. 911 calls. Much of the confusion of a situation is removed. And they continue to get intelligence as time goes by.
In addition, these types of systems can activate other systems, like door locks, sound alarms, make PA announcements. These are all the types of activities that can be activated once that threat is verified - and it happens in mere seconds.
"A complete AI Gun Detection solution would provide policed with the exact location of the incident, a photograph and a video snippet."
How? In the example given, it was a chair-leg, wrapped in paper, so physically looked like it might be a rifle or similar in poor light. There were no bang sounds, no muzzle flashes, no waving it around and pointing it at people or things. What is an AI going to "detect" until it's too late?
Re :"How? In the example given, it was a chair-leg, wrapped in paper, so physically looked like it might be a rifle or similar in poor light."
And this highlights a couple of potential problems. First, to be reliable, most visual systems need at least reasonable lighting. I should imagine this is far more necessary if the output of the AI is used for evidence. If there is even the slightest chance the video has been enhanced, even if just for recognition purposes, the defence could just argue the evidence has been tampered with, possibly getting the evidence removed.
Second, if the system is too sensitive, and generates a lot of false positive detections, you run the risk people will just assume the next detection is false, and ignore it until it's too late. If it's not sensitive enough, it may still miss the gunman until it's too late, and because they believe some system is protecting them, people may not be as vigilant.
What we need isn't more technology. It's for American society to change to having a more sensible attitude to guns. This isn't going to happen overnight, but I'd suggest that a good start would be tightening up their gun laws a lot (not necessarily banning guns, but making them an awful lot more difficult to obtain), and backing that up with drives to remove the amount of guns in the hands of the public. Any laws restricting sales need to be federal laws. If done at state level, all people need to do to get around the law is go to the next state that has lass strict laws.
I'm more pessimistic about these systems potential. Their marketing departments are coming at schools full force but the solutions are as flawed as the sales pitches. The focus on their ML models ability to identify common weapons successfully is only part of the problem they are trying to tackle, and why they REALLY don't want to talk about the rest of the issues.
Even the more focused of them have a total disconnect on the "what happens after we think we spotted something" part. One company claims that all of their ML-model triggered alerts are human verified, resulting in "Zero False positives". The claim is preposterous, of course, as it really can only be read as the sum of failures in human judgement and the sum of errors created by the electronic parts of the system.
By there nature, these systems MIGHT identify someone who was in the right postition, facing the right way, close enough to a camera, with a fully or partially exposed weapon. So you need high resolution cameras everywhere you hope to get an alert from. If the campus has tightly controlled access, you can screen at those points, but you aren't going to get any warning to the staff at that location in time.
If you start hanging cameras around the neighborhood you open a bigger can of worms, with all the usual risks, problems, political optics, jurisdiction, privacy and consent before the system even goes on line. Then even if you do set it up, hang the required signage, and turn it on, what happens? You are likely to both miss an active shooter until the shooting starts or alert on non-shooters, either as a false positive or an actual positive that isn't an a shooter at all. Those cases may be as benign as an off duty armed guard or police officer coming and going from their legal residence. Then add states with open carry laws to the mix.
The response is where these systems break down. The people selling them claim that the police will some how be able to be alerted, speeding dispatch. In reality, only edge cases where the perp decides to lurk around before an attack will allow the operator of one of these systems to identify a threat, validate it, and then alert the campus, law enforcement, and EMS. Otherwise the shooter can still walk right in and start firing.
In reality dozens of companies offer services like these, and the police that are actually responding don't have realistic access to them. There might be someone in a command center or dispatch that does. As we saw so tragically recently, slowing the response down enough for the central dispatch to drive the response doesn't work and gets people killed.
The last concern in the real world is that human verified or not, ML-based or not, biased response is a real problem. If an alert gets generated, the police will respond with very itchy trigger fingers, and anyone in the area is at risk when they do, especially if they "fit the profile" "match the description" or "look like trouble". This is the part where a school can unintentionally cause the deaths of people in their neighborhoods, who are just going about their business.
That's not to say that the idea is totally useless, but the schools shouldn't be the ones driving it, they don't have the expertise, the jurisdiction, or in many cases the funds. This should be piloted at the national level, starting with other services, and the working solution rolled out to schools once the problems are identified a fixed.
Schools should not be a test bed for this technology, full stop.
This post has been deleted by its author
In the case of sharpshooter, the microphone network to locate gunshots, it seems that the system was mostly used afterwards to justify an armed response.
The human expert could go in later and reclassify as a gunshot something the system had not, if it was in a convenient place/time for the police story
Are you nuts? Do you want them to learn a gun is just another (dangerous if not handled properly) tool and not something to be afraid of? What next, teach them to think for themselves?
Don't worry your pretty head citizen, the fully armed government enforcers will make everybody comply
Hopefully you missed off the /s at the end of your post, but in case you didn't, there's this https://abcnews.go.com/US/year-boy-fatally-shoots-year-girl-finding-dads/story?id=85847028
An AI gun detector would be socially unacceptable in the US and buying one with tax payer's money would be politically toxic. A product that would sell like hot cakes and guaranty re-election would be an AI based video game detector. This has the added bonus that the problem of dead children would remain unchanged and create an opportunity to sell an upgrade to AI video game detector version 2, and 4 and 8 - each at twice the price of the last.
Is there a problem?
.. almost all American shooting victims are Americans
It's not going to solve the real problem ... there are way too many Americans .. but it's a start
Plenty of good money to be made
- AI "detection"
- arming the teachers
+++
Will the "Final Solution" will be arming the students? ... what could possibly go wrong?
So many guns, so little safety ... when you are in a hole stop digging... LMAO
The USA (an oxymoron):
- where armed traitors freely roam the streets, where the(Confederate) flag of treason flies freely
- unable to protect its Capitol
- unable to protect its children
- where Christian nutjobs control the Supreme Court
+++++
A clusterfuck
Kill all Americans.
But to be honest the only thing that will stop this is a group of people doing a primary school shooting properly. 8 ppl with AM180 and spare (lc) mags, 2 with 40mm China lake launchers, all with cellphone Jammers and wipe everyone out down to the creepy janitor and the class hamster..
Then make sure everyone sees the pictures - before and after (kiddie-pizza™). This just *might* give the numbskulls a heads up.
And as for the second amendment BS - there is a lot of difference between a Brown Bess and a Glock with autosear kit or an AM180 in 22lr with 277rd pancake magazine. For those unfamiliar .22lr is a pistol version, roughly, of 5.56 NATO calibre..
There's a teenage girl shot in the face sharing her pics online and despite that NOTHING WILL HAPPEN and she knows it.
Since there's no chance of American schools doing their job and looking after their students mental health and no way of stopping someone having access to guns doing what they want - the only cure for this is UK esque gun laws - or collecting the children of NRA members together and shooting one in the head for every victim...
But it's a complete waste of time to even discuss it, because most Inbredistani minds seemed to have jammed somewhere around the 4th series of Outlander when it comes to guns and human rights (legacy of ashes, CIA history). So my advice?
Get used to it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
